Ridicule, Censorship, and the Regulation of Public Speech: The Case of Shaftesbury
Carroll, RE
Date: 10 October 2016
Journal
Modern Intellectual History
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP): HSS Journals
Publisher DOI
Abstract
The Third Earl of Shaftesbury has been celebrated for his commitment to free
public discourse regulated only by standards of politeness, a commitment exemplified by
his defense of the freedom to ridicule. This article complicates this picture by tracing
Shaftesbury’s response to the early eighteenth-century crisis of public speech ...
The Third Earl of Shaftesbury has been celebrated for his commitment to free
public discourse regulated only by standards of politeness, a commitment exemplified by
his defense of the freedom to ridicule. This article complicates this picture by tracing
Shaftesbury’s response to the early eighteenth-century crisis of public speech precipitated
by the demise of pre-publication censorship and growing uncertainty about intellectual
property in the print trade. Shaftesbury, the article shows, was a determined opponent of
pre-publication censorship through licensing, but he was also aware of the dangers posed
to religious liberty by, in particular, clerical attacks on toleration, and sought ways to
curb them that included corrective action by the state. When the Whigs opted to impeach
the High-Church cleric Henry Sacheverell, whose supporters had capitalized on an
unregulated print market to disseminate his sermons ridiculing Whig principles,
Shaftesbury expressed satisfaction with their choice. But he did not stop there. The article
reads Shaftesbury’s 1710 Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author against the backdrop of the
Sacheverell controversy, and shows how the earl used it to undercut Sacheverell’s claim
that clerical speech enjoyed special status.
Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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