On Offence review a 'coolly thoughtful analysis' of the politics of indignation

Richard King's timely study shows that insults have never had such potency, while legislating for hurt feelings is not the answer

Freedom of speech, we are often told by those with access to a dictionary of quotations, does not extend to the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre. Sensible-sounding stuff, you might think, if a little hackneyed. Well. The remark is originally credited to the supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr and, says Richard King, "given the analogy's provenance, its ubiquity is hard to fathom": "The case on which Holmes happened to be ruling when these words found their way through his imperial moustache had nothing to do with shouting fire but with a Yiddish-speaking socialist who'd distributed an anti-conscription leaflet to military draftees in 1919. The socialist was being sent to jail not for causing a stampede on Broadway but for protesting against US involvement in the first world war!"

It's a good caution against leaning on "common sense" or, worse, on something so seductively simple as a metaphor, when considering the way we police public debate. There's wide agreement that incitement to violence is a no-no. Where things get fuzzier is when it comes to so-called "hate speech". Is calling somebody a "nigger", a "kike" or a "fag", say, a coded incitement to violence? Or is it an act of symbolic violence (violence against the identity) that civilised society should regard as intolerable?