This article begins by briefly reconstructing the intellectual history of militant democracy, starting with Loewenstein's work and moving on to the ways in which the doctrine of militant democracy was developed in post-war West German constitutional law in particular. It next compares varieties of militant democracy, mostly, but not only in different post-authoritarian countries, before touching on the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, which has developed its own perspective on militant democracy. It then returns to the normative core questions surrounding militant democracy and asks whether one might conclude that some strategies for defending democracy are clearly superior to others — and what their implications are for constitutional law.