‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely’

‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.’

These famous words belong of course to Areopagitica, or A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England. Published in November 1644, Areopagitica remains John Milton’s most explicit assertion of the fundamental importance of freedom of expression.

Yet as we approach the 350th anniversary of Milton’s death (in November 1674), ‘the liberty’ he so vehemently defended is coming under concerted attack. Universities are purging the canon of dead white males (like Milton) in the name of decolonisation. Trigger warnings are slapped on books containing supposedly offensive content. So-called sensitivity readers vet authors’ work pre-publication to make sure it doesn’t offend anyone.

What’s more, it looks like we are about to get a lot more unfree under the new Labour government. It has already halted the progress of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which was designed to secure academic freedom and address the free-speech crisis within universities. And after the riots earlier this month, prime minister Keir Starmer is promising to crack down on so-called hate speech. There’s talk of applying pressure on tech firms to ban certain content and pledges to review social-media laws. ‘The liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely’? Not in 21st-century Britain.

Of course, the England of Milton’s day was very different to modern Britain. Yet so much of what he wrote still speaks to us, especially as the freedom he prized comes under increasing threat. He is a man for our time just as much as he was for his own.

Milton grew up in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. His family was a ‘middling sort’, with his father employed as a scrivener, producing and copying legal papers. After being privately tutored until the age of 12, Milton went to the nearby St Paul’s School, where he would have been exposed to humanist as well as religious ideas. While at Cambridge, he wrote poetry, mainly in Latin but also in the vernacular. He spent his entire life in and around London, other than his time as a student at Cambridge and a year in Italy in 1638. It was there that Milton met Galileo, who had been famously forced to retract his Copernican views by an Inquisition. Perhaps this encounter only served to strengthen his resolve and commitment to print the truth.

In May 1642, Milton married the 17-year-old Mary Powell. After only a month of marriage, she returned to her parents’ house in Oxfordshire and, for three years, resisted Milton’s pleas to return. The English Civil War (1642-1651) was underway. Mary’s family was for the king, and Milton was an avid supporter of parliament. Indeed he was to become a civil servant for the Commonwealth government during the English Republic at the end of the Civil War.

In response to the breakdown of his marriage, he wrote The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in four tracts. He called for an overhaul of England’s strict divorce laws, and argued that divorce should be granted on the grounds of intellectual incompatibility, ‘indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind.’

In the same year, he published an attack on the church’s governance: The Reason for Church-Government Urged Against Prelaty. He challenged the bishops’ control of the church, and argued instead for church government by a representative assemblies of elders.

Milton’s pamphlets quickly caught the attention of parliament’s censors, which had replaced the royal censors. The Licensing Act 1643 gave the Stationers’ Company responsibility for acting as censor in return for a monopoly of the printing trade. Milton published his pamphlets without a licence, and so the company moved to suppress them.

Penalties for writing controversial texts at the time could be unimaginably harsh. William Prynne, a Puritan who opposed stage plays, wrote a book against them entitled, Historiomatrix. This prompted his prosecution in 1634, after which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He also had his ears amputated in the pillory.

But Milton was not to be silenced. In response to the threat of prosecution under the Licensing Act, he wrote the incomparable Areopagitica. He argued that it is not up to parliament to decide what people can and can’t read. It is up to each and every individual to make his own mind up. After all, God had entrusted man ‘with the gift of reason to be his own chooser’.

He went further. He argued that censorship amounts to keeping adults in perpetual childhood. Only if individuals are allowed to exercise their God-given reason to form their own judgements will they be able to reach the truth, and distinguish good from evil.

Milton’s call for individuals to be allowed to form their own judgement cuts against the censor-happy paternalism of today’s political and media classes. They want debate to be curtailed, limited to what is deemed officially acceptable. Milton kicked back against precisely these restrictions in Areopagitica. Open debate is a civil liberty in a civilised society, he argues:

‘This is not the liberty which we can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the Commonwealth, that let no man in this world expect; but when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained, that wise men look for.’

The censoring and burning of books appalled Milton. He likened their publication to birth, and their existence to the life of a living thing. They are as ‘active as a soul whose progeny they are’, he writes, claiming they embody ‘the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them’. He continues: ‘Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image, but he who destroys a book destroys reason itself, kills the image of God as it were in the eye… a life beyond a life.’

Milton always credited readers with intelligence. Just as ‘bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction’, bad books don’t work on reasonable minds, he writes. People can be relied upon to apply their own judgement on vice and virtue.

Milton’s conception of individual liberty, of the human capacity for self-governance, was far advanced for a man born in 1608. It certainly outstrips that of today’s woke Puritans. Milton drew out the the pitiless conformism of their 17th-century forebears in Areopagitica:

‘If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreation and pastimes, all that is delightful to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth but what by their allowance shall be thought honest.’

In 1667, his epic poem, Paradise Lost, was published. This audacious retelling of the Fall of Man from the Book of Genesis cemented his reputation as one of the greatest poets in the English language. But Milton, the poet of the English Revolution, was also a daring voice for liberty. He speaks to us as powerfully today as he did to his contemporaries.

Michael Crowley is an author and dramatist. Visit his website here.