Chapter 9
Censorship: the licensing and suppression of books, speech and the press; liberty of printing; the case for and against control of opinion.
77 passages · 51 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Censorship, as the term is used here, covers the licensing and suppression of books, speech and the press. It includes the claim of rulers, churches or the public to decide what may be printed, performed or said, and the opposing claim of a liberty of printing and of opinion. The idea is a great one for these books because it sits where politics, religion, learning and art meet. To ask whether a magistrate may forbid a book is to ask what truth is, how it is known, what virtue requires, and how far any authority can trust its own judgment. The Harvard Classics hold the two classic modern arguments against control of opinion, Milton’s *Areopagitica* and Mill’s *On Liberty*. Around them sit scattered testimonies, ancient and modern, of poets, printers, prelates and princes who practised, proposed, suffered or evaded censorship. Even a naturalist’s travel journal counts freedom of the press among the marks of a hopeful liberal republic1.
The case for control is seldom stated in these volumes as a full doctrine, but it is everywhere implied. Its oldest form is moral and poetic. In Aristophanes, Aeschylus is cast as a kind of censor and holds that the poet must hide tales of vice such as Phaedra’s love, because such tales corrupt the citizens and poetry ought to improve the state2. Cervantes’ canon carries the same concern into an institutional proposal. He would have an official at court examine and license every comedy and book of chivalry before performance or publication, and he argues that prior censure would raise their quality and protect the players3. A civil version appears in Burke. He approves a Roman censor’s decree closing certain academies as shameless, and he applies it to the ministers who moved against Thelwall’s lectures, which amounts to a sanction for suppressing subversive teaching4. The religious version appears where one might least expect it. Luther would keep Aristotle’s *Ethics* and similar books out of Christians’ reach and abolish the commentaries5. Thomas More wished all heresies suppressed, even if that meant burning his own polemical works6.
Even the great opponent of licensing admits exceptions, and they matter for understanding his position. Milton favours toleration over compulsion but excepts popery and open evil7. He concedes that printers’ names may be registered and that libellous books may be burned8,9. From the outset he grants that books, like malefactors, may be punished once they have done harm10. The quarrel of *Areopagitica* is therefore narrower than a quarrel with every restraint. It is with prior restraint, the licenser who stands between the author and the press. Milton’s principle is punishment after the fact, not prevention before it.
Mill goes further, and the step from Milton to Mill is the chief change this idea undergoes in these texts. Mill denies that any government or public has a right to silence opinion, even when government and people are of one mind11. His argument rests on fallibility. The suppressed opinion may be true, and to refuse it a hearing is to assume one’s own infallibility. Even if it is false, stifling it is still an evil, and incitement may be punished only when it issues in an overt act12. Heretical opinions often carry neglected parts of the truth, so their contestants should be welcomed rather than silenced by law or opinion13. He defends unlimited freedom to state opinions, holding that the quiet suppression of half the truth is the greater evil14. He gathers these grounds into four and refuses even to restrict discussion to a “temperate” manner, because such limits would fall only on unpopular views15.
Milton had anticipated much of this in another key. For him truth wins in a free and open encounter, and the liberty to know, to utter and to argue is to be prized above all liberties16. Truth needs no licensing; licensing is the cowardly device of error against honest argument17. It is absurd to ask leave to publish truth, since truth is the thing most likely to be prohibited18. Those who would suppress whatever lies outside their own system produce a forced outward union, which is worse than free searching19. Many opinions are knowledge in the making, and the prelates’ silencing of Wyclif cost England its lead in reformation20. Licensers are not infallible21. Milton and Mill agree that dissent serves truth. They part on its limits. Milton excepts popery and libel; Mill admits no exception to the expression of opinion and draws the line only at action.
They part more sharply on the empirical question whether suppression works. Emerson holds that persecution defeats itself: every burned book or silenced word spreads further and vindicates the persecuted22. Milton sometimes reasons the same way. Suppression breeds sects23, and royalist libels were printed in spite of the licensing order24. Bacon, writing as a statesman, advises that seditious rumours are better checked by contempt than by severity, since attempts to stop them prolong them25. He notes too that severe laws against the spreading of prophecies have been tried26. Mill flatly denies the comfortable view that truth always triumphs over persecution. History shows heresies stamped out by legal and social penalties, so persecution often succeeds27. Mill’s denial changes the character of the argument. If suppression worked against truth only rarely, liberty would matter less. Because it can succeed, liberty must be protected deliberately. Calvin adds the complaint of the persecuted. His doctrine has been condemned unheard, on calumny, and punished with prison, exile and flames28. Adam Smith offers a political observation that bears on the dispute. A sovereign secure in a standing army can tolerate licentious remonstrance, while insecure governments must suppress every murmur29.
The fullest single treatment in these volumes is Milton’s attack on licensing, and its first move is historical. Destroying a good book, he says, is akin to homicide30. He then surveys antiquity. Athens burned only blasphemous or libellous books; Sparta needed no licensing; the comic poets went unsuppressed; at Rome, Cato’s wish to banish the philosophers was resisted31. Apart from libel and impiety, writing was free, and only tyranny silenced good books32. Prohibition grew under the Christian emperors and councils, then through the papal indexes and the Inquisition, until friars licensed printing itself33. Milton mocks the Roman and Florentine imprimatur formulas and the English prelates who imitated them34. He concludes that licensing has no ancient or reformed precedent and descends from Trent and the Inquisition35. The genealogy is meant to discredit. He asks whether an institution invented by oppressors can be good, and he cites Julian’s ban on pagan learning as persecution36.
The second move is moral and touches the heart of the idea. Knowledge cannot defile. Bad books serve the discreet reader, and errors can aid truth37. God left reading to each man’s choice, and the burning of books at Ephesus was voluntary, no precedent for magistrates38. Knowledge of evil is necessary to virtue. A cloistered virtue that never meets its adversary deserves no praise, and fear of infection would remove even the Bible39, along with the Fathers, as the Papists show40. Virtue requires freedom to choose, so the law should govern by persuasion and education rather than compulsion41. Here Milton answers Aeschylus directly in substance though not by name. Where the poet would hide vice to protect the citizen, Milton would expose it so that the citizen may be tried and proved.
The third move is practical. Licensing cannot attain its end. Weak readers cannot be forcibly hindered, and Plato’s licensing of poets belonged only to an imagined commonwealth42. To be consistent, regulators would have to license music, dancing and every recreation43. They would have to proscribe printed books already in circulation and adopt the expurgations of Trent, and Italy and Spain show that such rigour neither improves manners nor prevents sects44. Removing books does not remove sin, and restraining evil restrains virtue too24. The licensers themselves pose a further problem. They must be learned, yet the learned will find the work tedious, so their successors will be ignorant, imperious or venal45.
The fourth move counts the costs. Requiring a mature author to obtain an imprimatur treats him like a schoolboy46. The licenser’s delays harm the book, and licensed writing becomes the mere language of the times47. Licensers pass only received opinions, mutilate dead authors such as Knox, and breed contented dunces48. Licensing treats truth as a monopolised commodity, a staple ware, and insults the nation49. Milton recalls Italian learning crushed by the Inquisition and Galileo imprisoned by licensers50. Renewed licensing would be prelacy transferred to books, a second tyranny51. Belief held without exercise makes even true belief a heresy23. The licenser shields lazy ministers from challenge52,53. The practice resembles the Turkish prohibition of printing54, and a Parliament that set twenty licensers over a free nation would turn the liberators into tyrants55.
Against Milton’s indictment the other books offer concrete episodes, and these are more ambiguous. Walton shows licensing at work and even working tolerably. Herbert reviews Valdesso’s book before publication as a trusted friend56. When Herbert’s own *Temple* goes to Cambridge, the Vice-Chancellor balks at two verses on religion’s decline, and Herbert had asked that the book be burned if unfit57. After debate the whole is licensed uncut58. The episode shows the institution Milton feared, and also a licenser who could be argued with.
Where the press was legally freer, the question became where liberty ends and licence begins. Franklin as printer refused libel and personal abuse despite appeals to the liberty of the press. His remedy is the editor’s self-restraint, not law59. Sydney Smith exposes the anti-reformer’s hedge: praise of the liberty of the press, the “palladium of the Constitution,” joined to abhorrence of its “licentiousness”60. That word, Smith shows, brands bold exposure and excuses long imprisonment of writers61. Smith thus anticipates Mill’s suspicion of “temperate” limits15. Voltaire, oddly, would have magistrates suppress contemptible attacks on the stage, while he mocks clerical condemnation of the theatre and notes that a libel is freely sold beside Racine62. The stage had its own censors. Hugo remarks ironically that his drama lacks the publicity of an official veto63. He argues that political censorship and reading committees forbid a truthful historical drama, leaving the choice between false tragedy and prohibited truth64.
Beyond formal licensing lies suppression by sheer power. Pliny records that a senate under tyranny ordered a life of Helvidius destroyed and its author’s goods confiscated, while Fannia kept a copy and carried it into exile65. Hobbes observes that if geometry threatened rulers’ interests, its books would be burned66. On this view suppression follows interest, not truth. Pascal reasons that the historians’ silence about Christ suggests concealment or the alteration of records67. Shakespeare’s Fool, whipped for speaking true, for lying and for keeping silent, is a dramatic image of speech under power68. In religion the resistance is as old as the persecution. Luther refuses to let God’s word be bound by papal interpretation or by recantation, though he accepts silence on controversy69. Mill extends the concern to the Spanish ban on non-Catholic worship and the Puritan suppression of amusements, as examples of majority prohibition70.
Finally, censorship may be private or social. Giles urges that *Utopia* should not be suppressed71. Montaigne withholds La Boétie’s treatise because seditious men had used it against the state72. In Cervantes, a dead poet’s verses are burned over the protest that a writer’s papers should be preserved73. Pepys resolves to burn a roguish book after reading it74. Carlyle blames Respectability for leaving English biography a bloodless vacuum75. Mill names the public’s “censorship” over conduct and opinion76, and recalls, half in jest, his father’s censorship of his boyhood abstracts77.
Several questions remain open across these texts. One is whether the right line runs where Milton drew it, at prior restraint with libel and popery excepted, or where Mill drew it, at overt action. Another is whether truth prevails of itself, as Emerson and at moments Milton suppose, or must be guarded because, as Mill insists, persecution can succeed. A third is whether the moral claims of poetry justify a censor of the stage, or whether, with Milton, virtue must meet vice to become virtue. The last concerns the censorship that needs no office at all, the pressure of respectability and majority opinion, which Carlyle and Mill suggest may be the hardest of all to oppose.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
See also: Truth 5b · Opinion 10a · Liberty 5a
See also: Liberty 5a
See also: Liberty 5a · Knowledge 8b · Truth 5a
See also: Liberty, Truth, Opinion, Knowledge, Religion, Tyranny