Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

From America's founding fathers, via John Stuart Mill to today's social media giants,ity has long wrestled with the idea of free speech.

What does it mean? Can it really apply to everyone?

And is too much of it dangerous?

Here in conversation with Spencer Mizzin,

Farah de Boisville discusses a concept

that has divided the world's

great thinkers for 300 years. So far, as anyone who's been paying sort of any attention

to the news recently would have noted, free speech is one of the hot topics of the 21st century

and at the very centre of the so-called

culture wars. But you argue in your book, don't you, that this hasn't always been the case

that for millennia, free speech, at least as we understand it's a day, was not an intelligible concept. I wonder if you could

start by elaborating on that point a bit, because I guess that might surprise some of our listeners.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm very happy to. And it's a really important point, because one of the

difficulties we have in the present, in thinking and arguing about free

speeches, we always approach it from first principles as a philosophical question or a matter

of principle. But it's really also a historical question. And so the first point to understand

there is that for most of history, people thought very differently about expression. Up until the 18th

century, most cultures, all cultures

around the world, put a huge amount of effort into regulating speech. So freedom of speech does

exist in various ways as a concept and as an ideal, but it's a very exceptional form of expression.

I can explain that in a minute. The norm is that

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