ABSTRACT

The English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century was the first modern attempt to reorder the political affairs of an entire nation, while simultaneously reforming the consciousness of its citizens. John Milton, the official propagandist for Cromwell’s revolutionary government, was compelled to enlist ancient and medieval ideas in the service of political innovation, just as Machiavelli had done in Renaissance Florence. Specifically, Milton’s work employs the Platonic dichotomy between ideal and material spheres, and combines it with the Aristotelian concept of custom to offer an explanation of why people collude in their own oppression. For a time, Milton believed that by purging monarchy and prelacy out of the Commonwealth it might be possible to build a reformed society, and to people it with virtuous citizens. Like most revolutions

from above, however, the Cromwellian state soon foundered on the rocks of popular conservatism, and the monarchy was restored in 1660. The revolutionary regime’s intellectual apologists were thus faced with the weary task of comprehending ‘an inconstant, irrational and Imagedoting rabble’.1 How was it possible to account for people who, as it seemed, voluntarily chose slavery over freedom?