Mother Jones staff highlight their favorite books they read in 2024.
Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (2022)
Nonfiction The latest battle in the 2,500-year war over free speech came to a head during the vice presidential debate. “We actually do have a threat to democracy,” said JD Vance, as he accused Democrats of trampling the First Amendment. “It is the threat of censorship.” Tim Walz responded by defending efforts to restrict election-related misinformation and hate speech—and by blasting Republicans for banning books. None of these fights are new, as Mchangama’s fascinating history makes clear. Formal speech protections first appeared in Athens around 500 BCE; a century later, Socrates was executed because of how he exercised those rights. Beginning in 1275 CE, English authorities criminalized “false news” about the king. In 1798—less than two decades after overthrowing the British Crown and enshrining press freedom in the Constitution—some of America’s most revered Founders backed the infamous Sedition Act, under which journalists and politicians were prosecuted for criticizing the ruling Federalist Party. Mchangama expertly chronicles these struggles between rulers who sought to restrict speech and the dissidents who fought back—often at the cost of their freedom, livelihood, or lives. The culmination of these battles, it seemed, was the post–civil rights movement United States, which was almost certainly the most speech-protective society in history. But according to Mchangama, this hard-won American consensus around free speech “seemed to break down during the [first] presidency of Donald Trump.” Now, as Trump threatens to prosecute political foes, Mchangama’s most important history lesson is that we should never take our liberties for granted. —J.S.
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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).