Censorship

Censorship is the suppression of speech, writing, images, or other communication by an authority empowered to punish or prevent their expression. The censor’s hand has been held, at different times, by the church, the crown, the state, the publisher, the university, and — in the twenty-first century — the social-media platform. The conservative position is double-edged: conservatives wrote some of the strongest defences of free expression in the language, yet the tradition has also defended limits that liberals reject, on obscenity, blasphemy, and incitement, grounded in the claim that a society is entitled to protect its moral environment.¹

Today the live battleground has shifted from the state censor to private and institutional gatekeepers: platform content moderation, campus speech codes, and hate-speech law.

Key Takeaways

• Censorship divides into prior restraint (preventing publication) and subsequent punishment (penalising it afterward); Anglo-American law has treated prior restraint as the graver evil since the eighteenth century.
• John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), written against Parliament’s licensing of the press, remains the founding text of English free-speech argument.²
• John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) supplies the strongest secular case against suppression: even false opinion is useful, because truth untested becomes dead dogma.³
• Modern conservatives fight censorship by governments, platforms, and universities while accepting narrow traditional limits on obscenity and incitement.

History And Context

Systematic censorship arrived with the printing press. Rome’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Catholic Church’s list of banned books, ran from 1559 until 1966. In England, the Licensing Order of 1643 required state approval before printing — the law that provoked John Milton’s Areopagitica in 1644, a pamphlet arguing that licensing insults both truth and the reader, since a man who kills a good book kills reason itself in its image.² England let press licensing lapse in 1695, and the common law settled into a distinctive compromise: no prior restraint, but liability after the fact for sedition, libel, blasphemy, and obscenity.

The United States constitutionalised the principle in the First Amendment (1791), though enforcement took 130 years to mature; the Sedition Act of 1798 and the Comstock Act of 1873 both criminalised expression with little judicial resistance. The modern doctrine emerged through twentieth-century cases — Near v. Minnesota (1931) on prior restraint, Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) restricting punishment of advocacy to incitement of imminent lawless action, and Miller v. California (1973) narrowing obscenity. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859) provided the philosophical scaffolding: silencing an opinion robs mankind, because the opinion might be true, and even if false its collision with truth keeps truth alive.³ The twentieth century also produced censorship’s industrial form — Soviet Glavlit, Nazi book-burnings, and the Chinese state’s contemporary Great Firewall.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives hold that the strongest case against censorship is institutional rather than romantic: no body — state, platform, or faculty senate — can be trusted with the power to decide what the rest are permitted to hear, because that power is always captured by the orthodoxy of the moment. The framers of the First Amendment understood this as a structural restraint on government, not a celebration of every utterance. Conservatives add a historical observation: in their reading, the censoring institutions of the present era — universities, prestige media, HR departments, and the large platforms — lean left, so speech regulation lands asymmetrically on conservative, religious, and heterodox opinion. Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors (1993) gave this argument its modern form: knowledge advances only through a decentralised system of open criticism, and “humanitarian” restrictions on offensive speech break the machinery that sorts truth from error.⁴

At the same time, the older conservative tradition never accepted the libertarian claim that all expression is equal. Lord Devlin argued in The Enforcement of Morals (1965) that a society’s shared morality is part of its structure, and that the law legitimately defends it against corrosion.¹ On this basis conservatives have historically supported obscenity statutes, broadcast decency rules, and protections for children, while rejecting hate-speech laws — the distinction being that the former police the manner of public space, while the latter police opinion itself. The contemporary conservative programme is therefore consistent: dismantle viewpoint censorship in universities and platforms, resist state speech codes, and retain the narrow, ancient categories of libel, incitement, and obscenity.

Differing Positions

Progressive critics argue that the conservative picture mistakes power’s real location. Speech, they contend, is never a level field: harassment, slurs, and dehumanising propaganda silence their targets, so regulating such speech enlarges rather than restricts the total amount of expression — a case made by critical race theorists such as Mari Matsuda and Richard Delgado, and reflected in the hate-speech laws of Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. European jurisprudence accepts this trade-off explicitly: Article 10 of the European Convention protects expression subject to limits necessary in a democratic society. A second school, associated with platform-accountability scholars, argues that content moderation is not censorship at all but editorial judgment by private firms, which conservatives themselves defended when the editors were newspapers. Civil libertarians, finally, fault conservatives from the other side, noting that book-removal campaigns in American school districts and state laws restricting classroom topics sit poorly with free-speech rhetoric.

Conservatives respond that curating a children’s curriculum is parental governance, not censorship of adults — and that the hate-speech exception, once granted, has no logical stopping point short of Devlin’s censor wearing different clothes.

References

1. Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals (Oxford University Press, 1965).
2. John Milton, Areopagitica (1644; Cambridge University Press, 1918).
3. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859; Penguin Classics, 1974), ch. 2.
4. Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (University of Chicago Press, 1993).