A SPEECH OF MR. JOHN MILTON FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING TO THE PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND
Published in 1644, this is a polemical tract, which Milton wrote in opposition to the censorship of the time. Areopagitica is one of the most influential and impassioned philosophical defences of the right to freedom of speech and it is now regarded as being one of the most eloquent defences of press freedom ever written, forming the basis of many modern justifications of that right.
The tract was published on 23 November 1644, during the height of the English Civil War. The title refers to a speech by the Athenian orator Isocrates in the 5th century BC, with the Areopagus being a hill in Athens, where tribunals were held in Antiquity, as well as being the name of a council that Isocrates hoped to restore. Milton’s speech was never intended to be delivered orally, but instead distributed via pamphlet, defying the publication censorship it sought to attack. As a Protestant, Milton had supported the Presbyterians in Parliament, but in this tract he argued forcefully against the Licensing Order of 1643, in which Parliament required authors to have a license approved by the government before their work could be published.
Areopagitica did not persuade the Presbyterians in Parliament to nullify the prepublication censorship component of the Licensing Order of 1643 and sadly the freedom of the press was not achieved until 1695. Nevertheless, the work still remains one of the most stirring defences of the freedom of speech ever to be written.