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CENSOR AND CENSORSHIP
 The New Encyclopædia Britannica 
Volume 3
MICROPÆDIA
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FOUNDED 1768
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Censor
censor, plural CENSORS, or CENSORES, in ancient Rome, a magistrate whose original functions of registering citizens and their property were greatly expanded to include supervision of senatorial rolls and moral conduct. Censors also assessed property for taxation and contracts, penalized moral offenders by removing their public rights, such as voting and tribe membership, and presided at the lustrum ceremonies of purification at the close of each census. The censorship was instituted in 443 BC and discontinued in 22 BC, when the emperors assumed censorial powers.
The censors, who always numbered two, were elected normally at five-year intervals in the Comitia Centuriata (one of the assemblies in which the Roman people voted). Plebeians became eligible in 351 BC for the originally patrician office. Judgments were passed only with the agreement of both incumbents, and the death or abdication of one resulted in the retirement of the other.
censor, in traditional East Asia, governmental official charged primarily with the responsibility for scrutinizing and criticizing the conduct of officials and rulers.
The office originated in China, where, under the Ch'in (221-206 BC) and Han (206 BC-AD 220) dynasties, the censor's function was to criticize the emperor's acts; but, as the imperial office gained prestige, the censorate became mainly an instrument for imperial control of the bureaucracy, investigating acts of official corruption and misgovernment for the emperor. By, the T'ang dynasty (618-907), the censorate, or Yü-shih-t'ai, as it was then known, had thus become a major organ of the government. It expanded even further during the Sung dynasty (960-1279) and reached the apogee of its power during the Ming (1368-1644) and Ch'ing (1644-1911) dynasties, when the imperial institution became extremely autocratic. Retitled the Tu-ch'a-yüan in 1380, it was then a huge governmental bureau controlled by two chief censors and composed of four subdivisions.
The censors checked important documents, supervised construction projects, reviewed judicial proceedings, kept watch over state property, and maintained a general lookout for cases of subversion and corruption. Usually recruited from the civil bureaucracy, the censors were generally younger men of relatively low rank who were tenured for a maximum of nine years, after which they resumed their former posts. Their chief power derived from their direct access to the emperor. Some censors, however, were punished for their overzealous criticisms of favoured imperial policies, and this induced others to mute their criticisms and ignore many cases of misgovernment. The major effect of the office was to spread fear throughout the bureaucracy, preventing officials from instituting any kind of radically new or innovative policies.
Although the functions of the censorate were maintained in the Chinese Nationalist and, to a lesser extent, the Chinese Communist governments, the institution effectively ended in China with the overthrow of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1911.
A censorate apparatus was, however, adopted by all the East and Central Asian states that copied the Chinese bureaucratic system. In Korea, because of the relatively weak position of the Korean king and the strength of the aristocracy, the censorate became a highly important organ that not only scrutinized corruption but directly criticized the policies of the monarch. In Korea the original boards of censors (Sahönbu and Saganwön) were supplemented by the Hongmun'gwan (Office of Special Counselors) and Kyöngyön (Office of Royal Lectures), which eventually became a forum for evaluating state policy and the conduct of the king and officials.
The Tokugawa government (1603-1867) of Japan instituted a censorial system (metsuke) in the 17th century for the surveillance of affairs in every one of the feudal fiefs (han) into which the country was divided. Many daimyos (lords of fiefs) were transferred to smaller Hanna or lost their domains altogether as a result of the unfavourable judgments of the censorate.
Censorship
censorship, the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is condemned as subversive of the common good. It occurs in all manifestations of authority to some degree, but in modern times it has been of special importance in its relation to government and the rule of law.
A brief treatment of censorship follows. For full treatment, see MACROPÆDIA: Censorship.
In the ancient world the regulation of the moral, as well as the political, life of a people was considered a proper, if not necessary, role of government. In modern Western society, however, censorship often is considered a relic of an unenlightened and repressive age. A major reason for this difference of opinion is the change in the concept of the individual and his relation to society. Grounded in Christian doctrine and state-of-nature theories about social organization, the modern belief in the dignity of the individual has severely limited the scope of legitimate power to censor.
In the ancient Greek communities, as in Rome, it was assumed that the character of a people would and should be shaped by that of the government. Even the quite open society of Athens had limits, as indicated by the trial and conviction of Socrates in 399 BC for his corruption of youth and acknowledgment of unorthodox divinities. In the Republic, Plato outlines a comprehensive system of censorship, particularly of the arts, as part of the development of the best possible regime.
Such censorship was an integral part of life in ancient Israel, where opinions and actions were routinely governed by the community. But those in a position to know-the prophet Nathan, for example-were expected to speak out against abuses by those in power. This was possible because the community had been trained to share and respect a group of moral principles grounded in thoughtfulness. It led to the encouragement in early Christianity of private, individual testimonies of faith bearing upon the eternal welfare of the soul.
Ancient China was perhaps the largest polity to be thoroughly trained on a vast scale. Of great importance were the systems of education and examination that determined one's place in a social structure that made much of the Confucian insistence upon deference to authority and respect for ritual. Under the Chinese system, control of information was retained by the authorities, who also determined the contents of the authoritative texts.
In Christendom, perhaps the most dramatic form of censorship was the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, by which the Roman Catholic church for centuries policed the literature available to its followers. Other methods used by authorities (Catholic and non-Catholic alike) to control what people believed or thought were the development of creeds, such as the Nicene Creed, and the conduct of trials, such as those of Joan of Arc (1431) and Thomas More (1535).
The struggle against censorship in the Anglo-American world began to take its modern form in the 17th and 18th centuries. Of special importance was John Milton's "Areopagitica" (1644), in which he argued against a government's right to license (or previously restrain) publication. Milton's definition of freedom of the press, however, did not preclude the condemnation of material after publication, a matter taken up by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States (1787) in its guarantee of freedom of speech as well as of the press. Since then, the history of censorship in the United States has been that of the application of those freedoms in a variety of circumstances for the good both of the human being and of the community.
Such restrictions upon the scope of censorship as may be seen in the United States and Great Britain have not been instituted throughout the modern world. In the Soviet Union. for example, tight control of the press before publication is maintained, and there are severe sanctions against those who circumvent the system. Thus, the Soviet system represents an extreme with which other regimes, particularly those having more experience with self-governing citizenries, may usefully be compared. Such a system of censorship tends to grow out of a polity's principles and experience, including the manner in which it regards considerations of liberty, the common good, and the rights, virtues, and duties of its citizens.
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