ABSTRACT
Freedom of expression as a principle valued across the legitimate political spectrum in modern liberal democracy is often referred to as a product of Enlightenment liberalism, its history traceable from seventeenth-century English roots to wider embrace of the expanding public sphere, with defences from Milton to Mill. A way to retell this often-told story is as a self-conscious effort to forge freedom of expression as a tradition, one that could be its own argument. One outcome is insight into the “liberal tradition”, so named, as itself a twentieth-century product emerging from earlier tradition.
