PRESS AND SPEECH FREEDOMS IN THE WORLD, FROM ANTIQUITY UNTIL 1998: A CHRONOLOGY compiled by Louis Edward Ingelhart. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. 307 pages. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 0-313-30851-9.

Reviewed by John S. Gossett, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Texas. Email: gossett@unt.edu.

Ingelhart’s compilation presents an interesting task for the book reviewer in that it is not so much a book as it is an encyclopedia. Early on, the author describes his purpose as an attempt, ". . . to record many of the human endeavors to establish an atmosphere of freedom and free expression throughout the world in nations other than the United States" (p. vii). These endeavors are recorded in short-sentence individual-entry form rather than in paragraph form. Thus this text reads much like a series of unrelated laws, court decisions, quotations, and events that happened in a given country during a set of years. Nevertheless, this work contributes to the body of knowledge concerning press and speech freedoms and merits review.

The book is organized into six chapters that deal exclusively with Great Britain, four chapters that relate events from other nations, five chapters that chronicle events in Great Britain and other nations, and one chapter that deals with individual nations and international agencies. This schema and the dates included in the chapters, while not disruptive, do appear arbitrary. For example, Chapter Four, Schismatism in England, covers the period 1600 to 1643, and the subsequent chapter, Freedom of Expression Beckons in England, covers the years 1644 through 1699. Since the former chapter is not dedicated totally to events concerned with divisions in political and religious thought, and since such divisions, along with other events, laws, and court rulings, are also covered in the subsequent chapter, the arbitrary ending of one chapter with the year 1643 and the beginning of the next chapter with the year 1644 is puzzling. Had Ingelhart made the claim that publication of John Milton’s AEROPAGITICA in 1644 signaled the beginning of a new era in British thought concerning freedom of the press, perhaps the division of chapters would make more sense, but he does not make such a claim.

Several strengths recommend this volume. First, the book is well-researched. The citations in the end notes and the entries in the selected bibliography confirm the significant research effort undertaken to discover the thousands of persons and events referenced. For example, significant, but rarely referenced, events such as the establishment, in 1802, of the Society for the Suppression of Vice and For the Encouragement of Religion and Virtue Throughout the United Kingdom are included (p. 125). As one would expect in a work of this type, the source of each individual item needs to be noted, and Ingelhart provides this documentation. In addition, the works included in the bibliography are diverse, significant, and comprehensive.

Second, this volume includes a large amount of information on the development of laws, court rulings, edicts, and customs in non-Western nations. In addition to listing the more familiar developments in ancient Greece, the Roman republic, the Roman empire, Gutenberg Germany, France, and the Spanish Inquisition, Ingelhart systematically includes a listing of developments in ancient Mesopotamian, Sumarian, Minoan, and Phoenician civilizations, along with developments in Egypt, China, India, Japan, Russia and the Soviet Union, Pakistan, South America, and Australia. Except in the final chapter, where events in sixty-five nations plus the United Nations are listed, and excepting South Africa, there is a dearth of information related to developments in civilizations and nations in sub-Saharan Africa. On balance, however, it is apparent that the author made an overt attempt to include developments in non-Western nations.

As a third strength, I would note that Ingelhart does an admirable job of including the benchmark persons, literary works, events, legal rulings, and concepts that one would expect in a project such as this. Several examples illustrate this conclusion. The quotations and acts of famous (and occasionally infamous) people, mostly political, religious, and literary leaders, who influenced the development of speech and press freedoms are cited, including Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Cicero, Jesus, Plutarch, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Gutenberg, Luther, King John, Thomas More, Erasmus, Copernicus, Milton, Locke, Hobbes, Rosseau, Blackstone, Voltaire, Goethe, Erskine, Fox, Pitt, Burke, Bentham, Mill, Marx, Tolstoy, Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi, Goebbels, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Mao-Tse-Tung, Juan Peron, Khrushchev, McLuhan, Mandela, Solzhenitsyn, and Vaclav Havel. Similarly, the origins of several well known phrases are presented, For example, the book analyzes the controversy over who originated the phrase, "the fourth estate," Edmund Burke in 1790 (p. 119) or Thomas Babington Macauley in 1828 (139), and Voltaire’s famous quotation, "I wholly disapprove of what you say, and will defend to the death your right to say it" (pp. 104-5). Ingelhart also provides, on several occasions, clear presentations of the categorization of important legal concepts, such as when the British Parliament, in 1776, classified unlawful publications into the categories of defamatory libel, seditious libel, blasphemous libel, and obscene and immoral libel (pp. 114-5).

Despite these strengths, several weaknesses also emerge in this volume. The first weakness is that this work incorporates too much of what happened and virtually no discussion or analysis of how or why certain events occurred. Given the book’s purpose, an attempt to record many of the human endeavors to establish freedom of expression, I would expect its contents to be more descriptive than explanatory or analytical, but if a text of this type is to be of scholarly value it will need to provide a context for political, religious, and literary actions, and the author must discuss and assess the implications of those actions. Absent these components, the book functions merely as a chronological encyclopedia where one can discover, for instance, what happened outside of Great Britain and the United States in 1703. Many scholars as well as laypersons are familiar with the phrase, "the stamp act," and while it is interesting that the first such official tax on publications was enacted in Great Britain under Queen Anne in 1712 (p. 87), this book leaves one to speculate as to why this and subsequent versions of the stamp act developed into rallying points of rebellion for the American colonists. Similarly, the passage of Fox’s Libel Act in 1792, permitting juries to issue general verdicts of "guilty" or "not guilty" rather than deciding merely the fact of publication is included (p. 119), but the book provides no perspective as to why this act is a landmark in simultaneously increasing the sovereignty of the people and decreasing the power of the monarch. The book would be of much greater value were it to provide both context and implications of the items included.

A second weakness in this volume is that the author’s inclusion of numerous non-essential entries appears to crowd out more in-depth coverage of essential entries. Several examples illustrate this conclusion. In Chapter Ten, the book presents a statement from French essayist, Joseph Joubert, in 1842, saying, "Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make clear" (p. 159). Ingelhart also includes an 1899 Trinidadian proverb that says, "Conversation is food for the ears" (p. 167). These, along with a 1969 reference to the Beatles’ belief that "Everyone has to be free" (p. 196), a 1980 quotation by Princess Diana, "I know it’s just a job journalists have to do, but sometimes I do wish they wouldn’t" (p. 201), and a mid-1990s statement from British columnist and television producer David Frost that, "Television is an invention whereby your can be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn’t have in your house" (p. 209), add nothing to the scholarly value of the book nor do they aid in achieving the purpose of the work.

A third weakness concerns the numerous errors in preparing and editing the manuscript.

While it is impossible for a reviewer to discern the source of the errors, in this text they are abundant and significant. Multiple textual references to John Milton’s key work, AEROPAGITICA, are misspelled (p. 57 [four times on the same page], also pp. 80, 95), but it is spelled correctly in the selected bibliography (p. 276). Similar errors are found in the spelling of the name of the Irish dramatist, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (p. 105) and in a reference to a "Pope John Paul III" (p. 210). Finally, in a reference to 1987, Ingelhart includes a saying from Nikita S. Khrushchev, even though the former Soviet Premier died in 1971 (p. 202). Clearly, it is possible that these are printing errors instead of writing errors, but their existence undermines some of the qualities mentioned under strengths of this volume.

On balance, this volume will serve its intended audience well. Despite significant concerns, it achieves its purpose of attempting ". . . to record many of the human endeavors to establish an atmosphere of freedom and free expression throughout the world in nations other than the United States" (p. vii), and it may serve as a reference work for scholars pursuing historical research projects in the area of freedom of press and speech.

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