Sense on Censorship

"If the concept of censorship is extended to everything, it means nothing," Robert Darnton, Harvard's head librarian, cautions in The New York Review of Books, calling to mind analogous labels broadly applied in an attempt to stifle debate on matters to which they do not properly apply. For those genuinely concerned with defending the principle purportedly under assault, however, such charges ― or, not infrequently,  slanders ― are far too grave to be trivialized for partisan gain and thereby increasingly discredited among the remnant who yet dare to think for themselves. As censorship is essentially a political sword wielded by the State, Prof. Darnton, author of the upcoming Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature, is well suited to address it.