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England hath
need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant
waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside,
the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have
forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward
happiness. We are selfish men;
O raise us
up, return to us again,
And give us
manners, virtue, freedom, power.”
William
Wordsworth
“For books
are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be
as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in
a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred
them.”
― John
Milton, Areopagitica
“Milton, for
example, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast, the
writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton
produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the
expression of his own nature. Later on, he sold the product for £5 and, to that
extent, became a dealer in a commodity.”
Karl Marx
“Life is not
an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration
and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above
personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
― Leon
Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935
To say that
this small book of just 47 pages has gone under the radar would be an
understatement. A Google and Bing search has produced no mention, reviews, or
even an image of the book cover. A scenario that would not look out of place in
Stalin’s Russia or in George Orwell’s 1984. This is all the stranger since Andrew
Milner is a significant scholar and has produced a substantial amount of work
on John Milton.
John Milton
(1608–1674) is best known for Paradise Lost. He was also a vigorous political
writer (Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates) who defended freedom
of conscience and republican principles in the English Revolution. For any
reader, Milton’s work is historically and culturally useful. He illuminates the
ideas and political disputes of the 17th‑century bourgeois revolution in
England, the rise of parliamentary power, and the ideological roots of modern
notions of liberty and censorship.
Milner is a member
of the British Socialist Workers Party and a Marxist literary scholar who has
situated John Milton’s poetry and prose within the political and social context
of the English Revolution. In this small book, Milner seeks to show how
Milton’s imagery, rhetoric and political tracts are bound up with the emergent
class formations, religious conflicts and ideological struggles of seventeenth‑century England. He is primarily known as a literary and
cultural theorist; his work deals with ideology, culture, and intellectual
history. His work addresses ideology, aesthetics and the left’s intellectual
history. That terrain is important because ideology shapes class consciousness,
and the battle over ideas is a necessary front in the class struggle.
However,
cultural analysis alone cannot substitute for a rigorous political-economic
account of property relations, surplus appropriation and class power. Classical
Marxism holds that consciousness is rooted in material conditions; therefore,
cultural critiques must be integrated into analyses of the social relations of
production and the balance of class forces. Milton’s poetry and prose are
embedded in the English revolutionary conjuncture. His biblical epic and tragic
forms are works where he questions authority, liberty, and social order. Milner
reads Milton’s theological motifs as ideological representations tied to
emergent bourgeois and republican tendencies, while also acknowledging the
contradictions and ambiguities in Milton’s voice.
Milner’s
body of work, including this book, situates the poet within the political and
social convulsions of the English Revolution. For any reader, Milton’s poetry
and prose are productive areas for analysing how class conflict, ideology, and
revolutionary consciousness are represented, contested and mythologised in
literature. Studying Milton through Milner’s revolutionary eyes teaches how
literature both reflects and shapes class consciousness.
Socialist Workers Party
At this
point, it is worth examining Milner’s politics. Milner, as was said, is a
member of the British SWP, which does not represent orthodox Marxism. Along
with comrades in the SWP, he belongs to a tradition that broke with orthodox
Trotskyism in the mid‑20th century and developed the state‑capitalist analysis of the USSR (most associated with figures
like Tony Cliff).
For Cliff and the International Socialism tendency, regimes that nationalised industry but retained wage labour and commodity production were analysed as forms of capitalism in which the state functions as the collective capitalist; thus, they rejected the Trotskyist formulation of a degenerated workers’ state and argued for an independent revolutionary strategy oriented to overthrowing bureaucratic rule. In the 2010s, it was riven by a political and moral crisis around leadership, internal democracy and allegations of sexual abuse.
Although Milner’s
book illuminates how bourgeois and petty‑bourgeois cultural forms mediate
working-class experience, it still risks idealism if detached from concrete,
empirical investigation of the organisation of production and the state. Some critics
have argued that Milner collapses literary meaning into class interest,
treating Milton as merely an ideological mouthpiece of a social class rather
than a complex, contradictory subject. Perhaps a more serious charge, one in
which the great historian Christopher Hill was also charged with, was cherry-picking
passages or contexts that fit a class‑interest thesis while ignoring
counter‑evidence in Milton’s prose and reception.
In the book,
Milner cites Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson as early influences. It is
entirely correct to look at the work of these major historians when it comes to
evaluating John Milton.
Christopher
Hill treated seventeenth‑century literature as part of a revolutionary
conjuncture. Hill’s interpretive stance is class-centred and teleological. He
reads Milton as embedded in the Puritan radical tradition. He locates literary
production within the contours of political conflict, ideology, and
mobilisation. This is the Marxist tradition in history that emphasises the
structures and social forces that shape ideas—Milton becomes a voice within a
contested social order.
Hill’s major
contribution was to relocate the English Revolution from a narrow
constitutional dispute among elites into a broad social and cultural upheaval
rooted in class conflict. Works such as Society and Puritanism in Pre‑Revolutionary England and The World Turned Upside Down argue
that the upheavals of the 1640s were driven by changing material conditions—agrarian transformation, commercial
expansion, and the rise of new classes and layers within the population—thereby producing religious and
political movements ranging from Puritans to Levellers and Diggers. Hill’s
method was classic historical materialism: ideas and texts are treated as
expressions of social forces and class interests rather than as autonomous
abstractions.
Hill
emphasised the dialectical interaction between structural changes and conscious
political action: material crises opened space for radical ideas, which in turn
reshaped social relations until countervailing forces produced new
stabilisations. His sensitivity to popular religion, millenarianism, and the
“culture of protest” made visible the agency of Milton’s political
tracts—Areopagitica, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and his numerous
pamphlets—which must be read as ideological interventions in the convulsive
politics of the 1640s and 1650s. Milton defended republican sovereignty,
individual conscience and vehement opposition to censorship; his positions
reflected a fragment of the emergent bourgeois‑republican
current and the layers of intellectuals allied with parliamentary and anti‑royalist forces. His great epic, Paradise Lost, also encodes
the metaphysical and moral anxieties of a society undergoing revolutionary
reconfiguration.
On the other
hand, E. P. Thompson, by contrast, insisted on the agency, experience and
consciousness of social subjects. Where Hill stresses the structures and
propensities of classes, Thompson recovers lived mentality: culture is both
produced by and constitutive of working-class self-activity. Applied to Milton,
Thompson’s method would press you to examine how Milton’s language and
political interventions circulated among social groups, how readers
appropriated or resisted his ideas, and how ideological formations were lived
and transformed.
Andrew
Milner’s work on John Milton situates Milton’s poetry and prose within the
political struggles of seventeenth‑century England and the emergence of
the modern public sphere. Milner shows Milton not simply as an isolated
literary genius but as a political writer whose formal choices—pamphlet rhetoric, epic mode,
religious imagery—intervene in class conflict, state formation and the struggle
over free speech. Milner’s contributions to cultural theory enrich our understanding
of ideology and intellectual history. Still, they cannot replace the scientific
analysis of class, property and state that classical Marxism provides.
