Who Invented Free Speech? | Part 1

Fara Dabhoiwala's new book, "What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea," commits a serious chronological error.

I recently wrote a critical review essay of Fara Dabhoiwala’s new book, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea, in Foreign Affairs. That essay mainly used contemporary events to argue that Dabhoiwala’s reservations about robust free speech protections are misguided.

In this post, I want to focus on something more important for a book on the history of free speech: Dabhoiwala’s chronology.

A central plank of What Is Free Speech? is an origin story about modern (especially American) free speech. In Dabhoiwala’s telling, the modern American conception of free speech is the end-product of ideals first expressed in the famous eighteenth-century Cato’s Letters—pamphlets that went viral in Britain’s expanding public sphere and then in North America, where they helped shape revolutionary political culture and were canonized in Virginia’s Declaration of Rights and Madison’s first draft of what would become the First Amendment. Authored by the British radical Whigs John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letter No. 15 famously declares that freedom of speech is “the bulwark of liberty.” That line—and the wider claim that public liberty depends on public criticism—became a kind of Enlightenment meme, echoing from America to revolutionary France and beyond.

So far, so orthodox. But Dabhoiwala pushes this story much further. According to him, “No one before ‘Cato’ had ever put forward an essentially secular ideal of free speech as a popular political right, let alone made it the very foundation of all liberty.” He describes Cato’s Letters as radically novel: “everything about them was unprecedented: their breadth, their essentially secular conception, their unconditional valorising of public judgement.” In Dabhoiwala’s framing, Cato isn’t merely an influential milestone. It is the decisive break—the moment “freedom of speech” becomes a modern political right, detached from older ideas about parliamentary privilege or (religious) freedom of conscience and elevated into the foundation of political and individual freedom itself.

That matters because Dabhoiwala is not offering a neutral genealogy. He is offering a genealogy with a damning verdict. On his account, Cato is not only the root of modern free speech but also the root of its pathologies. Cato supposedly bequeaths a First Amendment “absolutist” position that “no anti-governmental speech should ever be silenced,” and Dabhoiwala connects that lineage to modern First Amendment doctrine that protects speech he regards as plainly harmful—racism, sexism, and disinformation. For Dabhoiwala, the moral is not simply that free speech has a complicated past. It’s that the past helps explain why modern free-speech protections are so often, in his view, an instrument of privilege for the powerful rather than a shield for the powerless.

This is why the book spends so much energy on Trenchard and Gordon themselves. Dabhoiwala’s verdict on Cato’s apparent endorsement of “absolutism” is damning: in their hands, “freedom of speech first came to be conceived of as a mechanism for truth, an antidote to falsehood, and the foundation of all liberty,” but “ironically, this new and powerful theory was itself a deliberately mendacious fiction.” He portrays them as ardent sexists, “self-serving” opportunists, and—by family ties and later career choices—entangled with the machinery of empire, patronage, and slavery.

He notes, for example, that when the government finally lost patience with Cato, Gordon became a paid-for-hire propagandist for the powerful politician Sir Robert Walpole, and repudiated Cato’s stance on free speech. He also finds it relevant that Gordon’s family ended up in Jamaica, the epicenter of British plantation slavery. Whatever one thinks of these biographical and moral indictments (and whatever weight they should carry), Dabhoiwala’s narrative is clear: Cato is origin, Cato is tainted, and the taint has been inherited by the modern American free speech tradition, which uncritically wears it as a badge of honor, when in fact it constitutes a mark of shame.

There’s a methodological problem here even before we get to the history. Discrediting a principle by discrediting its supposed originators is a familiar move—if frequently an unconvincing one. But it has an obvious weakness: it depends on getting the origin story right. If Cato is not actually the beginning—if it is one influential node in a much older, more diverse, and more radical tradition—then the entire “poisoned roots” framing becomes much harder to sustain. You can still criticize modern doctrine, of course. But you cannot credibly argue that the doctrine is fundamentally compromised because it springs from the narrow privilege and alleged mendacity of two unprincipled eighteenth-century pamphleteers.

And that brings us back to the central point: Dabhoiwala’s chronology is faulty. Not because Cato’s Letters were unimportant—they were immensely important—but because the core arguments Dabhoiwala treats as unprecedented were already being made, in strikingly modern terms, by persecuted radicals long before Trenchard and Gordon put pen to paper.

The “Cato-first” chronology

Let’s begin with Dabhoiwala’s headline claim: “No one before ‘Cato’ had ever put forward an essentially secular ideal of free speech as a popular political right, let alone made it the very foundation of all liberty.”

This claim is not only historically fragile; it also carries serious consequences. It has already helped canonize a convenient but misleading chronology—one in which modern free speech appears suddenly, in a recognizably “absolutist” American form, conjured by an ambitious and venal pamphleteering duo and then exported to the United States.

Now, I want to bracket one obvious issue: the ancient antecedents. Athenian isegoria (equality of speech) and parrhesia (fearless speech), Roman classical republican ideals and critiques of tyranny all mattered to early modern political writers. John Milton’s polemics, Trenchard and Gordon’s language, and Thomas Paine’s arguments are saturated with classical references. A serious intellectual history that speaks confidently about what is “unprecedented” in early modern freedom of speech should at least engage that influence. Dabhoiwala largely doesn’t—which is damning for a history book.

But we don’t need to start in Athens to show that “no one before Cato” is wrong. We can start in Civil War–era England, with radicals who most certainly were not writing from a place of power or privilege and who paid dearly for their commitment to political liberty: the Levellers.

Exhibit A: the Levellers got there first

The Levellers were not a coherent party in the modern sense. They were a loose, turbulent movement of writers, agitators, pamphleteers, and soldiers who pressed the revolutionary implications of the English Civil War. They defended ideas that were, for their time, startlingly democratic—popular sovereignty, equality before the law, religious toleration, and (in some formulations) something close to universal male suffrage. They were also, crucially, ferocious critics of censorship and defenders of free expression. But all we’re told by Dawhoiwala is that “In the 1640s, a few writings by leaders of the so-called Leveller movement had gestured towards a principled theory of political press liberty.” That’s it.

This omission matters because the Levellers’ place in free speech history makes nonsense of the claim that the call for robust free speech protections emerged as the self-serving invention of eighteenth-century elites. The Levellers were not agitating from a safe position of power and privilege. They were persecuted radicals, repeatedly harassed, imprisoned, prosecuted, and silenced by the very regimes that claimed to be building a godly commonwealth.

Several Leveller leaders attacked censorship and demanded free and open political debate, although their writings are not always consistent. The clearest Leveller articulation of free speech comes in a 1649 petition to Parliament—a moment when the revolutionary coalition, now aligned with Cromwell’s military power, ferociously cracked down on unlicensed presses and dissent. In other words: the old machinery of censorship was being refurbished and redeployed, not by a Stuart monarch, but by the revolution’s new masters, who had themselves been censored by Charles I.

The Levellers saw this pattern with remarkable clarity. They argued that although rulers always justify censorshipin the name of the public good, it reliably functions as the handmaiden of tyranny:

“For what-ever specious pretences of good to the Common-wealth have bin devised to over-aw the Press, yet all times fore-gone will manifest, it hath ever ushered in a tyrannie; mens mouths being to be kept from making noise, whilst they are robd of their liberties.”

They then draw the direct historical line Dabhoiwala says no one before Cato had drawn: censorship is not merely bad policy; it is an instrument of domination. Under Charles I’s prerogative rule, they argued, licensing and prior restraint had suppressed truth and kept the people ignorant—“fitted only to serve the unjust ends of Tyrants and Oppressors.”

This is not an argument about parliamentary privilege. It is not an argument about the sanctity of private conscience. It is an argument about a popular political right, rooted in the practical requirements of liberty: a free people cannot remain free if they cannot criticize power. Crucially, the arguments made by the Levellers for free speech are decidedly political, not religious, and therefore essentially secular, even if the Levellers were devout Christians who could not imagine a secular society in its 21st century manifestations.

And the Levellers didn’t stop at denouncing licensing. They made the positive case that freedom of expression is a precondition of popular sovereignty. Parliament, they insisted, should hold itself “to the supreme end, the Freedom of the People,” which depends on the ability of the people to speak, write, print, and publish their minds freely—without “Masters, Tutors, and Controulers over them.” Even “the least restraint upon the Press” was “altogether inconsistent with the good of the Commonwealth” and “dangerous to the liberties of the people.” To safeguard free speech, the Levellers demanded that Parliament “revoke all Ordinances and Orders to the contrary.”

If this sounds familiar, it should. Now consider the famous passage in Cato that Dabhoiwala treats as the crystallization of modern free-speech ideology:

“Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as publick liberty, without freedom of speech.”

Or this equally famous line:

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of the nation, must begin by subduing the freedom of speech; a thing terrible to publick traitors.”

But the Levellers also go further than Cato in a way that exposes another weakness in Dabhoiwala’s narrative. They link free speech not merely to restraining tyranny, but to democratizing authority. Their broader program demanded popular sovereignty, expanded suffrage, and robust religious liberty; their defense of expression is embedded in a radical constitutional vision. This is most clearly evident in Colonel Thomas Rainborough’s famous comments at the Putney Debates in 1647:

“I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government. And I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.”

Trenchard and Gordon, by contrast, largely worked within the horizon of the Glorious Revolution—a settlement that preserved a restricted franchise, limited religious toleration, and enshrined “freedom of speech” as a parliamentary privilege rather than an individual right.

To be sure, the Revolution and subsequent reforms helped loosen some of the older instruments of control, including harsh treason procedures and the regime of pre-publication licensing. But the lapse of licensing in 1695 did not mean the state stopped policing dissent. As political print exploded, both Tory and Whig governments repurposed —and in practice broadened—the law of seditious libel to target writers who attacked the Crown, its ministers, and public policy. That legal and political environment helps explain why radical Whigs like Trenchard and Gordon made such a point of heralding the blessings of free speech and warning about the dangers of suppressing it. They were, in effect, alarmed that even fellow Whigs were willing to suppress speech, once in office. They were right to fret, because these censorial tendencies were ultimately aimed at Cato. Even so, Cato is more abstract, allegorical, and less willing to name names than Leveller publications that openly pointed fingers at those who pulled the levers of suppression.

Here is another key point: the Levellers anticipate the “counterspeech” idea that Dabhoiwala treats as part of modern liberal free speech “absolutism”—the idea that the remedy for bad speech is more speech, not censorship. The 1649 petition argues that a government confident in its justice should want to hear “all voices and judgements,” which it can only do through a free press. And if someone abuses that freedom with scandalous pamphlets, the authorities will “never want able Advocates” to vindicate the innocent. The answer to falsehood is not suppression; it is rebuttal.

Crucially, the petition is not making this point as an abstract principle (unlike Cato). It reminds Parliament and the Army that, in their struggle against Charles I, they had been “very much strengthened all along by unlicensed Printing.” Now that they held power, they were turning the old machinery of licensing and suppression against the very critics and comrades who had helped bring them to office.

Cato is eloquent. Cato is memorable. Cato is quotable. But Cato is not inventing the underlying logic out of whole cloth. It is repackaging, popularizing, and sharpening an argument that the Levellers—among others—had already articulated in the heat of revolutionary struggle.

To be clear, this is not a claim that Trenchard and Gordon were plagiarists—or that Cato adds nothing. Cato’s distinctive contribution is partly rhetorical brilliance and partly political timing. It appears at a moment when older tools of censorship were mutating into new legal forms—when a burgeoning public sphere was colliding with a state still determined to control it and when the seeds of the Enlightenment were starting to take root.

Just as importantly, Cato speaks in a more abstract and universal voice than Leveller writings, entirely contingent on developments during the English Civil War. Cato’s arguments are interwoven with a rich historical tapestry—drawing on threads from antiquity and republican precedents in ways that make the case for free speech feel timeless and portable. All of these factors help explain why Cato could travel so effectively as an Enlightenment meme—from revolutionary North America to France and beyond.

But that is a very different claim from saying that “no one before Cato” had framed free speech as a political right foundational to liberty.

Persecution matters for the “privilege” story

There is a second reason the Levellers are so important for this debate. Their example is a direct rebuttal to the claim that free speech is born as an instrument of privilege.

The Levellers were persecuted not only under Charles I’s monarchy but also under Cromwell’s Commonwealth. John Lilburne—“Freeborn John”—is the emblematic figure here: a relentless critic of arbitrary power, repeatedly prosecuted, repeatedly imprisoned. Under Charles I, Star Chamber proceedings led to brutal punishment: he was whipped and pilloried. Under Cromwell, Lilburne was tried for high treason and acquitted by a jury in 1653—only for the government to keep him imprisoned afterward.

This history matters because Dabhoiwala’s moral genealogy leans heavily on the alleged privilege of Cato’s authors. Yet here we have a movement that (1) articulated many of Cato’s core arguments decades earlier, (2) did so while advocating reforms that would expand democracy and equality, and (3) suffered repression precisely because it insisted that ordinary people must be able to criticize power, unlike Cato which sold itself to the very government it had criticized when threatened with legal consequences.

If you want a story in which free speech is a shield for the downtrodden rather than a perk for the privileged, you could do far worse than begin with the Levellers.

And that is why the historical dispute matters now. At a time of a global free speech recession —in which people across the political spectrum are tempted to treat speech as a dangerous contagion—the last thing we need is a comforting story that portrays robust free speech as an elite con, a “deliberately mendacious fiction,” whose only real legacy is the protection of modern bigotry. Free speech has been defended by hypocrites. It has been invoked in bad faith. Speech has led to harm. All of that is true. But free speech has also been fought for by persecuted radicals, bound up with democratic demands, and justified—again and again—as a precondition of both popular sovereignty and individual freedom and equality.

The Levellers understood something that remains easy to forget: censorship is not just a tool that silences bad ideas. It is a tool that trains a people to accept being ruled without being heard. And once you accept that logic, you no longer have to pretend that “no one before Cato” saw free speech as the foundation of liberty. Many did. Some of them paid for it with their limbs and liberty.

If Dabhoiwala wants to criticize modern free speech doctrine, he should do so on the merits – something his book fails to do convincingly, as I argue in my Foreign Affairs essay. But if he wants to discredit robust free speech by narrating it as the tainted invention of Trenchard and Gordon, he must first get the history right.

He doesn’t. And the Levellers are one reason why. But they’re not the only ones.

In part 2, I’ll explore Baruch Spinoza, who insisted that “in a free state everyone is at liberty to think as he pleases, and to say what he thinks.” This powerful line—repeated almost verbatim by Cato—Dabhoiwala mangles into a tame call for toleration of “philosophical speculation” rather than what it was: a radical call for free speech as a “natural right” in a democratic state whose “end and aim” is “liberty”.

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Jacob Mchangama is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. He is also the author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media and The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom (forthcoming with Jeff Kosseff).