AreopagiticaJohn Milton

Milton's speech to the Parliament of England, published in November 1644, against the Licensing Order of 1643 that required books to be approved by a censor before printing. Cast as a classical oration on the model of Isocrates' Areopagiticus, it is the founding text in English of the argument for freedom of the press.

Milton's case proceeds by several lines. Pre-publication licensing is an invention of the Roman Inquisition and therefore suspect in any Protestant commonwealth. It insults the reason of the educated public, which is treated as incapable of sorting truth from error. It cannot even accomplish its aim, since bad books will circulate by manuscript and foreign presses regardless. And it mistakes the nature of virtue. Good and evil grow up together in the field of the world, almost inseparably; the knowledge of good is purchased by the exercise of discernment; a virtue that has never been tested by the reading of error is no virtue at all. "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue."

Truth, for Milton, is strengthened by being challenged. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? The Areopagitica stands behind every later defense of free inquiry in the English-speaking tradition, from Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration to Mill's On Liberty.