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82 Chapter  Areopagitica Books, Reading, and Context You have found and will find that the Greeks and Romans were much less favourable to tyrants. So too the Jews, if that book of Samuel in which he, 1 Sam. 10, had described the rights of kingship were extant. This book, so the doctors of the Hebrews have reported, was torn apart or burnt by kings so that they might exercise tyranny over their subjects with greater impunity. Milton, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio How can we more safely, and with lesse danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity then by reading all manner of tractats, and hearing all manner of reason? Milton, Areopagitica Criticism of Areopagitica has often sought either to extol the work as a cornerstone in the foundation of the liberal tradition, or to diminish and even renounce such claims as misreadings of Milton’s more conservative intentions . Following the Whig and Romantic lionization of Milton during the nineteenth century, traditional readings have seen the tract as “one of the founding and canonical texts of modern liberalism,” and have even gone so far as to call it “unique in its period, and perhaps unequalled in the range of freedom it demands until the Liberty of John Stuart Mill.” This liberal humanist account of Areopagitica’s position in intellectual history has been challenged from a postmodern perspective by readers who cast suspicion on all kinds of discourse—ideological or philosophical—as unconscious instruments of power. Such cynicism may seem almost justified by the fact that five years after writing Areopagitica, with his party now in power, Milton took a role as licenser ostensibly similar to the one he had railed against. Some have accordingly suggested that “as Petrograd in 1919 and Havana in 1965, so was Milton’s protestant London in 1644,” while others have seen a complicity in the tract “with the most repellent aspects of fascism.” A similarly unsentimental revision of the liberal view of Milton is taken by Stanley Areopagitica: Books, Reading, and Context 83 Fish, although from a different perspective. Fish’s deconstruction of Areopagitica ’s many internal contradictions, and his emphasis on such passages as “I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment . . . to have a vigilant eye how Bookes demeane themselves . . . and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors” (CPW 2:492) brings him to argue that the tract is “not against licensing,” and “has almost no interest at all in the ‘freedom of the press’ . . . [and] does not unambiguously value freedom at all,” and therefore cannot fit into the history in which it has been enlisted. Part of the difficulty in assessing the quality of freedom in Areopagitica is that the tract’s arguments fit into at least three categories of liberty: of the press, of conscience, and of the political subject. The recent reassessment of Whig historiography has often focused on one of these forms of liberty to the exclusion of others. Quentin Skinner’s Liberty before Liberalism (1998), for example, describes Milton’s contemporaries as embracing a neo-Roman conception of civil liberty that is not rightly termed “liberal.” This important reconsideration mostly omits liberty of conscience, a major part of civil war discourse, but recent work on religious freedom has also tempered the Whiggish habit, as Blair Worden phrases it, of congratulating “the past on becoming more like the present.” Revisionist approaches to the history of toleration have argued that the idea of “liberty” itself has been taken out of context, and that Puritan proponents of toleration did not seek liberty in a modern sense. “The claim of liberty of conscience,” argues J. C. Davis, “had virtually nothing to do with a claim to direct or manage ourselves”; rather it is a claim to “be free to submit to the governance of God [over] any other authority .” Recognizing some overcorrection in this conception of toleration, John Coffey’s “post-revisionist” work offers a more balanced account, showing that both religious and philosophical pressures were at play in determining the nature of the debate, and that the policy of persecution, although far more persistent than earlier accounts allowed, was nonetheless dramatically eroded by tolerationist ideology through the course of the seventeenth century. These recent conversations about the character of toleration and its place in political historiography have provided a more nuanced context within which to understand Milton, although as always he remains hard to place. Readers of...

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