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Areopagitica and other prose works
An inside look at the world's most powreful business leaders.
From Charles M. Farkas and Philippe De Backer, directors of the internationally renowned consulting firm Bain & Co., comes Maximum Leadership -- a fascinating report that answers the question: What in the world do CEOs do all day to make those multi-million-dollar salaries?
Coca-Cola, Gilette, Nestle, Canon: from computers to health care, from banking to advertising, these are some of the biggest names in business, ringing up billions of dollars in sales each year -- and behind each corporation is a CEO. Like the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain, these men and women at the top inspire both awe and skepticism.
In the summer of 1994, Farkas and De Backer began to interview the heads of 163 multinational companies. Instead of stock answers and puffery, they found CEOs willing to spend hours providing details, honesty, and reams of data. Here are the five management approaches the authors discovered not as quick remedies for success, but instead to show you the range of ways CEOs choose to contribute to their companies.
No matter where you are in the corporation, this riveting study will provide unique insight into how organizations are run and how you can add value to them.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1927
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14 people want to read
About the author
John Milton
3,771 books2,241 followersPeople best know John Milton, English scholar, for
Paradise Lost
, the epic poem of 1667 and an account of fall of humanity from grace.
Beelzebub, one fallen angel in Paradise Lost, of John Milton, lay in power next to Satan.
Belial, one fallen angel, rebelled against God in Paradise Lost of John Milton.
John Milton, polemicist, man of letters, served the civil Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote in blank verse at a time of religious flux and political upheaval.
Prose of John Milton reflects deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and self-determination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day. He wrote in Latin, Greek, and Italian and achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica (1644) in condemnation of censorship before publication among most influential and impassioned defenses of free speech and the press of history.
William Hayley in biography of 1796 called and generally regarded John Milton, the "greatest ... author," "as one of the preeminent writers in the ... language," though since his death, critical reception oscillated often on his republicanism in the centuries. Samuel Johnson praised, "with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the ... mind," though he, a Tory and recipient of royal patronage, described politics of Milton, an "acrimonious and surly republican."
Because of his republicanism, centuries of British partisanship subjected John Milton.
Beelzebub, one fallen angel in Paradise Lost, of John Milton, lay in power next to Satan.
Belial, one fallen angel, rebelled against God in Paradise Lost of John Milton.
John Milton, polemicist, man of letters, served the civil Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote in blank verse at a time of religious flux and political upheaval.
Prose of John Milton reflects deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and self-determination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day. He wrote in Latin, Greek, and Italian and achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica (1644) in condemnation of censorship before publication among most influential and impassioned defenses of free speech and the press of history.
William Hayley in biography of 1796 called and generally regarded John Milton, the "greatest ... author," "as one of the preeminent writers in the ... language," though since his death, critical reception oscillated often on his republicanism in the centuries. Samuel Johnson praised, "with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the ... mind," though he, a Tory and recipient of royal patronage, described politics of Milton, an "acrimonious and surly republican."
Because of his republicanism, centuries of British partisanship subjected John Milton.
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February 1, 2021
First, some shameless—but relevant—editorializing.
The new year threatens to be a dire one for freedom of expression in the United States. Following a riot at the Capitol building on January 6th, during which hundreds of Trump supporters invaded the halls of Congress while their representatives were gathered to vote on the certification of the 2020 election results, the corporate media establishment has acted in concert to suppress the speech of political dissidents—on both the left and the right—with an astonishing speed and on an unprecedented scale.
In a watershed moment for the future of political discourse, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch either suspended or permanently banned the sitting President of the United States from their platforms. Cable news outlets threatened to withhold coverage of any public address in which the President used “incendiary” rhetoric. Even one of the Trump campaign’s email providers cut off access. Taken together, these actions constituted a coordinated effort by the managers of the largest and most powerful communications apparatus in the history of the world to sever every line of connection between a sitting head of state and the public. These extraordinary measures, and the seemingly arbitrary standards by which they were employed, were criticized by other world leaders, including the Chancellor of Germany and the President of Mexico, who naturally take the censorship of elected officials by a handful of private social media companies to be an ominous development. Yet under the incoming Biden Administration, the efforts of so-called “liberal” American elites to stifle “harmful” speech appears to just be getting underway.
Since January 6th, hundreds of social media accounts have been purged for no other apparent reason than that their owners expressed political views that fell too far outside of the mainstream. An entire social media platform, Parler, was shuttered by Google and Apple, who control the app’s only means of distribution. Parler was given an ultimatum to change its moderation policies to match those of the other platforms, and was punished for its refusal to do so. Even though the Capitol rioters primarily used larger platforms like Facebook to coordinate their activities—to the extent that they were coordinated at all—the supposed danger of allowing political malefactors to use Parler was invoked as a pretext for shutting it down.
As of this writing, the US Congress is impeaching a President who no longer holds office, for the sole purpose of barring him, if convicted, from ever holding public office again. The Democratic leadership entertains the curious notion that our collective faith in “democratic institutions” will be restored once they’ve made it official that their chief political adversary is no longer allowed to win elections, no matter how many people vote for him. They are pursuing this impeachment under the dubious theory that Trump “incited an insurrection” by claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even though he broke no laws, advocated no violence, and merely expressed a mistaken (to be charitable) view.
Democratic members of Congress have called for the expulsion of some of their Republican colleagues, because the latter likewise questioned the integrity of the election and exercised their constitutionally-enumerated power to object to the certification. A former head of the CIA under the Obama Administration has proposed utilizing an enormous surveillance, intelligence, and law enforcement apparatus to wage a new “War on Terror”; this time against domestic “extremists” instead of foreign ones. At least one Twitter user is facing up to ten years in prison for spreading “disinformation” in the form of memes.
We’re entering a precarious new age in which the mere expression of certain heterodox opinions is being rebranded as sedition, and the majority of our substantive political discourse takes place within a privately-owned digital infrastructure wherein a small group of private individuals has virtually unlimited power to determine which viewpoints are freely disseminated and which are suppressed. A corporate and political establishment that has watched in dismay as new sources of information and commentary have undermined its ability to shape public consensus will now seize on any pretext, and use any means at its disposal, to regain its stranglehold on popular discourse and prevent the formation of an alternative populist consensus.
All of this is to say that Milton’s Areopagitica, the first prominent defense of freedom of expression written in English, is as relevant today as it was when it was first presented to the English Parliament in 1644. With a civil war raging in the background, the Parliament adopted an ordinance prohibiting the publication of any printed material without official licensure. Milton did not disapprove of post-publication censorship, but he opposed the ordinance on the grounds that dissenting views should at least be allowed a public hearing before they are silenced.
For Milton, to censor a speech product—be it a book, an article, a pamphlet, or presumably even a tweet—is effectively to do violence to the person who produces it, because in some sense the things we write are a part of us, containing a portion of our vital essence. “For books are not absolutely dead things,” Milton says, “but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are...they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” What lover of the written word doesn’t know this to be true? When I open one of Montaigne’s essays, it’s as if I’m releasing a genie from a bottle. The passage of centuries is stripped away, and I find myself inhabiting the mind of a man who lived half a millennium ago; a mind just as real as, and far more profound than, my own.
To destroy the written word, then, is nearly tantamount to homicide; or perhaps even something worse: “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.”
“We should be wary therefore…how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; wherein the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at…the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.”
Censorship not only robs one of his own free and heterodox expressions; it also robs everyone else of the freedom to hear those challenging views and to test them against their own. Most damningly, this “everyone else” includes not only one’s contemporaries, but future generations as well. The censor, when he burns a book or scrubs a disagreeable article or video from the internet, sins against the future. He knows nothing of the future; and yet even though it is both endlessly mysterious and far greater than himself, he claims a petty, despotic, hall monitor’s authority over it, subjecting it to his own prejudices. And what, exactly, gives him this authority?
Milton surveys the history of literary censorship in a manner that was certainly meant to flatter his protestant and English interlocutors, but which is nonetheless quite interesting. He claims that there was very little censorship in classical antiquity; neither under pagan auspices nor during the early centuries of Christianity. Only tracts which were atheistic or straightforwardly libelous were subject to official condemnation. The early Church (which Milton’s contemporaries believed they were re-forming in England) engaged extensively with pagan literature, as did their Biblical forebearers. Milton imagines that Moses was familiar with Egyptian thought, Daniel with that of the Chaldeans, and he points out that the Apostle Paul quotes three pagan Greek writers (Epimenides, Menander, and Aratus) in the New Testament. The early Church utilized pagan literature so prolifically that the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate attempted to bar Christian intellectuals from teaching on pagan works; a ban that was seen by the Church as a more pernicious form of persecution than the violent oppressions of Diocletian.
Certain heretical works were destroyed—most notably, perhaps, much of Origen’s corpus—but not, Milton points out, before they were published, disseminated, discussed, and ultimately rejected by the Ecumenical Councils. The real origin of censorship, in Milton’s view, was in the emergence of the hated Catholic inquisition.
Milton believed that the censoriousness of Catholic countries created a spirit of ignorance, servility, and spiritual laziness among ordinary people. It allowed them to offload the responsibility for their own spiritual development—as well as the freedom for which that responsibility is necessary—onto the institutions of the Church, effectively delegating their own salvation to others. Here is a critical point about the harm of censorship: the very act of licensing the censorship of others constitutes a surrender of a portion of one’s own freedom and self-responsibility. At the collective level, this amounts to a gradual renunciation of self-government. Censorship could almost be thought of as an act of idolatry, because it seeks to interpose the judgments of the censor between the Christian and God.
“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. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.”
“He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.”
At bottom, Milton’s belief in free expression stems not from some modern moral relativism, but rather from a Christian conviction that the Truth is incomprehensible, irrepressible, and ultimately invincible.
The new year threatens to be a dire one for freedom of expression in the United States. Following a riot at the Capitol building on January 6th, during which hundreds of Trump supporters invaded the halls of Congress while their representatives were gathered to vote on the certification of the 2020 election results, the corporate media establishment has acted in concert to suppress the speech of political dissidents—on both the left and the right—with an astonishing speed and on an unprecedented scale.
In a watershed moment for the future of political discourse, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch either suspended or permanently banned the sitting President of the United States from their platforms. Cable news outlets threatened to withhold coverage of any public address in which the President used “incendiary” rhetoric. Even one of the Trump campaign’s email providers cut off access. Taken together, these actions constituted a coordinated effort by the managers of the largest and most powerful communications apparatus in the history of the world to sever every line of connection between a sitting head of state and the public. These extraordinary measures, and the seemingly arbitrary standards by which they were employed, were criticized by other world leaders, including the Chancellor of Germany and the President of Mexico, who naturally take the censorship of elected officials by a handful of private social media companies to be an ominous development. Yet under the incoming Biden Administration, the efforts of so-called “liberal” American elites to stifle “harmful” speech appears to just be getting underway.
Since January 6th, hundreds of social media accounts have been purged for no other apparent reason than that their owners expressed political views that fell too far outside of the mainstream. An entire social media platform, Parler, was shuttered by Google and Apple, who control the app’s only means of distribution. Parler was given an ultimatum to change its moderation policies to match those of the other platforms, and was punished for its refusal to do so. Even though the Capitol rioters primarily used larger platforms like Facebook to coordinate their activities—to the extent that they were coordinated at all—the supposed danger of allowing political malefactors to use Parler was invoked as a pretext for shutting it down.
As of this writing, the US Congress is impeaching a President who no longer holds office, for the sole purpose of barring him, if convicted, from ever holding public office again. The Democratic leadership entertains the curious notion that our collective faith in “democratic institutions” will be restored once they’ve made it official that their chief political adversary is no longer allowed to win elections, no matter how many people vote for him. They are pursuing this impeachment under the dubious theory that Trump “incited an insurrection” by claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even though he broke no laws, advocated no violence, and merely expressed a mistaken (to be charitable) view.
Democratic members of Congress have called for the expulsion of some of their Republican colleagues, because the latter likewise questioned the integrity of the election and exercised their constitutionally-enumerated power to object to the certification. A former head of the CIA under the Obama Administration has proposed utilizing an enormous surveillance, intelligence, and law enforcement apparatus to wage a new “War on Terror”; this time against domestic “extremists” instead of foreign ones. At least one Twitter user is facing up to ten years in prison for spreading “disinformation” in the form of memes.
We’re entering a precarious new age in which the mere expression of certain heterodox opinions is being rebranded as sedition, and the majority of our substantive political discourse takes place within a privately-owned digital infrastructure wherein a small group of private individuals has virtually unlimited power to determine which viewpoints are freely disseminated and which are suppressed. A corporate and political establishment that has watched in dismay as new sources of information and commentary have undermined its ability to shape public consensus will now seize on any pretext, and use any means at its disposal, to regain its stranglehold on popular discourse and prevent the formation of an alternative populist consensus.
All of this is to say that Milton’s Areopagitica, the first prominent defense of freedom of expression written in English, is as relevant today as it was when it was first presented to the English Parliament in 1644. With a civil war raging in the background, the Parliament adopted an ordinance prohibiting the publication of any printed material without official licensure. Milton did not disapprove of post-publication censorship, but he opposed the ordinance on the grounds that dissenting views should at least be allowed a public hearing before they are silenced.
For Milton, to censor a speech product—be it a book, an article, a pamphlet, or presumably even a tweet—is effectively to do violence to the person who produces it, because in some sense the things we write are a part of us, containing a portion of our vital essence. “For books are not absolutely dead things,” Milton says, “but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are...they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” What lover of the written word doesn’t know this to be true? When I open one of Montaigne’s essays, it’s as if I’m releasing a genie from a bottle. The passage of centuries is stripped away, and I find myself inhabiting the mind of a man who lived half a millennium ago; a mind just as real as, and far more profound than, my own.
To destroy the written word, then, is nearly tantamount to homicide; or perhaps even something worse: “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.”
“We should be wary therefore…how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; wherein the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at…the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.”
Censorship not only robs one of his own free and heterodox expressions; it also robs everyone else of the freedom to hear those challenging views and to test them against their own. Most damningly, this “everyone else” includes not only one’s contemporaries, but future generations as well. The censor, when he burns a book or scrubs a disagreeable article or video from the internet, sins against the future. He knows nothing of the future; and yet even though it is both endlessly mysterious and far greater than himself, he claims a petty, despotic, hall monitor’s authority over it, subjecting it to his own prejudices. And what, exactly, gives him this authority?
Milton surveys the history of literary censorship in a manner that was certainly meant to flatter his protestant and English interlocutors, but which is nonetheless quite interesting. He claims that there was very little censorship in classical antiquity; neither under pagan auspices nor during the early centuries of Christianity. Only tracts which were atheistic or straightforwardly libelous were subject to official condemnation. The early Church (which Milton’s contemporaries believed they were re-forming in England) engaged extensively with pagan literature, as did their Biblical forebearers. Milton imagines that Moses was familiar with Egyptian thought, Daniel with that of the Chaldeans, and he points out that the Apostle Paul quotes three pagan Greek writers (Epimenides, Menander, and Aratus) in the New Testament. The early Church utilized pagan literature so prolifically that the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate attempted to bar Christian intellectuals from teaching on pagan works; a ban that was seen by the Church as a more pernicious form of persecution than the violent oppressions of Diocletian.
Certain heretical works were destroyed—most notably, perhaps, much of Origen’s corpus—but not, Milton points out, before they were published, disseminated, discussed, and ultimately rejected by the Ecumenical Councils. The real origin of censorship, in Milton’s view, was in the emergence of the hated Catholic inquisition.
Milton believed that the censoriousness of Catholic countries created a spirit of ignorance, servility, and spiritual laziness among ordinary people. It allowed them to offload the responsibility for their own spiritual development—as well as the freedom for which that responsibility is necessary—onto the institutions of the Church, effectively delegating their own salvation to others. Here is a critical point about the harm of censorship: the very act of licensing the censorship of others constitutes a surrender of a portion of one’s own freedom and self-responsibility. At the collective level, this amounts to a gradual renunciation of self-government. Censorship could almost be thought of as an act of idolatry, because it seeks to interpose the judgments of the censor between the Christian and God.
“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. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.”
“He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.”
At bottom, Milton’s belief in free expression stems not from some modern moral relativism, but rather from a Christian conviction that the Truth is incomprehensible, irrepressible, and ultimately invincible.
January 2, 2025
Fascinating defense of free speech. Really enjoyed following his (many) arguments. Logical, analogous, turns the idea of licensing published works back on the heads of government who have themselves fought for liberty of thought, discussion, Truth-seeking, and reason. Milton encourages charity toward others who differ in conscience and opinion, acknowledgement that new opinions often can correct errors in learned men's thinking, and that in so persecuting each new opinion without first gently examining and debating, pious men often go so far as to persecute Truth.
Also fascinating to read alongside Hilary Mantel's trilogy of King Henry VIII's reign told through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell. This was the time when men working at the printing of the Bible in English were persecuted to death and just decades after Luther wrote his 95 Theses against the Catholic church. Which reminds me that Milton also makes some interesting points about schisms--within which can still contain unity if not because of fundamental beliefs.
Also fascinating to read alongside Hilary Mantel's trilogy of King Henry VIII's reign told through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell. This was the time when men working at the printing of the Bible in English were persecuted to death and just decades after Luther wrote his 95 Theses against the Catholic church. Which reminds me that Milton also makes some interesting points about schisms--within which can still contain unity if not because of fundamental beliefs.
Read
November 28, 2024* only read “Of Education,” but I’m keeping track of that here :)
March 20, 2022
At some point I will have to read Paradise Lost and I pray to God I enjoy it (because I know I I’ve got to teach it). But this “famous defencce” of free speech? My Lord—Milton’s prose is like coming across an awkward gnostic “gospel” that denies all the literary beauty of that genre and replaces it with an absurd assemblage of overwrought “spirituality.” This slim volume reads like “Pseudo Shakespeare,” as if some archaeologists found a codex in a damp cave called “The Tragedie-I-cal Lyfe of KieNg LeeAr by Billy ShakeSpear.” Horrid, wooden, lifeless, ponderous, and obvious. I couldn’t believe that when I uncovered the basic arguments over so much fluff what I was given was so simplistic. Brevity is the soul of wit but Milton is a Polonius with even less self-awareness. Please tell me that at least his poetry has a little blood pumping through its veins…
January 13, 2020
This is more of a reflection on myself than on the writing. I just wanted to read Areopagitica but my local library didn't possess such a copy. Since what I borrowed also had the additional writings I decided to read them as well.
Areopagitica was a difficult read for me. Milton's writing style was unusual for me, although I'm sure it was typical for his time. I understood little of what he wrote in the title. I did understand his basic premise but didn't grasp the specifics. I typically struggle to get through esoteric topics, such as philosophy and politics. Unfortunately the other writings were more difficult for me to get through, particularly the discussion on divorce.
Areopagitica was a difficult read for me. Milton's writing style was unusual for me, although I'm sure it was typical for his time. I understood little of what he wrote in the title. I did understand his basic premise but didn't grasp the specifics. I typically struggle to get through esoteric topics, such as philosophy and politics. Unfortunately the other writings were more difficult for me to get through, particularly the discussion on divorce.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews