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Primary Source 10.3 – Milton
JOHN MILTON, AREOPAGITICA (1644)
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John Milton (1608–74) is widely considered the greatest writer in English after Shakespeare.
A private tutor, an excellent school in London, seven years at Cambridge University, and six
years of self-directed study made him an extraordinarily learned man with fluency in Latin,
Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian; vast knowledge of modern writing; and intimate
familiarity with the literature and thought of ancient Greece and Rome, of late antiquity, and
of the Middle Ages. From an early age, he believed himself destined to contribute a great
creative work, something that would do credit to the gifts with which the Lord had endowed
him. A deeply believing Christian and an unwavering advocate of religious, civil, and political
liberty, he devoted those gifts for twenty years to the service of the Puritan and Republican
causes. During this era, he penned Areopagitica, probably the greatest polemical defense of
the freedom of the press ever written. Following the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in
1660, Milton had to withdraw from political life. Seven years later, he published his
masterwork, Paradise Lost, an epic poem recounting the Biblical story of the Fall of Man in
over 10,000 lines of blank verse.
In Areopagitica, Milton deploys impassioned arguments, vast historical knowledge,
extraordinary erudition, and powerful logic to demand the abrogation of a law of 1643
authorizing twenty licensors, or censors, in England to approve or reject book and pamphlet
manuscripts before publication, a general policy (not always strictly enforced) dating to the
mid-1500s but abolished in 1641 by the Long Parliament. There followed a brief explosion of
pamphlet publishing—from 22 in 1640 to 1,966 in 1642. Milton argues that policies of prior
censorship had never existed in any ancient or medieval society before the Catholic Inquisition,
that stifling the free exchange of ideas would stunt intellectual development, that ideas should
be rejected only after they have been carefully assessed by society, that truth will always
prevail against falsity, that evil ideas test and fortify our discipline and ability to resist
temptation, that a society cannot remain free and vigorous without a robust sphere of public
disputation, that distinguishing truth from falsity is the duty of citizens and not government,
and finally that a handful of censors cannot possibly be trusted to judge what is right for an
entire society. Milton’s powerful arguments did not convince Parliament to overturn the law
of 1643, and prior censorship was ended in England only in 1695, yet the pamphlet exerted a
formidable impact on many subsequent political thinkers, including the Founders of the
American Republic.
In the excerpts below, Milton urges the leaders of Parliament to carry forward the
political transformation of England, begun in their struggle against King Charles I (r. 1625-
40) known as the English Civil War (1642–51).
For the full text online, click here. For a freely accessible audio recording, click here.
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John Milton, Areopagitica, ed. John W. Hales (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1875), 44–45, 46–47, 49–50,
51–52.
