Areopagitica

Overview

Areopagitica is fifty pages, published in November 1644, and its full title explains it: a speech of Mr John Milton for the liberty of unlicensed printing, to the Parliament of England. It is not a speech. It is a pamphlet written in the form of a classical oration, and Milton names it after the Areopagiticus of Isocrates, an address to the Athenian assembly that was also never delivered.

The context is specific and the irony is deliberate. In 1641 the Long Parliament had abolished the Star Chamber and with it the old royal machinery of press control, and for two years England had something close to a free press. In June 1643 the same Parliament restored licensing, requiring every book to be approved before printing and registered with the Stationers’ Company. Milton published Areopagitica in defiance of that ordinance: unlicensed, unregistered, and with his own name on it.

He had a personal motive. His tracts arguing for divorce on grounds of incompatibility had been attacked in Parliament and denounced from pulpits, and one had been complained of to the Stationers. The pamphlet is a general argument and it is not disinterested.

The prose is among the hardest in English, and this is the main obstacle for a modern reader. Milton writes Latinate periods that run for half a page, with the verb arriving late, packed with classical and biblical allusion. Read slowly, and read aloud where it stalls.

The argument

Milton organises the case in four movements and says so.

First, the pedigree of licensing. He surveys antiquity to show that no free state practised prior restraint. Athens suppressed only blasphemy and libel, and did it after the fact. Rome likewise. The practice of examining a book before it exists, he argues, was invented by the Inquisition and formalised at the Council of Trent, and the imprimaturs printed in the front of books are an Italian and papal invention. The rhetorical force of this is considerable: he is telling a Parliament that has gone to war against a king in the name of English liberty that it has adopted the machinery of Rome.

Second, what reading is for. Here the argument turns philosophical and becomes the part people quote. Milton grants that books are potent, and says so in his most famous sentence: books are not absolutely dead things, they contain a potency of life, and to kill a good book is close to killing a man, because it kills reason itself.

Then the central claim about knowledge and character. Good and evil in this world grow up together almost inseparably, and the knowledge of good is so involved with the knowledge of evil that they cannot be told apart. Adam fell knowing good and evil as two twins cleaving together. A person who has not encountered error, weighed it and rejected it has not achieved anything; Milton refuses to praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue that never sallies out to see its adversary. Censorship therefore does not protect virtue, it prevents it. He adds the practical point, that a bad book read by a discerning reader does good, and that no censor can stop a corrupt man finding corruption.

Third, that licensing will not work. The scheme is useless even on its own terms. Bad books will circulate anyway, in manuscript and from abroad. The censors would have to be men of enormous learning and judgement, and no such man would take a job that tedious, so the work falls to the lazy and the ignorant. And if books are to be licensed, consistency demands licensing conversation, music, dress and company, which is absurd.

Fourth, what it costs. The last movement is the most eloquent and the most political. Licensing insults a nation: it tells a free people they cannot be trusted with a page. It discourages learning, because scholars will not write under the eye of a man appointed to disapprove. Worst, it assumes that truth is already fully possessed, and Milton denies it. Truth in this world is like the body of Osiris, torn apart and scattered, and its friends are still going up and down gathering the limbs, and will be until the end. A church or a state that licenses is declaring the search over.

He offers the image of London in wartime as a city of people reading, arguing, and forging weapons of truth, and asks what kind of magistrate looks at that and sees disorder rather than a nation waking up. And he lets truth take her own part: let her and falsehood grapple, since nobody ever knew truth to be worsted in a free and open encounter.

Two limits should be stated plainly. Milton accepts punishment after publication, so he is attacking prior restraint and not the whole apparatus of the law. And he explicitly excludes popery and open superstition from toleration, along with what is impious or evil in itself. The most famous defence of free expression in English is not a defence of free expression for everyone.

How to read it

Read it in a modernised edition with notes, and give it more time than fifty pages usually needs. The allusions are dense and untranslated Greek and Latin appear without warning.

Read the middle section, from the passage on killing a good book to the one about cloistered virtue, most carefully. That is the philosophical core and everything else is arrangement around it.

Notice the shape of the rhetoric. Milton opens by flattering Parliament at length and closes by telling them that reversing the ordinance would prove them greater than they have yet shown themselves. It is a lobbying document and it is built like one.

Read it next to Mill’s On Liberty, which makes an overlapping case two centuries later on completely different grounds: Mill argues from the fallibility of all opinion and the value of contested truth, Milton from providence and the nature of virtue. Comparing the two is the clearest way to see what kind of argument each is.

Do not skip the exclusion of Catholics. Later admirers, including many who quoted him in free-speech cases, quietly left it out. It belongs to the argument, and it shows how a seventeenth-century case for liberty was bounded.

Questions it raises

• Does truth really win a free and open encounter? Milton takes it as providentially guaranteed. What would the argument look like without that guarantee?
• He attacks prior restraint and accepts punishment afterwards. Is that a real distinction, or does the threat of later punishment do the same work?
• If virtue requires exposure to temptation, does that hold for everyone, or only for readers as capable as Milton?
• Catholics are excluded. Is that a detachable prejudice or a consequence of how he has framed the case?
• The pamphlet was published illegally and Milton was not prosecuted. What does that say about how much licensing was actually enforced?
• Milton later worked as a licenser of newsbooks for the Commonwealth. Does that discredit the argument, or only its author?