Are cancel-culture activists aware of their sinister bedfellows?

Is there a woke case to be made for freedom of expression? Jacob Mchangama certainly seems to think so. This 500-page door-stopper, which combines a history of free speech with a persuasive case for its defence, is aimed squarely at snowflakes and social justice warriors. Mchangama deals patiently and methodically with all the objections they might make to ‘the first freedom’ and then tries to convince them it’s in their interests to defend it.

Take the assumption that untrammelled free speech perpetuates current inequalities, favouring the privileged and penalising the disadvantaged. That view often underpins the efforts of student activists to cancel controversial speakers, believing as they do that anyone who challenges fashionable orthodoxies about race, sex and gender will make minority students feel ‘unsafe’. And we’re not just talking about Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray. In recent years, the ranks of the no-platformed have swelled to include Germaine Greer, Peter Tatchell and Julie Bindel.

The first two-thirds of this book, which traces the concept of free speech from its beginnings in ancient Athens to its eventual triumph as ‘the great bulwark of liberty’, aims to demolish this argument.