“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” So declaimed John Milton in Areopagitica, his celebrated 1644 tract against prepublication licensing, which has long been hailed as a milestone in the history of freedom of speech and of the press as well as the history of liberalism more generally. The constitutional law scholar Vincent Blasi has rightly called it the “foundational essay of the First Amendment tradition.”

　　Yet even as Areopagitica deeply informs the Anglo-American free speech tradition that culminates in the First Amendment, it would be misleading to interpret Milton’s tract Whiggishly as a proto-liberal argument for free speech that merely presages later developments. It is a far more complex, difficult, and interesting text than that. Some modern critics, on the other hand, have ventured in the opposite direction, characterizing Areopagitica as positively illiberal, even totalitarian: Stanley Fish went so far as to declare that Milton “has almost no interest at all in the ‘freedom of the press’ as an abstract or absolute good (and, indeed, does not unambiguously value freedom at all).”

　　Both interpretations miss something essential in the text. For Milton does not advocate for a free press primarily as a political right but as a condition for philosophical and religious liberty. Freedom from licensing is not an end in itself: the aim is rather to create space for the exercise of reason and virtue in the pursuit of truth.

　　A Learned Title

　　While it was his poetry, above all the epic Paradise Lost, that ultimately earned literary immortality for Milton, for most of his lifetime he was far better known for his prose, both in Latin—still then the lingua franca of educated Europeans—and in English. While these writings ranged across disparate topics, from a plan for educational reform (Of Education) to a justification of the trial and execution of King Charles I (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates) to a treatise on theology (On Christian Doctrine), they were united, as Milton saw it, by a passionate concern with human liberty—specifically, as he put it in his Second Defense of the English People, the “three species of liberty, without which it is scarcely possible to pass any life with comfort, namely, ecclesiastical, domestic or private, and civil.”

　　Milton, being the late Renaissance humanist that he was, gave to his 1644 tract “for the liberty of unlicensed printing” the learned title Areopagitica—a reference to the Areopagus, a governmental body in ancient Athens, and in particular to a speech written by the Greek rhetorician Isocrates which called on the Athenian assembly to restore the powers of the Areopagus in accordance with its ancient constitution. Milton addressed this work to the English Parliament and cast himself in the role of Isocrates, “who from his private house wrote that discourse to the parliament of Athens, that persuades them to change the form of democracy which was then established.”

　　Freedom from licensing was never, for Milton, meant to produce license or anarchy.

　　Given that the tract was written amidst the English Civil Wars, which led to the regicide and the proclamation of an English “free state,” the quasi-republican connotations of the title are difficult to ignore. But Areopagitica is concerned not so much with a revolution in government as the question of how best to regulate a potentially dangerous information technology: the printing press.

　　Regulation, Deregulation, Reregulation

　　Since the reign of King Henry VIII, a system of prepublication censorship had prevailed in England, requiring authors to obtain licenses from political or ecclesiastical officials before their work could be printed. Even licensed books, moreover, could incur unwelcome judicial attention, as could problematic speech. The powers of the state censorship apparatus were most notoriously exercised in the 1630s under Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud in the Court of Star Chamber (evidently so called for the decorative ceiling of a starry sky), which ever since has functioned as a byword for legal tyranny.

　　Under Laud’s regime, one of Milton’s close friends, Alexander Gil the Younger, almost had his ears lobbed off after allegedly toasting the assassin of the widely despised Duke of Buckingham, the favorite of King James VI and I. In the end Gil received a pardon, but others were not so lucky: the cantankerous Puritan pamphleteer William Prynne, for example, underwent the punishment twice, and in an unpublished version of one of his sonnets Milton mocked “marginal Prynne’s ears.”

　　When Parliament, turning against Laud, abolished Star Chamber in 1641, it inadvertently incited a flurry of unauthorized printing. Until the Licensing Order of 1643, which reinstituted prepublication oversight, the press remained effectively unregulated. It was during this window that Milton first entered into public controversy with five anti-prelatical tracts, which argued for an end to the institution of episcopacy.

　　While Milton’s anti-episcopal sentiments aligned with the Puritan ascendancy in Parliament—the bishops were ousted from the House of Lords in 1642 and abolished outright in 1646—his next foray into pamphlet-writing met with more resistance even from his former ideological allies. His Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), the first of a set of tracts arguing for the availability of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, was published unlicensed and anonymously in August 1643, in contravention of the licensing order issued just a few months prior. The author was denounced in the pulpit and before Parliament. The word “Miltonist”—which is now a rather innocuous way to describe scholars who study Milton—was used for the first time as a polemical term for a proponent of divorce.

　　If the appearance of Milton’s tract “for the liberty of unlicensed printing” in the wake of controversy over his own unlicensed book distinctly suggests some personal motivation on the author’s part, it would not be the first time—his divorce tracts, after all, followed a period of separation from his first wife Mary Powell. He nevertheless asserts that Areopagitica represents not “the disburdening of a particular fancy, but the common grievance of all those who had prepared their minds and studies above the vulgar pitch to advance truth in others, and from others to entertain it.” Milton, that is, presumed to speak for the learned in denouncing the practice of prepublication licensing and in calling on Parliament to rescind the order that had reinstated it. It was a policy recommendation founded not only on an acknowledgment of the realistic limits of government action—one of the key arguments in Areopagitica is that the licensing system is fundamentally impracticable—but also on deeper philosophical and religious convictions.

　　Book-Killing and the Paradox of Toleration

　　Books, for Milton, are not mere objects. They are alive with the spirits of their authors: “books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” To stop a book’s publication—as the conceit is developed in one of the most memorable passages of Areopagitica—is therefore a kind of homicide, even verging on deicide: “as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.”

　　Being deeply aware of the power that books can wield, Milton does not insist on the absence of any regulation whatsoever. He readily admits “that it is of greatest concernment in the church and commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors.” Which offenses might justly entail punishment Milton does not say, though he does note suggestively that authorities in classical antiquity would only burn books that promoted atheism or contained defamatory material. The implication is that a remarkably wide range of views should be permitted in print with impunity: “if all cannot be of one mind—as who looks they should be?—this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian: that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled.”

　　But Milton’s toleration did not extend to the Roman Catholic Church: “I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate.” The violent rhetoric of extirpating Catholicism has prompted many readers to denounce Milton as hypocritical, genocidal, or both.

　　The ultra-Protestant Milton was vehemently anti-Catholic, to be sure. Yet the exception Areopagitica makes for “popery” may not be motivated exclusively by confessional prejudice. Milton’s reasoning resembles what the twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper would dub the paradox of tolerance: in short, if the intolerant are tolerated, the principle of toleration cannot long survive.

　　Milton attributed the invention of book licensing to the Inquisition and maintained that it was an essentially Catholic practice, which had been adopted in England by the pseudo- or crypto-Catholic imitators of Rome. Its main harm was its stifling effect on the advancement of knowledge: the exemplary victim of Catholic censorship singled out in Areopagitica is Galileo, “a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise then the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought,” whom Milton recalls meeting during his travels to Italy in the late 1630s. Milton feared that the continuation of this system of censorship would prevent England from becoming the “place of philosophic freedom” that his Italian friends believed it was. If the Catholic Church were tolerated in England, it could become a sufficiently powerful force to enable further restrictions on the press.

　　Milton believed a free press calls on writers and readers to exercise virtue in the arena of public discourse.

　　Even if the logic is clear, that does not vindicate Milton’s exclusion of Catholicism from the scope of toleration. Yet the paradox of toleration—whether embodied in Popper’s time by the totalitarian ideologies of fascism and communism, or by other illiberal forces in our own—continues to defy easy answers.

　　The Trial of Virtue

　　Americans today tend to think of freedom of speech as a constitutional and indeed a human right. But Milton, like many of the Founding Fathers, understood that liberty is not simply an entitlement—it also requires something of the person who enjoys it, namely virtue. Otherwise it devolves into license—a word whose multiple meanings Milton does not miss the opportunity to play on in Areopagitica (“lest I should be condemned of introducing license, while I oppose licensing”). As he writes in a sonnet on detractors of his divorce tracts around the same time: “License they mean when they cry liberty; / For who loves that, must first be wise and good.”

　　Milton, as one might expect given the themes of his poetry, was a deeply pious, albeit heterodox, Christian—most controversially, by the 1650s he rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, a belief for which some had been burned at the stake. This is hardly irrelevant to our consideration of Milton’s tract “for the liberty of unlicensed printing,” which is grounded in Milton’s Christian anthropology, his theological understanding of humankind.

　　In Areopagitica, the poet who would later develop Adam as a literary character in Paradise Lost here finds in our primordial forefather the pattern of a human being thrown into the world with free will: “when God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing.” But against those who would cordon off temptations, whether in the form of books or otherwise, Milton affirms that for postlapsarian humanity virtue can only manifest through spiritual combat: “he that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian.” In a number of copies of the tract this last phrase has been pointedly corrected by hand—possibly at the author’s instigation—to “warfaring Christian.”

　　Virtue, for Milton, was not a quality to be signaled, but a capacity to be demonstrated through trial: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race.” And this points to an important aspect of Milton’s understanding of freedom of speech which is easily neglected.

　　Milton believed that the termination of licensing, and the resulting panoply of perspectives, would ultimately prove helpful in the quest for truth: “Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” In this respect, Areopagitica genuinely seems to anticipate John Stuart Mill’s argument in On Liberty as well as the notion of the marketplace of ideas as articulated in First Amendment jurisprudence, both of which emphasize the emergence of truth from the contest of opinions and ideas.

　　Yet Milton also had another reason for arguing for “the liberty of unlicensed printing”: to create an open field for the trial of virtue. Depriving individuals of access to false or malicious books does not protect them. Rather, it prevents them from proving themselves—and indeed improving themselves—in the encounter.

　　Freedom from licensing was never, for Milton, meant to produce license or anarchy. It is not simply permission to say whatever one wants. Instead, a free press calls on writers and readers to exercise virtue in the arena of public discourse. That is a point well worth remembering in our own time.