Among the heirs of Greece and Rome and of Israel were the Christians of varying professions. Perhaps the most dramatic form of censorship in Christendom was that displayed in the development by the Roman Catholic Church of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of proscribed books, the origins of which go back (in a primitive form) to the 5th century ce and which continued to have official sanction well into the 20th century. The most spectacular instance of the silencing of a thinker of note may well have been the restrictions placed upon Galileo in 1633.

The orthodoxy protected by an institution such as the Index probably had to be a system of thought in which much was made of certain books, particularly if other publications should seem to challenge in significant respects the teachings of the canonical texts. This must have appeared even more acute a problem when means became available, especially after the invention of printing, to produce and distribute books in large quantities.

The establishment of a fairly precise orthodoxy led to a perhaps unprecedented recourse to creeds. Thus, for example, the Nicene Creed was promulgated in 325 ce. It was devised to fend off a heretical threat to Christian doctrine—and it led, partly because of a unilateral change in wording made by the Western church, to a schism that has continued since 1054 between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.

Thus, it very much mattered which doctrines people were taught and what came to be believed—and this was largely determined, as it usually is, by the action of some authority, ecclesiastical or temporal. Similar developments can be seen in the Islamic world to this day.

It is difficult to distinguish religious and nonreligious elements in some of the more celebrated controversies of the medieval Christian world, just as it is today among Islamic peoples. The persecutions of witches—which ranged across much of Europe from the 14th to the 18th century and cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives—can be understood as due to various political, social, and psychic disturbances as well as to strictly religious differences.

The trials of Joan of Arc in France (1431) and of Thomas More in England (1535) are notorious illustrations of the difficulty in distinguishing religious from political differences. Indeed, it has been common, because of the experiences of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance, to see the cause of political liberty as intimately related to the cause of religious liberty (and especially the liberty to do without religion).

The Enlightenment, beginning in the 17th century, attempted to purge Europe of the censorship that found political despotism allied with religious traditionalism. Alexis de Tocqueville was astonished to find in the United States, in the 1830s, that it was possible for ordinary men who stood for political freedom to be, and to remain, religiously devout. This was not the typical combination in the Europe of his day.

Even so, it should be recognized that the rigorous medieval theological-political regime against which Moderns have rebelled did have at its core a principle that subjected the exercise of will (or sovereignty) to the test of wisdom. This principle, upon which the contemporary dedication to freedom of speech may ultimately depend, is reflected in Thomas Aquinas’s insistence in De veritate, “To say that justice depends simply upon the will is to say that the divine will does not proceed according to the order of wisdom, and that is blasphemous.”

The 17th and 18th centuries

The struggle against censorship in the Anglo-American world in the 17th and 18th centuries took two principal forms. There was the effort to keep government from reviewing, before publication, any manuscript, and there was the effort to keep government from penalizing, after publication, any text that expressed forbidden sentiments. (There were throughout the Western world developments with respect to these matters similar to those in Great Britain and the United States, but they usually occurred later.)

The effort to eliminate “previous restraints” (also known as prior restraints) in Great Britain and in America had its roots in English constitutional experience. Previous restraint (or licensing) came to be regarded as an inheritance of Roman Catholic practices. And so, when the Anglican successor to the Roman Catholic Church was disestablished by the Puritans, it was evidently something of a shock to John Milton to find Parliament reinstating licensing in 1643.

Milton’s “Areopagitica” (1644) has remained the classic statement of the arguments against censorship, particularly in the form of previous restraint. Milton conceded that criminal prosecutions might, perhaps even should, follow upon the publication of certain writings. He insisted, however, that such works must not be suppressed before publication.

Critical to Milton’s position in support of freedom of the press is something that may not have been implicit in the traditional pre-Miltonian position against censorship—his confidence that truth, “in a free and open encounter,” will be able to overcome error. Related to this opinion is the assurance that it is a positive good for mankind to be exposed to error; only in this way may virtue be tested, strengthened, and made adequate to the trials of earthly life. Milton cannot praise “a fugitive and cloister’d vertue.” All this seems to rest upon a Christian view of the world: truth may indeed win out in its encounter with error, if the struggle continues long enough and if divine aid is thrown into the balance, as Milton seems to assume it will be; a person not only must act virtuously but must also personally choose to do so; he must be prepared to be exposed to alternatives, as inevitably he will be, and he must choose rightly if he is to merit and secure eternal salvation.

A reliance upon due process of law (which Milton in effect calls for) is the vital concession that the community can be led to make to reason: it provides a safeguard that must be so well established in times of calm and reflection that it is held to firmly, as a tenet of a common political faith, when the community is almost beside itself with passion. And, Milton might add if he were to use modern terminology, due process provides the ground rules for that free and open encounter in which truth may indeed prevail over error.

Thus, it is against the polemical background provided by Milton’s “Areopagitica” that the abandonment of prepublication censorship in England in 1695 could be properly seen as a great victory for liberty of the press in Anglo-American constitutional history. And so, in 1765–69, William Blackstone could say about the English common law with respect to liberty of the press in his Commentaries on the Laws of England:

The liberty of the press . . . consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public; to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press: but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own temerity.

The next major step in the Anglo-American response to censorship problems may be seen in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. That amendment, ratified in 1791, provides:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Similar provisions may be found in most of the state constitutions in the United States, although the connection between political and religious liberty is not always recognized to be as intimate as it is in the First Amendment.

Such a guarantee of freedom of the press as is found in U.S. constitutional documents has long been understood to foreclose the possibility of previous restraints, thereby confirming the definition of “liberty of the press” found in Blackstone’s Commentaries. A few scholars and jurists have gone so far as to suggest that the First Amendment and the state constitutional provisions do no more than limit restraints prior to publication, but it is difficult to bring the “freedom of speech” language (often found in the same guarantees) within this suggestion, since there never had been (and, in the nature of things, could never easily be) previous restraints upon what might be spoken (as distinguished from what might be printed). Rather, as indicated above, “freedom of speech” is modeled upon the British parliamentary privilege, a privilege that should be generally available when a people becomes sovereign in the fashion of the American people. (In addition, the celebrated case of John Peter Zenger [1735] had already established for Americans the principle that truth was a defense in seditious libel prosecutions, thus going beyond Blackstone’s position in still another respect.)

The traditional parliamentary privilege—which is still guaranteed in the United States to members of Congress and to state legislators—can be considered virtually absolute in the protection it provides legislators against being held accountable “in any other place” for what they utter in a legislative body. The question remains, of course, as to precisely what kinds of matters may be discussed freely, and without fear of sanction, by citizens entitled to such protection as is provided by the First Amendment.

The old-fashioned answer was that the kind of discussion primarily protected by the First Amendment is that of citizens engaged in investigating and assessing the public business. Such protected discussion may be found in art, in moral and scientific inquiry, and in advertising, as well as in obvious political discourse. Thus, whatever is suppressed simply because of political differences is likely, in the circumstances, to be “political.” Another way of putting this is to say that the crime of seditious libel is not consistent with the First Amendment. Particularly influential spokesmen for this position in the 20th century were Alexander Meiklejohn (1872–1964), Hugo Black (1886–1971), Harry Kalven, Jr. (1914–74), and Malcolm P. Sharp (1897–1980). It is a position epitomized by its questioning of the constitutionality of the Sedition Act enacted by Congress in 1798.

The Sedition Act made criminal the publication of “any false, scandalous and malicious writing . . . against the government of the United States, or either House of Congress . . . or the President . . . with intent to defame [them] or to bring them . . . into contempt or disrepute.” This act, which was allowed to lapse after two years, has been generally repudiated by American jurists and scholars. The U.S. credo in these matters may well be found in Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address (1801), in which he said, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

The First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and of the press was anticipated, in effect, by the provision of the Constitution (drafted in 1787) that “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” This too has made it difficult to prosecute citizens for their criticism of government, something that had been much easier to do under an expansive definition of treason. The First Amendment guarantee was anticipated as well by the assumption evident in the Declaration of Independence that a people is always entitled to examine and to assess the doings of its governments, all with a view to being able to replace any government deemed upon due consideration to be unsatisfactory.

The extensive freedom of Americans to discuss political matters can lead to serious abuses. But it is generally recognized that the abuses resulting from censorship of such discussion—whether in the form of previous restraints or in the form of postpublication sanctions—are apt to be even more serious for a community.

Perhaps not as generally recognized is that considerable self-restraint is required if the best possible use is to be made of free discussion in the circumstances of a people. A call for such restraint (or self-censorship), as well as for both public enlightenment and respect for organized religion, may be seen in George Washington’s Farewell Address (1796). Similarly, Lord Macaulay could say of the 19th-century British press, “Foreigners who dare not print a word reflecting on the government under which they live, are at a loss to understand how it happens that the freest press in Europe is the most prudish.”

Modern practices

The system in the former Soviet Union

The Index, which was abolished by the Roman Catholic Church in 1966, could be seen in another form in the Soviet Union before its dissolution in 1991. In the Soviet Union there was a comprehensive system of supervision of manuscripts before publication. (Similar control, in varying degrees, was made a practice in other countries with Marxist governments.) Such supervision, in the light of official Communist Party doctrines, was not limited to political discussions or to books and newspapers but seemed to cover all kinds of subjects and all forms of publication, including broadcasts. This led, in effect, to considerable self-censorship by authors seeking to be published in some form. Of course, the more “unreliable” authors were simply refused publication in the conventional places. There were, in the 1970s and ’80s, periodic relaxations of control in the Soviet Union, but a pervasive and shameless control by the Communist Party oligarchy predominated. The advent of government policies of glasnost (or “openness”) in the late 1980s involved some relaxation of the censorship that marked the greater part of Soviet history.

The comprehensive Soviet system led to the development of sophisticated modes of guarded expression in print and even in music, the aim of which was designed to conform with official proprieties even as signals were given to the more perceptive about sensitive political and social themes. It also led to (or perhaps permitted the perpetuation of) such expedients as the transformation of the circus clown into a tolerated means for exhibiting and venting public exasperation with the regime. All in all, in such circumstances, the bearing of persecution on the arts could be seen.

A limited uncensored circulation of literary manuscripts was effected by private copying; a few authors had their manuscripts published abroad. Some materials were smuggled into the Soviet Union, and there were foreign radio broadcasts, which were “jammed” from time to time. But these exceptional modes provided uncensored information and discussion to only a very small number of Soviet citizens. The large body of citizens knew, by and large, only what the government chose to reveal, often remaining ignorant of critical conditions and developments in their own country (such as the serious illness of a Soviet leader) that were well known abroad.

This sort of control was justified as necessary for the protection of the state and the welfare of its citizenry. Some of the restrictions were designed to permit retention of information that was considered vital to national security; others were designed to keep citizens from being “misled,” especially since a proper understanding of dialectical materialism was said to be necessary to determine what is relevant and what contributes to the health of the community and the well-being and moral soundness of citizens. Variations of the arguments used in the Soviet Union may be found in medieval apologetics, in Confucian doctrines, in Plato’s Republic, and in UNESCO proposals for “a new world information and communication order.”

How seriously such arguments are to be taken depends, in part, on whose interest the rulers exercising this control truly serve. George Orwell, in his novel Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), portrayed a ruling class that was evidently drawn in large part from his study of the practices of the ruling party in the Soviet Union. The rulers in Nineteen Eighty-four, when they speak most frankly, disavow serving any interest but their own, whatever they may say publicly about national security and social progress. Such ruthless self-centredness on the part of rulers fits the traditional definition of tyranny. (It is not necessary to be concerned here with whether such a completely self-centred tyranny, which must be rare, would be likely to withstand determined opposition by men and women willing to sacrifice themselves.)

The portrayal in Nineteen Eighty-four is particularly gripping because it suggests how extensive the modern control of ideas can be. (Developments with respect to computers subsequent to the publication of Orwell’s novel made the prospects of comprehensive control seem even more ominous.) The ultimate in censorship may be seen, in the novel, in a technology and an ideology that permit government to edit not only what is being said today and tomorrow but also what is recorded or remembered to have been said yesterday. Many readers of Nineteen Eighty-four are likely to be offended not only by its government’s efforts to control political discussion but also by the official assumption that the individual has no standing worthy of serious consideration.

It is unlikely that any system of censorship in the world today, with the possible exception of that in China, is as effective as was that in the Soviet Union. But official secrecy, as well as tyranny, was something to which Russians were long accustomed. (In the late 19th century, the Russians had perhaps the only extensive censorship system in the world.) It is instructive, therefore, to consider how censorship has worked in countries with somewhat more experience in self-government.