India, Oct. 19 -- Your new book's subtitle is provocative. Were you interested in centralising the general acceptability of 'free speech' without considering its potential dangers?

I became interested in this idea [free speech] because of a fundamental, underlying notion that prevails globally today: that we all value free speech. But that's only one side of the story. The other side is that we can't seem to agree on it at all. We're all fighting all the time on what it is, which is why I say it's chaotic, because we can't even define it properly. Through this book, I wanted to find a way to define this idea.

The other importance of looking at this idea historically is you can't figure this out - or pursue it - just as a legal or philos...