ABSTRACT
For most of the last 300 years, in the US and Western Europe, free speech was an active partisan signifier: while the right tolerated calls for censorship, the left welcomed free expression. One exception to radicals’ demand for free speech concerned those who practised violence and general censorship. In relation to them, the first modern philosopher of free speech, John Milton, accepted that it was legitimate to “suppress the suppressors.” The chapter explores the beginnings of First Amendment law in the US, and the contrast between the liberal doctrines on the surface of the speeches of Justice Wendell Holmes or Brandeis and the restrictive core of their judgments. The politics of free speech continued to cleave on left–right lines until around 1970 and could be seen in such final moments as the Trial of the Chicago 7 and the Oz Trial in Britain.
