page_title: Michael Gottlieb Birckner
section_title: Struggle for Freedom of the Press
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Gottlieb Birckner / Struggle for Freedom of the Press
caption_attribution_description: Dansk: Titelbladet til den anden og forøgede udgave af M.G. Birckners "Om Trykkefriheden og dens Love." fra 1797.
context_page_description: Michael Gottlieb Birckner was a Danish priest and philosopher.
  Birckner especially explored the subject of Freedom of Speech. The American historian H. Arnold Barton has characterised Birckner, along with Niels Ditlev Riegels, as being "one of the most original thinkers" of the radical group of authors in Denmark in this period. The Danish jurist Peter Germer in his book The Nature of Freedom of Speech shows that Birckners ideas was akin to ideas that Scottish-American philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn proposed in his Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government.
context_section_description: But neither his sickness nor his poverty prevented him from continuing his philosophical endeavours. When the bishop of Zealand Nicolai Balle Edinger had reported the poet Malthe Conrad Bruuns recently published book The Catechism of the Aristocrats (Aristocraternes Catechismus, 1796) to the authorities for infringing the press laws, Birckner anonymously published a small tract which criticised the bishop for playing the part of head of police instead of minding his ecclesiastical pursuits.
  However his real struggle for freedom of the press was not carried out anonymously. He had already previously shown that the Danish laws regarding this subject did not allow for a complete freedom of the press. It was to achieve this goal that he published his major work On the Freedom of the Press and its Law ("Om Trykkefriheden og dens Love", 1797).
  In this book he claims the importance of freedom of press as a powerful means of putting ideas into circulation and thereby enlighten the monarch of things that he would otherwise have been ignorant of. He also writes about it being a "revolution from above", when a "noble and patriotic" man, "brimming with feelings for the general good of man", at once appear among the powerful and without restraint "sacrifices his own splendor and absolutism". These words were aimed at the reigning crown prince Frederick, who had shown considerable influences from the tolerant enlightenment ideas in his early years on the throne.
  But Birckner does not only demand freedom to write about the affairs of government, he also demands freedom of speech in matters of religion. He shows that the way to achieve insight into the "moral truths" can only happen by discussing it in the open. However Birckner does propose some limits on the freedom of press, he does not think it should be allowed to publicly call for rebellion, that is urging the people to overthrow the constitution of the state or in other ways oppose the actions of the government with physical force. Neither, Birckner says, should it be allowed to defame the private affairs of a man in his home, something which has no public interest and it violates the private sphere of the individual.
  The book became a bestseller in Denmark-Norway. A second revised and improved edition appeared the same year, and a third printing was made for the first volume of the Collected Works of Birckner (a work which had 2.100 subscribers at the beginning of its publication, a very high figure in Danish literary history). Furthermore, he translated the book into German and it was printed in the German periodical Beiträge zur Veredlung der Menschheit, 2. vol., 1. part, 1797, and the same year published as a stand-alone work under the title Ueber die Preszfreiheit und ihre Gesetze, von dem Verfasser selbst aus dem Dänischen übersetzt, durchgesehen und herausgegeben von C.J.R. Christiani, Kopenhagen und Leipzig.
  These ideas met opposition from several contemporary writers. Some thought Birckner went too far in his support of free speech, while others thought there should be no limits whatsoever. This prompted Birckner to publish his Further Reflections on the Freedom of Press and its Laws ("Videre Undersøgelser om Trykkefriheden og dens Love") the following year (1798). His response is especially aimed at the criticism posed by professor Johan Frederik Vilhelm Schlegel. Only at one point in this book does he change his stance from his previous work, and that is only "half unwillingly" he thinks that writers who "with their filthy imagination attempts to awaken impure desires in his readers", these individuals should be sentenced "a fitting punishment". His "half unwillingness" for this stems from the fact that he sees "what the result would be, of such a power administered by the judges of geniuses, and how easily such a power can be abused most savagely... And yet, all art and beauty be damned, if it misleads just a single person to stray from the path of virtue".
caption: The titlepage to the second and extended edition of Birckners On the Freedom of Press and its Laws from 1797.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "314", "Image YResolution": "314", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2008:10:17 17:26:48", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4424", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1913", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3246"}