The West Is Abandoning Its Free-Speech Legacy

By Joseph Laconte

Sunday, September 29, 2024

 

Venice — Not long after the Gutenberg press was up and running, a publisher in Venice announced his life’s ambition: to make sure that people devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and truth could get their hands on affordable books. “Until this supply is secured,” he declared, “I shall not rest.”

 

Aldo Manuzio, who opened his print shop in 1494, kept true to his word. His publishing house, the Aldine Press, became so successful that he sparked a publishing revolution. By the 1500s, Venice was producing and selling more books than any other city in Europe. As a result, the Venetians helped to introduce into the West the concepts of free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of conscience: the foundational rights of a healthy democratic society.

 

Yet today, 500 years later, many educated elites have turned their backs on this legacy of liberty. New forms of censorship, the shutting down of academic debate, the cancel culture: Modern attempts to suppress the free exchange of ideas make 16th-century Venice look like a citadel of classical liberalism.

 

Consider: During the 1500s, more than 690 Venetian printers and publishers generated at least 15,000 titles, which had an average press run of about 1,000 copies. Some historians estimate that the Venetian presses produced more than 35 million books. Printers worked 12 to 16 hours a day, printing one sheet every 20 seconds. Venetian women, such as Antonia Pulci, wrote and published books and worked as editors, illustrators, and proofreaders. In the universe of publishing, Venice was the North Star.

 

Situated in the middle of a tidal lagoon, Venice has always astounded visitors with its waterways, its architecture, its incomparable Piazza San Marco. Yet Alessandro Marzo Magno, author of Bound in Venice: The Serene Republic and the Dawn of the Book, describes medieval Venice thus: “What struck foreign visitors most were the books: the dozens and dozens of bookmaking workshops that were gathered here in a density unequaled anywhere else in Europe.” The Venetians effectively invented the modern bookstore.

 

What were they selling?

 

The discovery of a ledger in 1810, in the attic of the Basilica of San Marco, was revelatory: a comprehensive list of 12,934 book sales, from 1484 to 1487, from a single book shop in Venice. Educated Venetians were not, for the most part, consuming the thin gruel that dominates much of our publishing today. There were lots of books on mathematics, rhetoric, medicine, and natural history. About 20 percent of the books were religious: Bibles and commentaries, sermons, writings of the Church Fathers.

 

Another 25 percent of the inventory were classic works from the ancient Greeks and Romans — Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero — along with medieval authors such as Dante. In other words, the Venetians were being nourished by the classical-Christian inheritance of the West.

 

And this is where Aldo Manuzio, better known by his Latin name, Manutius, enters the picture. When Manutius arrived in Venice, the classic texts of Greek literature, drama, philosophy, and history existed only in manuscript form in Europe. They might easily have been discarded as irrelevant to the problems facing ordinary Europeans. It was Manutius, trained as a humanist scholar, who first printed the complete works of Aristotle in Greek, along with the works of Aristophanes, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, and Plato.

 

It is not too much to say that Manutius almost single-handedly jump-started the medieval interest in the works of classical antiquity, the literary lifeblood of the Renaissance.

 

Technological innovation is part of the story. Manutius pioneered the use of the smaller octavo-sized format for the works of antiquity. For the first time, beginning in 1501, he produced paperback “handy books” — editions of Virgil, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, and others — that were portable and affordable. Great literature, he believed, belonged to everyone and could be enjoyed anywhere. As humanist scholar Erasmus observed, Manutius was “building a library which knows no walls save those of the world itself.”

 

It’s vital to grasp what the burst of publishing and the recovery of classical texts represented: nothing less than the liberation of the medieval mind in a fresh pursuit of truth, wisdom, and beauty. It is no accident that this revolution began in the Venetian Republic, which had the oldest and most stable republican form of government in history. Never conquered by an external enemy, the Venetians cherished their independence, in publishing as well as in politics.

 

Yet it was not without controversy. As elsewhere in Europe, unregulated printing invited government censorship. The first literary censor, in fact, was a Venetian printer appointed by the state in 1516 to collaborate with the secret police of the city’s Council of Ten.

 

The censor’s role bore a striking resemblance to that of the present-day “digital commissioner” of the European Union, another unelected bureaucrat charged with suppressing speech considered offensive or dangerous. Before quitting his post, Thierry Breton had threatened to block transmission of Elon Musk’s interview with Donald Trump “to protect EU citizens from harm.” That’s pretty much the way the censors in the 16th century justified their coercive techniques of meting out fines, imprisonment, book burnings, etc.

 

The Venetian booksellers, however, were not going to be pushed around by either church or state. Protective of their financial interests, they kept the presses running. As Alessandro Magno points out, they mostly ignored the inquisitors. The sheer volume of Venetian printing in the early 16th century — half of all the books published in Europe were printed in Venice — confronted the inquisitors with an impossible task. As a result, Magno writes, “freedom of the press” would be “nearly absolute.”

 

Although moveable-type print was invented in China, its imperial government controlled the presses, just as the communist government in Beijing does today. Not so in Europe, especially in Venice, where publishing was a profit-making, entrepreneurial enterprise. “Anyone with money and some idea of which books would sell could purchase a printing press and set up shop,” writes Thomas Fadden in Venice: A New History. “For Europeans, therefore, printing became a craft. . . . Because it had the potential for great profits, printing expanded rapidly.”

 

More than any other society in their day,  the Venetians, ever the entrepreneurs, placed a high value not only on books but also on the rights of those who wrote them.  In 1486, Marco Antonio Sebellico was granted a copyright by the city, the first of its kind, for his book Decades Rerum Venetarum, a history of Venice. By 1545, with the book-publishing business at a fever pitch, the government declared that the individual writer possessed an “artistic personality” and was entitled to compensation.

 

In Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization, Meredith Small argues that the Venetian book publishers transformed the way we think about the life of the mind and the rights of the individual author. In Venice, uniquely, we find “the first evidence of intellectual property rights anywhere in the world.”

 

Venice thus boasts a long list of firsts in publishing. The city gave the world the first printed cookbook, the first book of fairy tales, the first book explaining how to make chocolate, and the first self-help book, On the Conduct of Honorable Men. In 1601, Lucrezia Marinella published The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, a riposte to a book critical of women and the first example of a woman arguing with a man in print. Indeed, Venice functioned almost like a year-round book fair. As Alessandro Magno notes, “There are accounts of how Renaissance bookshops, meeting places for intellectuals, reverberated with discussions and debates, at times resembling the halls of academe.”

 

There is a profound bond between the concept of self-government and an ethos of intellectual freedom. Thomas Jefferson, the father of the Library of Congress, summarized the relationship thus: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” The Venetians instinctively understood the linkage. The first book published in Venice, for example, was a work from Cicero, Rome’s greatest statesman: Cicero devoted his political career to defending Rome’s republican government against the forces of corruption and tyranny.

 

In similar fashion, Manutius emerged as a champion of republican freedom, and his humanism — rooted in a biblical outlook — was the reason. He believed that the recovery of the classics, alongside the teachings of Christianity, was the key to moral and cultural renewal. He published the devotional letters of Catherine of Siena, he explained, as a check against the immorality that offended a just God. “There is nothing left in man but the form and the name,” he wrote. “He no longer cares for honor or reputation.”

 

For nearly three centuries, the Republic of Venice sustained a vibrant printing industry, one that elevated eloquence, virtue, and the wisdom of the ancients. Its democratic form of government was buttressed by the cultural commitment to truth-seeking that this industry created.

 

Modern-day inquisitors, however, have betrayed this legacy. Contemptuous of the literary canon of the West, they have discarded the concept of moral excellence. Ignorant of the sources of our democratic freedoms, they follow the lead of the medieval book-burners: They would censor every point of view that refused to conform to their blinkered vision of human life and human societies.

 

Venice’s premier publisher would have stood them down. As one historian summarizes it, Manutius believed that books, and the intellectual freedom they demand, provided “an antidote to barbarous times.” Surely the barbarians are at the gates.

 

Manutius would be ready for them. “I do hope that if there should be people of such spirit that they are against the sharing of literature as a common good,” he wrote, “they may either burst of envy, become worn out in wretchedness, or hang themselves.” Hang the inquisitors — metaphorically speaking — and we just might save the republic.