Religious toleration and freedom of expression in Seventeenth-century England: Milton vs. Locke

Abstract

A holistic interpretation of the Areopagitica confirms that Milton manages to maintain a more secular approach to freedom of expression than that offered by his contemporaries, so that although Miltonian oratory is imbued with the religious doctrines that characterized the writings of the Puritan era, they are, however, subordinated to the emerging process of secularization that implements the rationalist humanism of their political doctrines. Hence the contractual postulate of equal freedom constitutes the only insurmountable barrier that Milton points to all political or religious doctrine, an issue paradigmatically reflected in the rejection of Catholics, based especially on a political and historical basis, rather than religious. Pactist determinism of a secular nature also present in the timid defense that John Locke offers on freedom of expression within the framework of discourse on religious tolerance, hence the area of tolerance proclaimed by the founder of political liberalism stops, as Milton, at the gates of the Catholic temple. Although the expansive force that the property right achieves leads to a hierarchization of the ends that justify the bourgeois and utilitarian state that Locke designs, hence its limited contribution to the diachronic process of conceptualization of freedom of expression.

Enviado el (Submission Date): 27/05/2019

Aceptado el (Acceptance Date): 12/07/2019