My goal in this talk is to re-think improvisation as a democratic-political phenomenon. While improvisation has been theorised as a model for democratic politics, these conceptions raise more questions than answers. It remains unclear exactly how political practices can be modelled on performance practices such as theatre or jazz improvisation. Moreover, improvisation might just be the right tool for anti-democrats: Donald Trump was notorious for going off-script and disregarding official policy – he even presented himself as a defender of improvisation by proposing a teleprompter-ban. I want to revisit the question: how does improvisation relate to democratic politics? But instead of looking to modern on-stage improvisation as a model for democratic politics, I take a historical approach and recapture earlier political conceptions of improvisation that we have forgotten about. First, I consider a manifesto for improvisation in Athenian democracy written by Plato’s contemporary Alcidamas, who thought that politicians should invent and deliver their speeches at the moment when they are facing their audience. Democracy, he thought, demands improvisational speech and is in tension with the delivery of written speeches. After that, I point out that improvisations, then and now, lack a script, cannot be read prior to performance and are therefore uncontrollable. This uncontrollability makes improvisations potentially disruptive. I will show how this disruptive dimension becomes most apparent in the opposition to improvisation by those in power, especially the 18th- and 19th-century censorship of German-speaking theatre and the Viennese anti-improvisation law of 1770. It is here that improvisation obtained its modern Western meaning as civil disobedience and political liberation – a meaning we now take for granted.