John Milton
“Innocence, Once Lost, Can Never Be Regained. Darkness, Once
Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost.”
John Milton
“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 -Economic Works of Karl Marx 1861-1864
What in Me is Dark is a fascinating account of how John
Milton’s Paradise Lost influenced a whole coterie of radical and not-so-radical
people, ranging from the former Trotskyist C L R James, the black nationalist
Malcom X, to the right-wing fanatic Jordan Peterson.
In the book's introduction, Reade attempts to situate Milton
and his Paradise Lost within the context of the English bourgeois revolution. In
a recent interview with the British Socialist Workers Party, Reade was asked,
"What was John Milton’s relationship with the English Revolution?"
Reade answered, “By the end of the 1630s, Milton believed
that the Church of England bishops were a threat to the liberty of protestant
English people. This was the bedrock of his radical politics. Religious freedom
was very closely connected to the idea of freedom to be a poet. Poets needed to
be free, as Milton said in Paradise Lost, he was justifying the ways of god to
man. He wrote the poem after the utter defeat of his political cause.”[1]
Reade is not a radical and has a perfunctory understanding
of the English Bourgeois revolution. Describing Oliver Cromwell as “ruthless”
and the revolution itself as a “failed Revolution”. The SWP did not challenge
Reade’s lightness of touch regarding the bourgeois revolution, nor did they ask
why Reade ignored the writings of Christopher Hill, whose book on Milton is
extremely valuable in understanding the defeat of the revolution and how and
why the monarchy was restored so easily without a shot being fired.[2]
A former SWP member, John Rees, offers a better summation of
Milton’s importance to the English Revolution: “When the monarchy was restored
in 1660, Milton was imprisoned. He narrowly escaped execution and lived to
write his deep poetic meditation on the human experience of revolutionary
change, Paradise Lost. The essential purpose of this great epic was a
meditation on why, if the revolutionary cause was good, it had not triumphed. His
prism for viewing this question was the original fall of man, the story of Adam
and Eve. Milton concluded that greater enlightenment, education, and culture
must make human beings fit to receive the divine providence of revolution. Even
in defeat, Milton looked forward to the rebirth of hope. His own role in
hastening that day, he wrote, was to “sing unchanged”.[3]
Interpretations of Milton matter because they inform
political vocabularies: Milton’s critique of censorship (Areopagitica) and his
republican prose can be marshalled for democratic struggles, while other
readings can be used to justify hierarchies or cultural conservatism. John
Rees’s interpretation should be assessed to see whether it advances working‑class
political independence or adapts Milton to reformist or managerial politics. My
understanding of Rees’s politics would side with the latter interpretation.
What in Me is Dark is Reade’s first book and emerged
from his experiences as a doctoral student at Princeton and as a teacher at a
New Jersey prison for five years. Reade is now a professor at Northeastern
University, London. His BA and PhD were in English Literature, and he holds an
MA in Renaissance Studies.
Paradise Lost has been read and written about by a huge
literary and political glitterati, including Blake, Wordsworth, George Eliot,
Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, all of whom feature in Reade’s book. Reade
chooses twelve figures who, in one way or another, have been influenced and
moved by a reading of Paradise Lost.
Hannah Arendt
As Nicholas McDowell perceptively points out, “What in Me
is Dark mixes psychological speculation of this kind with analysis of
the poem’s reception, for which documentary evidence is fragmentary and
inconsistent. Some of Reade’s speculations are more convincing than others –
the chapter on Hannah Arendt and her relationship with Heidegger strains to
make the connection with Milton – but the weight of allusion and reference
built up over the course of the book is compelling.”[4]
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a prominent 20th-century
political thinker best known for The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in
Jerusalem (the “banality of evil”), and The Human Condition. Her distinctions
between the public and private, her emphasis on the autonomy of political
action, and her analyses of totalitarianism have shaped liberal and
conservative debates about politics, rights and mass society.
However, from a classical Marxist viewpoint, Arendt’s ideas
must be examined and criticised as products of a particular class milieu and
intellectual trajectory, rather than as neutral philosophical truths. Arendt’s
portrait of Eichmann focused attention on the bureaucratic and thoughtless
character of mass crimes. While agreeing with Arendt’s exposure of bureaucratic
complicity, it should be
noted that her moralising explanations detach such crimes
from the concrete class politics and state interests that produce them. The
tendency to universalise responsibility into moral categories can obscure how
ruling classes organise mechanisms of repression to defend property and empire.
The reactionary
Jordan Peterson
Reade tends to treat Peterson as an eccentric public
intellectual. While Peterson presents himself as an independent intellectual,
his role in contemporary politics is class‑based and reactionary. He
functions as a mass media conduit for far‑right ideas—individualist ideology, anti‑Marxist
polemics and cultural reaction—that
buttress the interests of capitalist elites and help demobilise working‑class
resistance. Understanding Peterson politically requires analysing the material
forces he serves, not treating him as an eccentric public intellectual.
Peterson’s prominence exacerbates two strategic dangers for readers.
First, he deepens fragmentation: identity and culture wars obscure objective
class interests, making cross‑sector solidarity more difficult.
Second, he aids the rise of authoritarian forces that will escalate repression
against strikes, refugees, immigrants and left parties.
Peterson treats Milton as a repository of psychological
archetypes and moral lessons about responsibility, suffering and the hero’s
journey. This emphasises individual moral psychology and universal,
trans-historical meanings. Peterson’s psychological universalism obscures the
poem’s social roots and repurposes Milton as support for contemporary
individualist and conservative politics.
C. L. R. James
Reade calls James “an
enabling thinker”. In an interview with Marina Scholtz he writes “It’s all
about movement. There’s something about the dialectical tradition, which is all
about not remaining stuck in contraries or conflicts, but always trying to find
a way to overcome those conflicts. I felt energised when I finished writing
about him, which I didn’t feel when I finished writing about Malcolm X, even
though he’s my favourite reader of Paradise Lost, and the reader
who I think is the most important in the book.”[5]
Reade is correct when he cites James as having a dialectical
understanding of Milton. This was more pronounced in his early classical
Marxist days than in later life. C. L. R. James reads Milton politically and
artistically, and his use of the Marxist method situates Paradise Lost in the
social and historical conflicts of the English Revolution and the rise of
capitalism.
For James, literary works are not “timeless”: they reflect
and refract class conflict and political projects. James’s method shows how
culture becomes terrain for struggle over ideas, identity, and historical
memory—an approach relevant to present-day battles over curriculum, historical
narrative, and class consciousness.
C. L. R. James reads John Milton not primarily as a solitary
religious genius but as a political and historical actor whose epic must be
understood in the context of the English Revolution and the crisis of
seventeenth‑century bourgeois society. For James, literature is
social and dialectical: form and drama express fundamental social forces and
political conflicts.
James’s understanding is that Paradise Lost is inseparable
from Milton’s republican commitments, his experience in the Commonwealth, and
the later Restoration defeat of the English Revolution. Milton’s theology and
poetic choices, James argues, reflect attempts to reconcile liberty, authority
and social hierarchy after revolutionary failure. Satan and the politics of
sympathy: James confronts the Romantic tendency to valorise Satan as the proto‑revolutionary
hero. He treats Satan’s
eloquence and charisma as a political technique—an ideological appeal that can conceal class content.
Rather than uncritically celebrating Satan as a liberator, he insists on
situating Satan’s
rhetoric within material and historical relations.
In another part of Scholtz’s interview with Reade, she asks
him How did you first come across Malcolm X’s relationship to Paradise Lost?
Reade replied, “I found out about Malcolm X’s reading of
Paradise Lost in quite a strange way. When I was at Princeton, I was in a
Spinoza reading group, where we would meet every week to discuss a tiny chunk
of Spinoza’s Ethics. Lots of philosophers and historians of
philosophy would turn up and spend two or three hours poring over a single
paragraph, which was sometimes a bit too much for me because I couldn’t always
go there with them. Once, we were talking about Spinoza when a noise outside
the philosophy building turned out to be a Black Lives Matter protest. We ended
the session and left, and some participants joined the protest. I remember one
of the philosophers telling me that Malcolm X had loved Spinoza. I read his
autobiography because I was really curious about this fact. While in
prison, he taught himself everything about the world and consumed Western
history and philosophy. Before he read Paradise Lost, he read Spinoza.
Malcolm X is an incredibly original reader. He wants to turn a lot of his reading
upside down because he’s figuring out that the world he’s been educated into is
not as it seemed, and that historians have whitened everything. So he wants to
reverse that process of whitening, and often that involves coming up with quite
surprising interpretations. So he’s really interested in Spinoza, because he
thinks that he’s a black Jew. When he comes to Paradise Lost, he
comes up with his own very original interpretation of it.”[6]
The juxtaposition of Malcolm X and John Milton’s Paradise
Lost opens a rich field for inquiry. Reade’s critical study of Malcom X’s
relationship with Milton shows how literary and political texts mediate ideas
people live by — and how those ideas can either advance or frustrate political
understanding of the need for revolutionary transformations.
Reade examines Malcolm X’s life and political evolution,
which was the byproduct of a Black working-class experience in the US and
internationally. His conversion in prison, the Nation of Islam period, his
break with NOI, and his turn towards the working class internationalism (that
ultimately led to his assassination) are essential in understanding his
fascination with Milton and other literary figures.
It is easy to understand why Malcolm X saw Milton’s Satan as
a complex figure — rhetorically heroic yet politically reactionary when read
historically. Malcolm’s early rhetorical militancy drew on the image of a
proud, self‑defending people.
Reade’s book shows that studying Paradise Lost is not an
ivory-tower exercise. In a limited way, Reade’s approach to Paradise Lost is as
a historically situated cultural text. He clearly admires Milton’s craft. He interrogates
the social forces his epic both expresses and seeks to resolve. A Marxist would
combine literary insight with the dialectical method. John Milton’s Paradise
Lost should be viewed as a reflection of revolutionary struggle,
interpreting the fall of the angels as a failed uprising against an absolute
monarch. Ultimately, while Milton was not a Marxist, his focus on radical
change, liberty, and the questioning of authority provides rich ground for a materialist
and revolutionary analysis.
[1]
Paradise Lost inspired generations of radicals-https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/paradise-lost-inspired-generations-of-radicals/
[2]
Milton and the English Revolution by Christopher Hill-Verso
[3]
John Milton: poetic genius who was at the heart of revolution-https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/john-milton-poetic-genius-who-was-at-the-heart-of-revolution/
[4]
Awake, Arise, or Be Forever Fallen What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life
of Paradise Lost-literaryreview.co.uk/awake-arise-or-be-forever-fallen
[5]
The Many Readers of Paradise Lost: Orlando Reade in Conversation thelondonmagazine.org/interview-orlando-reade-in-conversation-by-marina-scholtz/
[6] The Many Readers of Paradise Lost: Orlando Reade in Conversation thelondonmagazine.org/interview-orlando-reade-in-conversation-by-marina-scholtz/
