New book retraces the idea of censorship

New book retraces the idea of censorship

Censorship is often regarded as a new concept used by modern leaders to suppress ideas and thought. But a new book edited by Dr Geoff Kemp from the University of Auckland outlines how censorship has been part of human life for 2500 years.

In Censorship Moments: Reading Texts in the History of Censorship and Freedom of Expression an international team of experts explores the nature of debates over censorship from Socrates and Cato to the later twentieth century.

“The book is pointing out that the whole idea of censorship is bound up with history. The story of censorship is in part the story of democracy,” Dr Kemp says.

Chapter topics range from ancient Roman Censorship to the Papal Index of Prohibited Books, the American founders and the censorship of public opinion, and Lenin and George Orwell on censorship. Contributors are drawn from the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Ireland and New Zealand, and feature leading historians of political thought such as Professor Bryan Garsten of Yale University and Professor Melissa Lane of Princeton University Professor Lane will visit Auckland as a Hood Fellow in semester two this year.

Dr Kemp, a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the School of Social Sciences, has also written a chapter, ‘Areopagitica’s Adversary: Henry Parker and the Humble Remonstrance’.

Areopagitica is the most celebrated denunciation of pre-publication press censorship in the English language. It was written by John Milton, poet and a civil servant for the Commonwealth (republic) of England under Oliver Cromwell, and published 23 November 1644, at the height of the English Civil War.

The Humble Remonstrance of the Company of Stationers had been written in April 1643 by political writer Henry Parker to support press regulation. The chapter asks how Milton and Parker, both associated with ideas of republican liberty, could differ on so fundamental an issue as free expression.

University of Auckland colleague Dr Katherine Smits’ chapter ‘The Silencing of Women’s Voices: Catharine MacKinnon’s Only Words’ discusses how Professor MacKinnon’s book identifies pornography as a key source of the continuing ‘censorship’ of women, although it is, ironically defended on anti-censorship grounds.

The book’s release is topical given the recent Leveson Inquiry into the British Press, and the massacre of 12 people at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris last month.

“An aim of this book is to contribute to widening the horizon, historically and intellectually, by scrutinizing a range of ‘moments’ over the past two millennia when thinkers addressed the theme of censorship,” Dr Kemp says.

The book is part of a new series, ‘Textual Moments in the History of Political Thought’, published by Bloomsbury Academic. The series editors are Professor J.C. Davis of the University of East Anglia and Professor John Morrow of the University of Auckland.

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

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