In the latest issue of Prospect, Open University’s Nigel Warburton looks at recent censorship scandals in Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Ireland and writes, “perhaps it’s not just cheap clothes that we’ll be importing from China this year.” From there he launches into a (very) short history of Western philosophers who argued against free expression:
Plato wanted to censor the arts because, he argued, they misrepresented the nature of reality, something that only philosopher-kings could accurately discern. Two millennia later, in 1965, the Marxist Herbert Marcuse also railed against free expression, asserting that it was of little use when the people in a capitalist democracy were so indoctrinated that they parroted their master’s thoughts.
Source: Prospect
