Milton's Areopagitica of 1644 Is Still the Best Case Against Licensing Speech

Imagine a government office whose job is to read your manuscript before you are allowed to print it. Not to punish you afterward, mind you. That would be crude. This office is more refined: it simply decides in advance whether the public may be trusted with what you have to say. A polite clerk stamps the page, or does not. No jail, no trial, no martyr. Just a quiet "no" delivered by someone who has never written anything himself.

That was the law of England in the autumn of 1644, and a poet who had gone blind in the service of the Puritan cause decided to answer it in Parliament's own language. John Milton's Areopagitica is not a long pamphlet, and it was not a popular one in its day. It is, however, the root from which a large part of the American First Amendment grows. It is worth reading slowly, because every generation of officials rediscovers the clerk with the stamp and gives it a new name.

The order Milton was answering

Some history first, because the argument makes sense only against the facts. Before the English Civil War, printing in England was a licensed trade. A royal decree of the Court of Star Chamber in 1637 limited the number of printers and required every book to be approved by an official licenser before it could be published. The Stationers' Company, the printers' guild, enforced the rules and profited from them.

When Parliament went to war with Charles I, the Star Chamber was abolished in 1641, and a good many people assumed the censorship went with it. It did not. On June 14, 1643, Parliament passed its own Licensing Order. It required that books be licensed before printing, that printers register what they published, and that the Stationers' searchers have power to hunt out unlicensed presses. The same Parliament that said it was fighting for English liberty against a tyrant king had reinvented the tyrant's censorship with the Parliament's name on it.

Milton had personal reasons to be angry. In 1643 and 1644 he had published pamphlets arguing that divorce should be allowed for incompatibility, and he printed them without a license. The unlicensed printing drew complaints, and in August 1644 the minister Herbert Palmer preached against toleration before both Houses of Parliament. But his argument was not self-defense. It was the first general case in English for the principle we now call freedom of the press.

He published it on November 23, 1644, with a title that tells the reader where he stands: Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England. The name comes from the Areopagus, the Hill of Ares in Athens, where the ancient council met, and from an oration by the Athenian orator Isocrates. Milton does not address Parliament as a rebel. He addresses it as a friend of liberty who is about to make a mistake.

First passage: a book is a living thing

The most quoted lines of the pamphlet come early, and they are worth reading in full:

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.

And then:

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.

Take the second sentence carefully. Milton is not saying that burning a book is as bad as murder. He says that killing a man destroys one person, while destroying a good book destroys something that could have enlightened many generations. And the standard he applies is theological, not secular: reason is the image of God in man. To suppress the reasoning of a mind is a kind of sacrilege.

This is the Milton conservatives should know. His argument for free printing is not "anything goes." It is that human beings are rational and moral creatures made in God's image, and a government that bars them from hearing and weighing ideas treats them as less than that. It is an argument from human dignity, and the dignity comes from above the state.

Second passage: virtue that has never been tested

Milton's second argument turns on virtue. Licensers imagine that if the public is never exposed to a bad book, the public will be good. Milton says that is how you get a population of children.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

The point is hard and clear. A virtue that has never met a temptation has not been proved. A man who is good only because he has never been offered a bribe is a man waiting to be corrupted. Milton invokes the biblical tale of Adam and Eve: God left the knowledge of good and evil in the world and gave Adam reason to choose. A world with the tree removed would have been one without moral choice, and so without virtue.

Modern censors have updated the language, but the claim is the same one: protect the public from harmful speech, because the public is too weak to resist it. Milton's answer is that the strength comes from using the muscle.

Third passage: truth in a free and open encounter

This is the passage that lawyers and judges quote for four centuries, and it is the heart of the argument:

Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes would reach for this idea in his 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United States, when he wrote about the "free trade in ideas" and "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market." The Supreme Court has quoted that dissent for a century. Milton had the thought three hundred years earlier, and he had the better phrase.

It is a claim about method, and a conservative should take it seriously for the reason a conservative takes anything seriously: because it rests on a humble view of who gets to decide. Who will be the licenser? A fallible man, with his own prejudices, his own patrons and his own career. The licenser, Milton observed, must be wiser than the author, or he is not qualified, and a man wiser than all authors is not to be found. Licensing thus puts the judgment of the one in the place of the judgment of the many, which is precisely backwards for a free people.

Fourth passage: the stamp does not work

Milton also argued from experience. Licensing fails to do what it promises. The thing is a sieve with the biggest holes at the top. A corrupt book can be smuggled in from abroad; a bad idea can be spoken; a bad man can talk. And meanwhile the licenser, with his stamp, is a bottleneck that delays the good as well as the bad.

He ends the pamphlet with the most famous sentence of its kind in English political writing:

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

Notice the order of the three verbs. To know: to read, to learn. To utter: to speak and publish. To argue: to contest. The sentence covers the reader, the writer and the debate. And it ends with conscience, the faculty by which a person answers to God. It is not "the liberty to say whatever amuses me." It is the liberty of a person to follow what he believes to be true.

The limits Milton himself drew

An honest reading has to include the part that does not flatter its hero. Milton did not defend the liberty of everything. He wrote, in a passage in which he argued for broad tolerance, that it should not extend to "popery, and open superstition," by which he meant Catholicism, because he thought it would extirpate other religions. He also said that books that were libelous or blasphemous could be punished after publication, by the magistrate, as the law of the day provided.

We should say plainly that the Catholic exception was a mistake, and a serious one, and that later generations of English and American thinkers would correct it. Milton was a man of his century, deeply shaped by the wars of religion. The notable thing is how far his principle outran his own application. The argument he made, that truth and conscience need no censor's permission, does not rest on the exception. It undermines it. Once you accept that licensers are fallible and that truth wins in open encounter, you have no ground to exempt the creeds you personally dislike. Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) and later the First Amendment made precisely that move.

What happened next

Parliament did not repeal the Licensing Order in 1644. Milton lost that round. He went on to serve as Latin secretary to Cromwell's government, and the licensing system, in one form or another, lasted. After the Restoration of the monarchy, Parliament passed the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662. When that act came up for renewal in 1695, the House of Commons declined to continue it, and licensing lapsed. The reasons given in the Commons were largely practical, with objections to the Stationers' monopoly and the burdens on honest printers, but the effect was that England no longer had a general system of prior restraint.

Blackstone put the result into the common law's own language in the Commentaries in 1769. The liberty of the press, he wrote, consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. That is a narrower rule than Milton's ideal, and the English kept the law of seditious libel, which could punish publishers afterward. But the principle that the government must not stand between an author and the public before publication became the common law baseline.

The American colonists inherited it. The trial of John Peter Zenger, the New York printer, in 1735 saw a jury acquit a man charged with seditious libel for printing criticism of a royal governor; see John Peter Zenger and the Jury That Defended American Press Freedom in 1735. The Founders were well read in the English pamphlet tradition, and the First Amendment of 1791 says, in words Milton would have recognized: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." The Supreme Court held in Near v. Minnesota (1931) that prior restraint was the heart of what the press clause forbids. See also Freedom of the Press Meant No Prior Restraint, and Then It Meant More for how the idea expanded.

The strongest objection, answered

The best objection to Milton is the one his critics have always made: some speech does real harm, and truth does not always win. Lies travel, propaganda works, demagogues rise. Isn't the optimism of the "free and open encounter" refuted by history?

Here is the answer in numbered points.

1. Milton's claim is comparative, not absolute. He does not say truth always wins quickly. He says that licensing is worse than the alternative, because the licenser's errors are protected from challenge, while the speaker's errors are open to refutation.
2. The question is always who will decide. If the answer is "the government," then those who hold power get to define falsehood, and the first falsehoods they will define are criticisms of themselves. A rule that works as long as your friends are in charge is not a rule.
3. The remedy for harmful speech is more speech, and after-the-fact law for the narrow categories that cause concrete injury, such as fraud, defamation, true threats and incitement of imminent lawless action. That is the structure of American law, which sets those categories apart while forbidding the stamp in advance.
4. The cases where officials have most eagerly reached for censorship, in wartime and in political campaigns, have been cases where later generations judged the censors to be the ones in error. That is the record, and it does not suggest that officials are the better guardians of truth.

The verdict: Milton's answer is not naive. It is the sober judgment that human beings are fallible, those who govern most of all.

Why Milton still matters

The clerk with the stamp has many modern forms. A government agency "flags" a post. A regulator asks a platform to remove a category of content. A university office decides which speakers are safe. The tools differ. The theory is the same: someone wise has to decide in advance what the rest of us may hear. Milton's answer, delivered to Parliament by a blind poet in 1644, is that the wiser course is to trust free minds in an open contest. If you want the American version, read Frederick Douglass's Plea for Free Speech in Boston, Read Passage by Passage.

The case in brief

1. Parliament's Licensing Order of June 14, 1643 revived the censorship the Long Parliament had abolished with the Star Chamber, and Milton answered it in November 1644.
2. His argument rests on human dignity: a good book carries the life of a reasoning mind, made in the image of God.
3. He argued that virtue untested is not virtue, and that truth in "a free and open encounter" is its own best defender.
4. His limits, especially the Catholic exception, were wrong, and the logic of his own argument cuts against them.
5. Licensing lapsed in England in 1695, Blackstone fixed the rule against prior restraint, and the First Amendment carried it into American law.

What you can do: read the First Amendment's text on the site's Constitution page, then ask your local school board or library whether any process exists for approving what students may read in advance, and who runs it.