Keyword – Milton

Gosztonyi, Gergely:

A typology of censorship in the light of a brief history of political censorship

The history of censorship is as old as the history of mankind, but Hungarian-language summaries of censorship theory and history are currently not in the mainstream of research. There are countless definitions of what exactly censorship is, but there is no uniformly accepted one. The aim of this paper is thus to place the most common form of censorship in a diachronic context, which it does by embedding it in a theoretical and historical context. Drawing on the thousands of cases included in the Green–Karolides and Jones encyclopaedias of censorship, this paper attempts to nuance the colloquial notion of censorship and to construct a typology that can help us understand when and for what reasons various types of content intended for the public were banned in the past. The study will present the main theories of censorship from Antiquity to the end of the 20th century, as well as the ways in which content restriction has been implemented in practice.

Keywords: Areopagitica, Bentham, censorship, economic censorship, freedom of the press, Gutenberg, Index Expurgatorius, Index Librorum Prohibitorium, Mill, Milton, new censorship theory, Plato, political censorship, self-censorship, Sollicita ac Provida, Tindall