From What Is Free Speech?, which will be published next month by Harvard University Press.

Walk into the grand, marbled halls of the United States Capitol in Washington, and you are in the world’s greatest center of power. Every day, legislators in this building make decisions that affect the lives of millions, and sometimes billions, of people in the United States and around the globe. Its architecture is meant to convey the dignity of that task—and also to impress upon American lawmakers that they are part of a glorious history. Over in the House of Representatives chamber, the decor exalts legislative landmarks. At the apex of its central corridor is depicted the nation’s foundational law, the Constitution. Beside a mural captioned the first federal congress, 1789 are vignettes of a preacher and a printer, which symbolize the First Amendment. And beneath these images is an explanatory quotation: “Without Freedom of Thought there can be no such thing as Wisdom & no such thing as publick Liberty without Freedom of Speech.”

It’s a rousing and entirely appropriate statement—those lines are taken from the ultimate source of the First Amendment’s conception of free speech. The inscription specifies its origin: “Benjamin Franklin 1722.” Type the quote into any search engine, and page after page of results will wholeheartedly concur: the sixteen-year-old Franklin coined this sentence in a newspaper column published in July 1722. What a precocious genius he must have been!

But in fact the teenage Franklin didn’t come up with these words. The true story reveals both how freedom of speech first came to be conceived of as a mechanism for truth, an antidote to falsehood, and the foundation of all liberty—and that, ironically, this new and powerful theory was itself a deliberately mendacious fiction. This is a paradox whose consequenceswe are still living with.

Between 1720 and 1723, two ambitious London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, published a series of anonymous newspaper articles that came to be known as Cato’s Letters. The name links their ideals to those of the famously incorruptible Roman senator Cato the Younger, who led the opposition to the tyranny of Julius Caesar.

The political theory was fairly derivative. Mainly it purveyed easily digestible nostrums about personal liberty, religious freedom, the limits of government, and the nature of knowledge, drawn from weightier thinkers such as Algernon Sidney, Charles Davenant, and John Locke, as well as older heroes of republican thought such as Machiavelli. Yet at its heart was a novel set of arguments about freedom of speech and the press. No one before Cato had ever put forward an essentially secular ideal of free speech as a political right, let alone made it the very foundation of all liberty. Here is the stirring opening of his first column on the subject, published in the London Journal on February 4, 1721:

Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the right of another: And this is the only check it ought to suffer, and the only bounds it ought to know. This sacred privilege is so essential to free governments, that the security of property, and the freedom of speech, always go together; and in those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything else his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of the nation, must begin by subduing the freeness of speech; a thing terrible to public traitors.

It is not often that one can date a major intellectual shift with such precision. But in this case, it is well established that the idea of freedom of speech as an individual right was first widely discussed in the English-speaking world, and that Cato’s essay was its earliest and most celebrated model.

This “daring and well-developed theory of free speech” suddenly “burst upon the scene,” marvels a leading American historian of the subject, like “a flashing star in an orthodox sky.” Owing to its originality and scope, “no eighteenth-century work exerted more influence” on British and American ideas about freedom of speech and print. Though countless later writers tackled the topic, they all—whether agreeing or disagreeing—trailed in Cato’s wake. Until the publication of John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” in 1859, it was probably the most important English-language text on the subject.

But how did two little-known journalists suddenly manage to invent an entirely new way of thinking about politics and public debate? For various reasons, this remains an unexplored puzzle. Though the text of Cato’s Letters has been much studied, not much has previously been discovered about its authors, and scholarly analyses of their work invariably focus on its overall relationship to eighteenth-century political trends, rather than its specific propositions about speech. Historians of print, meanwhile, tend to note Trenchard and Gordon’s new arguments about freedom of expression, without interrogating their oddity. Yet what is puzzling is not just that Cato’s theory of speech was so innovative, and its authors’ motives so obscure, it is also that it ignored exactly the issues that were highlighted by every other contemporary commentator. Its presumptions about free speech match those of our time, but not those of their own.

In late-seventeenth-century Britain there emerged a new kind of populist national politics, organized around the world’s first-ever enduring political parties, the conservative Tories (who stood for divine-right monarchy and coercive religious uniformity, the so-called High Church position) and the more progressive Whigs (who favored limits on royal power and toleration for Protestant sects). This transformation greatly enhanced the status of the English Parliament as the chief arena of public debate.

After the Revolution of 1688, a new English Bill of Rights accordingly upgraded the traditional “freedom of speech and debates” of members of Parliament to a constitutional entitlement. Previously it had been merely a privilege, granted by monarchs—who had not scrupled to punish members whose speech displeased them. But even the new concept of a right to free parliamentary debate remained predicated on the ancient rhetorical ideal that rulers deserved honest counsel from their chosen advisers during the sitting of their representative body—and not at all on the idea that every citizen had a right to address the public.

In fact, as far as the general population was concerned, the new structure of politics created a great paradox. On the one hand—with two rival political parties now constantly appealing to public opinion, more frequent elections than ever before, and the introduction in the 1690s of new forms of public finance, like government bonds and traded stocks—the verdict of the people at large became more important than ever. On the other hand, especially given that the vote was still restricted to only a small minority of propertied men, the rise of party politics itself sharpened the age-old mistrust of popular judgment as irrational and easily swayed—especially by lies. Were the people behaving as a rational public, or a misinformed mob? That became the perennial question.

The second major change, which compounded this problem, was the largely inadvertent breakdown of prepublication licensing. The consequence of its abandonment in 1695 was not just a surge of religious polemic (whose dangerous tendencies Parliament tried to restrain by passing a new Blasphemy Act in 1698), but also a great explosion of printed daily and weekly news—and its eager exploitation by political partisans. Previously, such press freedom and appeals to public opinion had burgeoned only during periods of political breakdown, notably in the 1640s, when embryonic ideas of political free speech were occasionally put into print, including by John Milton in his Areopagitica. Now they had become the norm, on a vastly greater scale than ever before. English political discourse rapidly became the most unrestrained and fast-paced in the world.

All this made “liberty of the press” a fashionable new phrase. By and large, early-eighteenth-century Englishmen and women grew to accept that these novel circumstances were here to stay. They became addicted to argumentative newspapers and pamphlets. And they were often proud that the press in England was now freer than that in other places. Its champions gradually came to reinterpret the end of licensing as a natural consequence of the Revolution of 1688—part of the progression from tyrannical absolutism to parliamentary monarchy.

In 1706, for example, the radical journalist John Tutchin used this patriotic argument to justify his own constant muckraking attacks on the government of the day. Freedom of expression, he explained to the readers of his paper, The Observator, epitomized the superiority of English liberty over French “vassalage”:

Here we dare speak and write the Truth, this is an essential part of our freedom; there they dare not speak or write their minds . . . we are slaves neither in body or mind. We breathe in a free air, we think free, we are neither pen nor tongue tied, and yet are under restrictions of law; neither has an unbounded liberty.

Yet it was obvious not only that such arguments tended to be self-serving, but also, as Tutchin’s onetime colleague Daniel Defoe observed in 1720, that the explosion of newspapers had created a wave of “false news”—“forgery, infamy and absurdity” masquerading as fact. It had allowed the art of political lying to reach such heights, Jonathan Swift noted, that mere plodding reality no longer stood a chance: “Falsehood flies, and Truth comes limping after it . . . like a man who has thought of a good repartee, when the discourse is changed, or the company parted.” No early-eighteenth-century commentator on press freedom failed to notice “the mischiefs that proceed from the abuse of it, in the daily propagation of news and scandal.”

In addition, although prepublication censorship had been abandoned, the government retained many ways of controlling the press. Both Tories and Whigs regularly reaffirmed the laws against “spreading false news, and printing and publishing of irreligious and seditious papers and libels,” as a royal proclamation put it in 1702. Beyond these two parties (which, like the population at large, both demonized Catholicism) loomed the shadowy counterrevolutionary threat of Jacobites—those who clandestinely worked to return the deposed James II and his descendants to the throne through intermittent plots and serious rebellions in 1715 and 1745. In this febrile context, pretty much any political criticism could be deemed seditious, even if true, and writers and printers were regularly harassed, arrested, put on trial, and imprisoned (or even executed, as happened in 1693 and 1719 to the publishers of Jacobite tracts). Until the late 1710s, serious efforts were made to reintroduce some form of censorship, and in 1737 the Theatre Licensing Act muzzled political criticism from the stage by giving the government absolute power to censor plays and close theaters. Throughout John Locke’s lifetime (1632–1704), the great argument he and others championed, that truth would emerge out of free debate, was still largely confined to the spheres of scholarship and religious toleration—and even there it remained contentious.

Of the handful of theorists of free speech before 1720 who even considered applying it to the realm of politics, rather than religion, the lawyer Matthew Tindal went furthest when, in 1698, he described liberty of expression as not just a spiritual but also a “civil” and “natural” right, a safeguard of political as well as religious liberty—but only in passing, in an argument mainly about freedom of conscience. Most contemporary observers would have regarded this as misguided sophistry. To them, Parliament was the proper guardian of the people’s rights, and the only legitimate forum for liberty and freedom of speech. Unrestrained publishing brought not liberty but the chaos of unchecked insult, misrepresentation, and the multitude’s deluded and ignorant criticisms. No private person’s natural rights could trump those of the community: preserving peace, order, and comity.

When Tutchin was convicted of seditious libel in 1704, the lord chief justice, John Holt, dismissed his “plausible pretences of defending the rights and liberties of the people” by instructing the jury that, even though The Observator had not defamed any particular minister by name, nonetheless its attacks could not be tolerated, for if writers and printers could not be punished “for possessing people with an ill opinion of the government, no government could subsist. . . . This has always been looked upon as a crime.” This became a famous, though controversial, legal maxim. It built on Holt’s previous rulings affirming that judges, not juries, were to decide whether written words were libelous, and that writing such words was always criminal, even if they were never published, or were not intended maliciously.

The upshot was that “liberty of the press” remained but an empty, cynical catchphrase: politicians loved to trumpet it in opposition, yet on gaining power invariably trampled all over it.

As historians these days point out, “Nothing could be further from the truth [than] that the early eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of the freedom of the press.” Until Gordon and Trenchard published Cato’s Letters, even the idea was inconceivable: people had essentially no intellectual tools, no language to justify the free press.