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So for fact sake, search the economist. And the And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

My name is David Bromwich.

I teach literature and humanities at Yale.

And I wrote a short essay for persuasion recently on John Milton and the Psychology of Censorship.

This was intended I should add as the first of a series The Persuasion Community aims to publish on classic

texts that speak to some concerns of our present moment.

I chose Milton's political track Ariopagitica, which he wrote in 1644 during the English Civil War,

in order to question the motives and the wisdom of an active parliament that would have

required official approval and licensing of any work submitted for publication.

The proposed measure was an innovation of preventive ethics.

Stop the bad thing before it appears, before it does the harm you think you know it will do.

Licensing in this way would have amounted to censorship

before the fact. The licensor himself acting on behalf of Parliament would

prevent the publication of anything dangerous to civil society

or tending to pollute the minds of the people. Because the proposal for licensing came up in time of war it could also be defended as an

emergency measure but Milton was unmoved by this argument from necessity.

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