John Milton: A Hero of Our Time

by David Hawkes

John Milton — poet, polemicist, public servant, and author of one of the greatest masterpieces in English literature, Paradise Lost — is revered today as a great writer and a proponent of free speech. In his time, however, his ideas far exceeded the orthodoxy of English life; spurred by his conscience and an iron grip on logic, Milton was uncompromising in his beliefs at a time of great religious and political flux in England. In John Milton , David Hawkes expertly interweaves details from Milton’s public and private life, providing new insight into the man and his prophetic stance on politics and the social order. By including a broad range of Milton's iconoclastic views on issues as diverse as politics, economics, and sex, Hawkes suggests that Milton's approach to market capitalism, political violence, and religious terrorism continues to be applicable even in the 21st century.

This insightful biography closely examines Milton's participation in the English civil war and his startlingly modern ideas about capitalism, love, and marriage, reminding us that human liberty and autonomy should never be taken for granted.

Genres: Biography

356 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

David Hawkes is a Professor of English Literature at Arizona State University and a distinguished scholar in literary criticism, economic thought, and early modern literature. He is the author of several influential books and has edited critical editions of classic literary works.
Hawkes studied at Oxford University, earning a B.A. in 1986, before continuing his postgraduate education at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1992. At Oxford, he was a student of the literary critic Terry Eagleton and engaged in socialist-feminist scholarship with Oxford English Limited. At Columbia, he worked under Edward Said and contributed to alternative and underground journals in New York’s Lower East Side.
His academic career began at Lehigh University, where he taught from 1991 to 2007 before joining Arizona State University as a full professor. He has also held visiting positions at institutions in India, Turkey, and China. Hawkes has received prestigious fellowships, including a year-long National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the William Ringler Fellowship at the Huntington Library.
A prolific writer, Hawkes' works explore themes of economic criticism, ideology, and the intersections of literature, magic, and finance in early modern thought. His books include Idols of the Marketplace (2001), The Culture of Usury in Renaissance England (2010), and Shakespeare and Economic Criticism (2015). He has also edited editions of Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress. His recent works, The Reign of Anti-logos (2020) and Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama (2022), continue his exploration of the relationship between literature, philosophy, and economics.
Hawkes' scholarship is widely recognized for its critical engagement with ideology and material culture, offering fresh perspectives on the intersections of literature, politics, and economic systems.

Reviews

[Silvio Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started this book with some worry that it would be a conservative rant about the glories of The Western Tradition. It turns out the author is a Marxist with an agenda that I more or less agree with, calling out postmodernism and the like for valuing words instead of realities. But I find it mind-bogglingly perverse to take John Milton, with his lifelong insistence that the religion he believed in mattered more than the tangible world, as an intellectual hero for our side rather than our adversaries. The book was most valuable to me for its accessible narrative of the English Revolution, a topic of some personal interest to me since it's the context where my former religion emerged and which I haven't read much about. It gets across the extent to which the revolution was understood by both sides as a holy war, something which I think the popular image of early modern Europe tends to downplay.

[John David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This biography, written for the 400th anniversary of Milton’s birth, is a rather mediocre offering, and hardly worth being associated with the great poet’s name. Hawkes argues, rightly I think, that Milton’s perennial encounters with religious strife and political contretemps should have us embracing him as a contemporary, not as an austere figure of worldly timelessness. Milton was a world-class heterodox: he ceaselessly questioned the authority of institutions (including the English monarchy), wrote jeremiads against human obsequiousness and psychological idolatry, and led a far-from-ordinary family life.

Hawkes’ continued interest in Milton’s life derives from his interest in iconoclasm in all forms, and Milton’s active embrace of it. One of the few strong points of this book is the author’s willingness to look at the important texts other than just “Paradise Lost.” The pamphleteering, including the “Areopagitica,” is paid due consideration, and Milton’s advocacy of divorce and unfettered freedom of speech strike us as ultra-modern even four centuries later.

Unfortunately, Hawkes seems to be too invested in ideological concerns that I imagine would barely have consumed any of Milton’s attention. He inevitably wants to connect everything to usury (that is, the practice of loaning out money for a profit, which was a relatively new practice in Milton’s time). Milton’s father was a usurer, and this fact is somehow used to interpret, in a bizarre, anachronistic mixture of Freudianism and Marxism, many of Milton’s motivations. While Milton might have had many opinions that put him out of the mainstream, he is very much a member of the seventeenth century when it comes to his opinion on this: usury means making an idol out of money, when the only thing we should make an idol out of is God himself.

Hawkes also makes reference to Nietzsche at least twice in the book, one time saying that he “fatuously preferred evil” (p. 185). I found this ignorance to be surprising from someone who apparently works at an American university. Nietzsche already suffers from enough willful misinterpretation at the hands of people who know plenty about him than to incur this. And if he’s saying this stuff about Nietzsche, what is he getting wrong about Milton, a figure with whom I’m even less familiar?

Milton is the indispensable poet, both for his time and for ours. This biography, however, can easily be skipped – and should be. It’s amazing how this was, according to the cover, made the “Booklist Top Ten Biography Pick.” While I have yet to read either of these, I do have two more Milton biographies – Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns’ “John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought,” and Anna Beer’s “”Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot.” A quick perusal shows both of them to be far superior to Hawkes’ book, and I look forward to reading them in the future.

[Mark Stephenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a nearly life-long fan of John Milton I was very pleased by this contemporary interpretation of his life and work. Mr.Hawkes taught me of Milton's activities as a money-lender (following in his father's footsteps) as well as the importance of his opponent Salmasius as a justifier of usury. Milton's ideas were rejected by most of his fellow citizens, but they have influenced many generations up to our own time because of his phenomenal erudition, great power of expression, sincerity and the depth of his thinking. My only criticism is that a few more pages spent on Paradise Regained would have strengthened the portrait of Milton's Christian beliefs which guided him throughout his very eventful and astonishingly courageous career.

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book's title might make you do a double take. How could a blind Puritan possibly be relevant in the 21st century? David Hawkes responds to that question almost at once, and continues to address it throughout this biography, which is measured and thorough in its own righto. Milton's thought, Hawkes argues, prefigures and even predicts important modern issues like consumerism, mass media, and terrorism. As Hawkes explains, Milton, not known for his humility, was writing for posterity, so these connections transcend mere academic navel-gazing. My only complaint about Hawkes's narrative is that explication of Paradise Lost constitutes only a small chapter of the book, but this is merely a question of focus.

[Bryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skims the historical surface while giving a Marxist interpretation of Milton's political writings.

[Tesla · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good biography, but biased in some areas