Free to Disappoint

Reading Paul Hammond’s excellent book in the run-up to a British general election, as I did this spring, was a salutary and at times unsettling experience. Like Hammond’s Milton, I found myself – and was surely not alone in doing so – successively hopeful that the people would Do The Right Thing; anxious that they might prove fickle, and susceptible to the wiles of demagogues; and finally crestfallen and resentful that they had let me (and, as I saw it, the rest of the nation) down. This was, I thought, a moment that could be seized to choose the best of an admittedly far from ideal set of alternative futures for the country, and hence an opportunity lost. So, it seems, must Milton have felt when he wrote and published The Readie & Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth in 1660, just before the restoration of the monarchy – confronting, as Hammond says, the problem that occupied him ‘from the beginning: could the people be trusted to use their freedom to make the decisions which would preserve that freedom?’ (p. 189).

The questions of how and how far the people should participate in government, and of how exactly to define ‘the people’, are ones that have occupied political philosophy from the earliest times, and continue even now. Hammond pays close attention to the long tradition of thinking about these concerns in the periods leading up to Milton’s career, though he (perhaps wisely) does not address their contemporary resonances in the twenty-first century. At the heart of his study is the identification of a set of tensions, contradictions, and slippages in Milton’s notion of the people, who can at one moment be described as the sovereign power of a nation (itself, as Hammond points out, a weighted and pliable term) and as chosen by God, and then at another dismissed as an unreliable mass. How, in other words, can we reconcile the depiction of ‘a noble and puissant Nation’, ‘a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies’ in Areopagitica (which goes out of its way to ascribe to Milton’s opponents the dismissive notion of the people as ‘giddy, vitious, and ungrounded’, ‘an untaught and irreligious gadding rout’), with that of ‘an inconstant, irrational, and Image-doting rabble’ willingly submitting to slavery in the face of the king’s image, at the conclusion of Eikonoklastes? Does ‘the people’ refer to all humankind, to the citizens of a specific nation, to the best among those citizens, or to God’s chosen people – what Adam in Book XII of Paradise Lost calls ‘the few | His faithful, left among the unfaithful herd’ (ll. 480–1)? These are, as Hammond demonstrates, concerns that touch on much more than the history of political thought: they also invite us to consider the construction of writerly identity and authority, the relationship between reason and the passions, the function and decorum of texts and the conditions of their publication, and the nature of Milton’s styles, in both English and Latin, prose and verse.

Several of the problems confronting Milton in his conception of the people, and of popular government, are apparent in the opening passage of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649):

If men within themselves would be govern’d by reason, and not generally give up thir understanding to a double tyrannie, of Custom from without, and blind affections within, they would discerne better, what it is to favour and uphold the Tyrant of a Nation. But being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the public State conformably govern’d to the inward vitious rule, by which they govern themselves. For indeed none can love freedom heartilie, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence; which never hath more scope or more indulgence then under Tyrants …

Here we see the complex movement from individual and internal self-governance – nonetheless couched in the plural and thus generalised (‘men within themselves’) – to external and institutional rule (‘the...