Political Philosophy · Free Expression
Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing
Written against Parliament’s Licensing Order of 1643, which required every book to be approved before printing. Milton’s answer is the founding argument against prior restraint in English: that truth needs no licence, that a book is not a dead thing but the living reason of the man who wrote it, and that killing a good book is nearer to killing a man than most censors imagine. Short, furious, and the direct ancestor of the First Amendment.
- Period
- 1644
- Region
- United Kingdom
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Public domain — published 1644, before 1930, so the work is free of copyright in the United States. The scan is the Internet Archive's, released without additional restriction.
- Source
- https://archive.org/details/miltonareopagitica
This record is catalogued here; the text is held at the original source.
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