Martin luther

The preservation of a strict social hierarchy rests very often on the enforcement of correct modes of address. In America today any university student may address any other as ‘dude’, but those who have attained a certain level of prestige will object if an unwary low-status blunderer ventures to call them ‘bro’. Rebels seeking to overturn rigid class systems will often start by violating such regulations. The German revolutionaries of 1968, for example, made a point of addressing everyone as arschloch, or ‘arsehole’ – a radical usage I remember being startled by it in mid-1990s Kreuzberg bars until it was explained to me that I wasn’t being insulted. Their other move, to use the intimate du, rather than the formal Sie, for ‘you’, has taken much stronger hold.

‘Now tell us, you miserable wretched sack of maggots,’ wrote Thomas Müntzer, sounding like the love child of Owen Jones and Ian Paisley, ‘who made you into a prince over the people whom God redeemed with his own precious blood?’ The question Müntzer posed Count Albrecht of Mansfeld was, you’d think, rhetorical. Like his contemporary Martin Luther, if less unremittingly scatological, the radical millenarian preacher wielded a sharp pen. Don’t forget Ezekiel’s prophecy, he wrote to Count Albrecht’s brother Ernst: ‘God would command the birds of the air to feast on the flesh of the princes and command the unthinking beasts to lap up the blood of the bigwigs.

Is there a woke case to be made for freedom of expression? Jacob Mchangama certainly seems to think so. This 500-page door-stopper, which combines a history of free speech with a persuasive case for its defence, is aimed squarely at snowflakes and social justice warriors. Mchangama deals patiently and methodically with all the objections they might make to ‘the first freedom’ and then tries to convince them it’s in their interests to defend it. Take the assumption that untrammelled free speech perpetuates current inequalities, favouring the privileged and penalising the disadvantaged.