Censorship Moments: Reading Texts in the History of Censorship and Freedom of Expression

Description

Censorship in varying forms has been part of human experience for 2,500 years and has proved to be a recurring presence for political thought, whether as active repression, a shaping context for expression, or as itself a subject for analysis and argument. From the death of Socrates to the present, attempts to silence thinkers and writers have provoked passionate and often penetrating responses that speak of their historical moment. Censorship Moments provides short, accessible and stimulating essays on a variety of these responses. Each chapter pairs a textual ‘moment’ of writing on censorship by a past writer with analysis by an expert current scholar. The book’s main focus is the public political dimension of censorship and freedom of expression, in its relation to political authority and political thought, while also reflecting on the porous boundary to literature and other areas such as law and the media. Authors of the essays include Gregory Claeys, Stephen Ingle and Melissa Lane. Cover Half-title Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Illustrations Contributors Series Editors’ Foreword Introduction 1 Cato the Censor and Socrates the Tyrant 2 The Case of Cremutius Cordus: Tacitus on Censorship and Writing under Despotic Rulers 3 The Peace of Babylon (and What it Censors): St Augustine of Hippo’s City of God 4 The Regulation of Language in Medieval Theology: The Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas 5 William of Ockham on Ecclesiastical Censorship 6 ‘Whether to Confiscate, Burn and Destroy All Jewish Books’: Johannes Reuchlin and the Jewish Book Controversy 7 To Kill a Heretic: Sebastian Castellio against John Calvin 8 Paolo Sarpi, the Papal Index and Censorship 9 Areopagitica’s Adversary: Henry Parker and the Humble Remonstrance 10 Text and Image: William Marshall’s Frontispiece to the Eikon Basilike (1649) 11 Rara temporum felicitas: Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise 12 Roman Censorship, Spartan Parallels and Modern Uses in Rousseau’s Social Contract 13 Censorship from Rulers, Censorship from Book Piracy: The Strategies of Immanuel Kant 14 The ‘Censorship of Public Opinion’: James Madison, the Sedition Act Crisis and Democratic Press Liberty 15 The ‘Spirit of Independence’ in Benjamin Constant’s Thoughts on a Free Press 16 The Royal Shambles (1816): Hiding Republicanism in Plain Sight 17 Mill and Censoriousness 18 ‘Every Idea is an Incitement’: Holmes and Lenin 19 Orwell: Liberty, Literature and the Issue of Censorship 20 Sphinx with a Secret: Leo Strauss’s ‘Persecution and the Art of Writing’ 21 The Silencing of Women’s Voices: Catharine MacKinnon’s Only Words Notes Suggestions for Further Reading Index