Free thought was once seen as an essential component of intellectual inquiry and the pursuit of truth. ‘Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom’, declared John Stuart Mill in
On Liberty. Some 80 years previously, Immanuel Kant had also argued that independent thought required the ‘
freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters’. In one of the first arguments for academic freedom, Kant continued, ‘as a scholar, [man] has full freedom, indeed the obligation, to communicate to his public all his carefully examined and constructive thoughts’.
