By Marcelo Brito

Originally published in 2022 with the title Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, Jacob Mchangama’s work is presented as what his subtitle promises: a global history of freedom of expression that starts in classical Greece and flows into the digital ecosystem. Mchangama, Danish lawyer, founder of the Justitia Idea Lab and host of the Clear and Present Danger: A History of Free Speech podcast, has not written a legal manual or a scholarly chronicle for specialists, but a long-term narrative about an idea as celebrated as misunderstanding. The book appeared in English in Basic Books in February 2022 and has rightly circulated as one of the most ambitious and legible defenses of that freedom that we solemnly invoke and practice with narrowness. Now Ladera Norte publishes it in Spanish, and deserves all our attention.

The first virtue of the book is its ambition. Mchangama is not content to repeat the most well-known liberal catechism, the one that blurs Milton, Voltaire and Mill as if everything had started and ended in Western Europe. His account insists that the history of freedom of expression is neither a straight line nor a monopoly of the West. The author incorporates figures, conflicts and traditions that overflow the usual geography of the canon, and there lies much of his interest: in showing that the drive to control the word and the impulse to resist that control are as old as they are universal. The promise of “global history” is not a mere advertising ornament; it is part of the method and also of the thesis.

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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).