We students of Milton were all pretty excited today when the old boy cropped up in the Court of Appeal's judgment on the Simon Singh/BCA case. In paragraph 23, the Law Lords quote from Milton's famous "speech" (in reality an essay) Areopagitica.
The section of
Areopagitica the learned judges chose is a bit odd - one gets the impression they include it simply to remind us that free speech has distinguished antecedents in the English intellectual tradition, rather than specifically to co-opt Milton's point - but it's nice to see it there nonetheless.
If you're of a liberal and sceptical bent and you haven't read
Areopagitica, I'd strongly recommend it. There's a (relatively) readable e-text
here. If you want a cheapish print version (much easier to read: Milton's prose is elegant, but dense even by the standards of his own day) there's one included in the Oxford Edition of Milton's
Major Works. By the way, if you don't have any Milton on your bookshelves (for shame!) this is the edition to get, because it also includes
Paradise Lost.
Areopagitica is sometimes all but worshipped as a key influence on modern freedom of speech laws. It's certainly true that the arguments Milton formulates in the text had a profound impact, most famously on Thomas Jefferson and James Madison when they were drafting the US Constitution.
But is it fair to describe Milton as "the great hero of English free speech", as the excellent and estimable
@jackofkent did today?
On balance, I certainly think he's
a hero of free speech, if only because of
Areopagitica's effect on later thinkers. However - to play devil's advocate for a few minutes - there's quite a lot, both in
Areopagitica and in Milton's life and other works, to indicate that the notion of free speech he had in mind as he wrote was rather different from our modern one.
Licensing and prior restraint
First off, in
Areopagitica Milton wasn't writing about freedom of speech in a general sense. He was making a specific case against the licensing of books, a system of so-called "prior restraint" that required each new book to be given government approval before it was published.
His argument is largely practical rather than ideological.There are, he contends, few people qualified to decide whether or not a book is dangerous or not, and, given the large volume of publication in the 1640s, they would quickly develop a backlog of works that needed checking. Such a backlog would delay publication of all books (including the ones the licencers approved) and thus have a chilling effect on intellectual debate.
Milton also highlights the risk that "good" books might be banned because of error or ignorance on the part of the licencers. In the most famous passage of the whole essay, he writes:
I deny not, but 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: for 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. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand unless wariness be used, 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. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. [My emphasis]
Although Milton vigorously opposes prior restraint, he says that he has no problem with "church and commonweath [i.e., the state]" seeking to "confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on [books]" after they have been published.
In other words, it is not censorship in and of itself that he disagrees with, but rather the specific system of censorship that is prior restraint. It is only "good" books he thinks should be protected from being "killed"; he has no objection to the "killing" of "bad" books - it's just that attempting to do so before they are published would have unacceptable practical consequences.
(Milton went on to practise what he preaches in
Areopagitica, working as a censor for the Parliamentary and Protectoral governments of the 1650s. "Bad" books, in the 1650s, were Catholic tracts and texts advocating restoration of the Monarchy, both of which Milton viewed as inimical to his conception of liberty of conscience, which he valued far more highly than freedom of speech.)
Exactly how "bad" books might be identified, Milton doesn't make precisely clear, though the implication is that it will be by general consensus of those qualified to know:
...he [a Latin commentator Milton is discussing] might have added another remarkable saying of the same author [St. Paul]; to the pure all things are pure, not only meats and drinks, but all kind of knowledge whether of good or evil; the knowledge can not defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled. For books are as meats and viands are, some of good, some of evil substance; and yet God in that unapocryphal vision, said without exception rise Peter, kill and eat, leaving the choice to each man’s discretion. [My emphasis]
So, in Milton's view, the "pure" (i.e., godly protestants) can be trusted to read what they like and suffer no harm. The impure, by implication, cannot. Milton reinforces this by making the point that although he is opposed to licensing, neither is he in favour of "licence" - that is, a licentious free-for-all in which anything can be published and read by anyone.
Areopagitica is important because it represents the first major flowering of some key ideas that grew into the modern conception of freedom of speech, and Milton deserves due credit for them. But was he advocating free speech as we understand the idea today? He certainly wasn't.
