Word: areopagitica
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...must participate in society rather than withdrawing from it, a recognition of its changing and pervasive character as an institution. But it must adhere to the social contract by staying neutral when it is asked to address social problems by nonacademic means. Bok quotes a passage from Milton's Areopagitica to outline his own position on engagement: "'I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where the immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat...
Censorship founders first of all on a rock that Poet John Milton charted 300 years ago in his great anticensorship treatise, Areopagitica: If there were a censorship law, whom could one possibly trust to act as the censor? As Loory's Sun-Times editorialized, "Who would administer a law like that? A national news censor? Do you really want someone to shut off your news...
...certain optimism, and the core of a proper conservatism is a certain Augustinian pessimism. Nothing seems to me more demonstrably untrue--demonstrable from the received experience of the race that we call history--than the optimism that pervades such enjoyable texts as Mill's On Liberty and Milton's Areopagitica--that is, if you just let truth and falsehood fight, falsehood will be beaten." He laughs, a rare indulgence. "That's refuted on every page. Falsehood has lots of advantages. There are a lot more forms of it than there are forms of truth. An awful lot of truths...
...Government ultimately prevails, it could compromise the basic principle of a free press. As far back as 1644, John Milton fought against prior restraint in Areopagitica, his famous protest to Parliament "for the Liberty of Unlicenced Printing." Hard-won democratic tradition insists that a free press is vital to an informed electorate: Anglo-American law has generally rejected any Government right to license a newspaper or censor its publication for any reason. William Blackstone, the great 18th century English jurist, stated the basic proposition: "The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state...
...know modern democracy is to know something at least of Jefferson, though you may not have read him; to learn to respect freedom of speech or the rights of the private conscience is not to be wholly ignorant of the "Areopagitica" or the "Antigone," though you may know nothing about them...