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, Areopagiticas 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 Womens Voices: Catharine MacKinnons Only Words discusses how Professor MacKinnons book identifies pornography as a key source of the continuing censorship of women, although it is, ironically defended on anti-censorship grounds.

The books 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.

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New book retraces the idea of censorship