Free Speech And Why It Matters

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349135373

Price: £9.99

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‘Impassioned, scholarly and succinct’ The Times

FREE SPEECH AND WHY IT MATTERS

Free speech is the bedrock of all our liberties, and yet in recent years it has come to be mistrusted. A new form of social justice activism, which perceives language as potentially violent, has prompted a national debate on where the limitations of acceptable speech should be drawn. Governments throughout Europe have enacted ‘hate speech’ legislation to curb the dissemination of objectionable ideas, Silicon Valley tech giants are collaborating to ensure that they control the limitations of public discourse, and campaigners in the US are calling for revisions to the First Amendment.

However well-intentioned, these trends represent a threat to the freedoms that our ancestors fought and died to secure. In this incisive and fascinating book, Andrew Doyle addresses head-on the most common concerns of free speech sceptics, and offers a timely and robust defence of this most foundational of principles.

Reviews

A powerful, timely and sadly necessary book
Richard Dawkins
Impassioned, scholarly and succinct
Dominic Maxwell, The Times
A fantastically timely book written by one of the smartest thinkers in Britain
Piers Morgan
Doyle's book is terse, restrained, and as carefully argued as a QC's summing-up in a top-drawer courtroom drama . . . a beautifully balanced and comprehensive overview
The Critic
The primer that we have been needing for some time
Areo magazine