Areopagitica

Few works are more routinely misdescribed than Milton’s Areopagitica, which is almost always said to be a defense of “freedom of the press.” It isn’t. So what is it?

It is an argument, addressed to the House of Commons and House of Lords, against a proposed law mandating the licensing of any book before it can be published in England. Anyone wanting to publish a book would submit it to a governmental censor, who would read it and either approve or deny its publication. Milton thinks this is a terrible idea, for many reasons:

It imitates Catholic practice, with its inquisitors and Imprimaturs and Nihil obstats;

it has no ancient or biblical warrant;

it would only affect law-abiding people — the truly scurrilous would just print without license and seek to avoid capture;

it would not stop the spread of evil and false ideas, which have a long history of moving through even an illiterate population with lightning speed;

the job of reading everything submitted for publication would be so vast that the government would need an army of censors;

the job would be so tiresome that no one with the wit and judgment to do it well would agree to do it at all;

the law would discourage writers, many of whom would scarcely go to the trouble of writing a whole book when a dim-witted or ill-tempered censor could quash it in an instant;

it would insult the public by presuming them incapable of making their own judgments about truth and falsehood,

and would deprive them of the responsibility of growing in genuine virtue by exercising and testing their discernment.

That last point is expressed in one of Milton’s most famous outbursts of eloquence:

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, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

Above all, says Milton, such a law presumes that our possession of the Truth is complete, which it manifestly is not and will not be until our Lord’s return. Those who can add to our store of genuine knowledge and understanding will, inevitably, deviate from current opinion as much as will the mendacious and the mistaken, but the censors will be unable to know in advance which deviations are worthy of praise and which worthy of condemnation.

Thus, concludes Milton, there should be no law in England mandating the pre-publication licensing of books.

But what happens then?

Ah, now we’re getting to the good stuff. First of all, if a book is deeply controversial, the contest between Truth and Falsehood is fought out in the public square:

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

(Another famous passage.To Milton’s question, by the way, I would answer: I for one have often seen Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter.) And if a book is deemed false, or anyway dangerously false? Well, then, of course it is suppressed:

Yet if all cannot be of one mind — as who looks they should be? — this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that may be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or manners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw itself.

Many shall be tolerated, but not Catholicism. Lines must be drawn, and the intolerable not tolerated but rather “extirpate.”

Milton doesn’t explicitly say so, but this would surely be done through the usual legal means in accordance with the laws of England — laws prohibiting blasphemy, for instance, or sedition, or libel (though libel had a rather different meaning in those days than it does today, a topic I explore in this essay). An author accused of crime would be given a fair trial, allowed to submit evidence and to make arguments on his behalf, and so on.

Moreover, while Milton is against government censorship of books, he strongly supports a law requiring that all books to be published are registered with the government. And if they are not?

And as for regulating the press, let no man think to have the honour of advising ye better than yourselves have done in that Order published next before this, “that no book be printed, unless the printer’s and the author’s name, or at least the printer’s, be registered.” Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man’s prevention can use.

Burn the book and hang the printer and/or author. And even if a book is properly registered, what if it then “be found mischievous and libellous”? I think we can guess what Milton would recommend.