ANOTHER WORLD: FREEDOM OF PRESS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
In Small World (1984), David Lodge's satire of academic life and the politics of textual interpretation, a young professor scores a minor cocktail party coup. Deftly displaying the latest postmodernist moves, he recasts his study of Shakespeare's influence on T. S. Eliot to an examination of Eliot's influence on the Bard. This reversal substantially enhances his academic reputation. The Eliot-to-Shakespeare project, he is advised, is much more "interesting" than any study proceeding on conventional assumptions about authorial intent. And in any event, he is assured, academic libraries purchase almost any book about either Shakespeare or Eliot, and they would undoubtedly order a volume featuring both names, in whatever order, in the title. In contrast to Lodge's imaginary Eliot-Shakespeare thesis, Jeffrey Smith's study of freedom of the press and early American journalism enters the notso-small world of First Amendment scholarship by asking a more conventional, though controversial, question: What did the framers really mean by the free press clause of the First Amendment? In approaching the usual textual suspects-the writings of Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Paine, etc. -and a broad sampling of the eighteenth-century press, Smith avoids fancy interpretive turns in favor of the straightforward claim that recent histories of political culture reveal the "context" of eighteenth-century ideas about freedom of the press and even the "original intent" of the First Amendment.' Not surprisingly, Smith takes special aim at Leonard Levy, the constitutional historian whose works have long dominated discussions of pre and post-First Amendment thought. Levy's Legacy of Suppression (1960) offered the then revisionist thesis that colonial and Revolutionary Era ideas about free expression were much more restrictive than earlier writers had assumed. Using the crime of seditious libel as the baseline for judging "libertarianism," Levy insisted that North American writers fell short of the mark. As framed