Asserting the legitimacy of executing Charles I, Milton declared, with typical force:

No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally 'were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all the creatures, born to command and not to obey.
(Tenure, CPW 3.198-9)

The texts in which Milton elaborated the implications of this premise have caused him to stand for many as 'the major intellectual spokesman' of the English Revolution.(1) In William Haller's judgement, 'His pamphlets, their influence enhanced and sustained by the poems which grew out of his revolutionary experience, would become one of the main channels by which Puritan revolutionary ideas in their most dynamic form would reach the age of John Locke.'(2)

[20]

may be restrained from invading others' rights, and from doing hurt to ' one another, and the law of Nature be observed, which willeth the peace; and preservation of all mankind, the execution of the law of Nature is : in that state put into every man's hands'. Likewise Milton, rendering his account of the origins of government in the form of an historical: narrative, refers to 'This autoritie and power of self-defence and preservation' against 'what was violated against peace and common right. ... being originally and naturally in everyone of them.' However, there are, as Locke puts it, 'inconveniences' in this 'state of nature'. Not only; is there the possibility that some men will be guilty of 'invading' the; rights of others, but there is the further danger that in judging what action to take in response men will be 'partial to. themselves and their friends' and too harsh towards others. Milton, too, recognizes the problems that would arise if 'each man should be his own partial judge'. ' Thus, as Locke puts it, 'civil government is the proper remedy'.

An end is put to the state of nature, states Milton, when men agree 'to ordain e som authoritie, that might restrain by force and punishment what; was violated against peace and common right' (2T §7 and 13; 'CPW 3.199).

However, giving up the power personally to execute the law of nature is not the end of the freedom which is the essence of man as God has I made him, because 'it is not the end of the power to judge whether those charged with 'the responsibility of ruling, or executing the law of nature, are acting in accord with this law. For Locke, 'government has no other end but the preservation of property', defined a little later as the people's 'lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name -property', and 'The people shall be judge' of whether this trust has be,en kept (2T §94, 123, 240). 'Common right' predates and exists independently of the sovereign. Thus, even once magistrates were established they o remained accountable. The need for accountability underlies Milton's account, in Tenure, of how, since the power to execute justice 'left absolute in thir hands' (that is to say, unrestricted by specific laws) proved a 'temptation' to the first magistrates and 'perverted them at length to injustice and partialitie', the people found they had to frame laws so that 'man, of whose failing they had proof, might no more rule: over them, but law and reason abstracted as much as might be from personal errors and frailties' (CPW 3.199-200). According'to Locke, any power which is' not limited along these lines is 'no form of civil government at all' and is indeed worse than the state of nature, since a man' subject to such power is denied a right of redress:

[21]

...whenever his property is invaded by the will and order of his monarch, he has not only no appeal, as those in society ought to have, but, as if he were degraded from the common state of rational creatures, is denied a liberty to judge of, or defend his right, and so is exposed to all the misery and inconveniences that a man can fear from one, who being in the unrestrained state of Nature, is yet corrupted with flattery and armed with power. (2T 90, 91)

Or, as Milton put it, 'he that bids a man reigne over him above Law, may bid as well a savage beast' (CPW 3.206). Authority is not a matter of will, but is essentially impersonal.

Although we may not express the idea in terms of the structure and design of the universe, the notion that government is founded in law and accountable to the people seems commonsensical to us. This is a measure of how deeply ingrained the assumptions of liberal humanism have become. But the notion of a 'people' independent of political power yet entitled to call it to account is in fact historically specific, as is -demonstrated by the views of the Royalist Sir Robert Filmer, whose Patriarcha is described by Gordon Schochet as 'a concise statement of the traditional political beliefs that had to be overcome before constitutional liberalism could become a dominant ideology'.(5) Filmer was fundamentally opposed to the idea of an original natural liberty because his theory of political obligation was founded in Genesis, specifically in the beliefs that Adam's fatherly power was political in kind, that it was absolute because it consisted in a power of life and death over members of the family he ruled, and that all earthly government was ultimately derived from Adam's rule and shared its fatherly nature.(6) This is by no means representative of all political thought prior to the seventeenth century. Furthermore, Filmer is unusual even among patriarchalist and royalist theorists in basing a systematic theory of political obligation on Genesis, an effort which Locke demolished in his First Treatise.(7) The strength of the patriarchalist view of society was not essentially propositional but a matter of a 'cast of mind', intuitively convincing to many who lived in a society characterized by the exercise of paternal power, which the Stuarts and their supporters sought to exploit (with marked if posthumous success in the case of Eikon Basilike, supposedly written by Charles I himself).(8) Thus, in a speech to parliament in 1609, James I had the following to say about the relation between the king, his subjects and their property:

[22]

As for the Father of a familie, they had of olde under the Law of
Nature Patriam potestatem, which was Potestatem vitae & necis, ouer
their children or familie ...Now a Father may dispose of his Inher
itance to his children, at his pleasure: yea, euen disinherite the eldest
upon iust occasions, and preferre the youngest, according to his
liking; make them beggers, or rich at his pleasure: restraine, or banish
out of his presence, as he finds them giue cause of offence, or restore
them in fauour againe with the penitent sinner: So may the King
deale with his Subjects.(9)

The most significant aspect of such accounts is that government is conceived as 'natural and native' rather than 'voluntary and conventional', as Edward Gee put it in his critique of patriarchalist arguments.(10) Milton and Locke see government as the result of an agreement between rulers and ruled, sometimes referred to as the 'social contract'. The state is ultimately an expression of the ordering power of individuals.(11) For patriarchalists, by contrast, men are not naturally free but are intrinsically bound to a social whole, the cohesiveness of which is established by the 'natural' model of a father and his family. Milton argued that without the right 'to abolish any governour supreme' men were effectively deprived of. (that power, which is the root and sourse of all liberty, to dispose and oeconomize in the Land which God hath giv'n them, as Maisters of Family in their own house and free inheritance' (CPW ; 3.236-7). For patr~archalist theorists, by contrast, this right to 'oeconomize', to manage one's own affairs, far from providing a basis for the right to determine the form of government under which one lives, can in fact be removed by a king who is ultimately unquestionable. Property is not a natural right which it is the duty of government to protect, and a vocabulary of 'invasion' such as that employed by Locke simply would not apply (2T §91). As the Laudian clerics of James's biological son were to argue with regard to extra-parliamentary taxation, 'what we have is not our own, and what we gave was but rendering and restoring.(12) It may be desirable that government protect property -many royalists held that, morally speaking, a king should do so -but the fact; that a given king does not is not grounds for deposing him.(13) Thus Claude de Saumaise, or Salmasius (Milton's adversary in the propaganda war which raged over the execution of Charles) argued that

...as a natural father, although he may be too harsh, too wicked, and even too cruel, cannot be removed by his children without the greatest crime, so it is not right that he who plays the role of public

[23]

parent, although he may oppress his subjects with burdensome and, unjust rule, be killed without the crime of parricide. Indeed as a 'father does not stop being a father, although he exercises the right of a father's power over his children too severely, so the king who exercises his power over his subjects too harshly does not lose the title, Father of his Country, as Justinianus says.(14 )

Government is not the product of consent. In fact, a refusal to consent to it would simply be wicked disobedience. Furthermore, it is a matter not of common reason but of a father's will. Power is utterly personalized, and the concern is not to determine its legitimate scope but to emphasize the limitlessness of the power of even a bad or 'unjust' king and the absolute obligation to obey him. Men in general are not autonomous reasoners who have decided to 'submit as free men' to government (CPW 3.209), but dependants of the king. In The Trew Law of Free Monarchies James buttresses the comparison of a king and 'a father of children' with the similarly natural and organic image of society as a body with the king as the reasoning head, 'the seate of Judgement' from which 'discourse and direction flowes', and which the other members must obey.(15) Filmer, while prepared to outline the principles on which the king's power is based, makes a great show of not being competent to pry into the particular workings of government: 'I have nothing to do to meddle with mysteries of the present state. Such arcana imperii, or cabinet councils, the vulgar may not pry into', and in any: case 'the causes and ends of the greatest politic actions and motions of I state dazzle the eyes and exceed the capacities of all men, save only those that are hourly versed in managing public affairs'.(16) For both James and Filmer, government is beyond the competence of any but the head: the individual is not a judge of the given but is, rather, judged: according to his conformity with it. The expression of patriarchalist conceptions of political society could take less extreme and one-sided forms than those noticed here. Elsewhere there is more stress on the reciprocity implicit in the relation between a father and a son, and thus on the duty of a king to be loving towards his subjects. But, since order is natural, the individual is still debarred from stepping outside it and there is little or no scope for change. The individual is a merely empirical phenomenon, a component of a whole which is the bearer of value, rather than himself a value.

For Milton and Locke, on the other hand, individual liberty is, if not, the supreme value, then at least the indispensable precondition for the realization of the ultimate ends of human life.(17) In this emphasis they

[24]

are far removed from Hobbes, whose Leviathan, despite its advocacy of vesting absolute power in the hands of the sovereign, is now regarded by many as a classic text of early liberalism.(18) Insofar as they see government 'as a human affair which can be understood as the rational remedy for a governmentless state, both Milton and Locke share 'artificialist' terms of reference with Hobbes. However, Hobbes was the architect of an attempt to subvert the radical potential of contract theory, associated as this was with arguments for limitations on the power of governments.(19) Fundamental to this attempt is Hobbes's apparent neutralization of the subersive potential of appeals to the law of nature. For Hobbes, desire is the measure of good and evil: 'whatsoever is the object! of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth Good; And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, Evill.' Freedom does not consist in the recognition of an objective moral law, but amounts to the liberation of desire from external constraint, a state of affairs about which, as Hobbes stresses, there is nothing. distinctively human or moral. Liberty, for Hobbes, refers not to a quality of the subject but to the nature of its circuI1;lstances. It is, he asserts, 'Absurd, Insignificant, and Nonsense' to talk of A Free Subject; A free-Will; or any Free, but free from being hindred by opposition'. It is not a function of reason and so 'may be applyed no lesse to Irrationall, and Inanimate creatures, than to Rationall; (Lev. 120 / 24, 113 / 19, 261 / 107).

Since there are no moral constraints on behaviour, 'during the time i men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man'. It is a situation in which 'virtue' is given a Machiavellian twist: 'Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall vertues.' Thus in the state of nature the life of man is, famously, 'solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short'. 'The 'condition of meer Nature, that is to say, of absolute Liberty... is Anarchy, and the condition: of Warre'. For Hobbes, self-preservation is paramount. Consequently, each man has a 'RIGHT OF NATURE' to do 'anything' in the cause: of 'the preservation of his own nature'. Given that 'there is nothing he [a man] can make use of, that may not be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemyes; It followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a Right to every thing; even to one anothers body' (Lev. i 185 / 62, 188 / 63, 186 / 62, 395 / 186, 189-90 / 64). Passages such as this would seem to be the reason that Locke pointedly places his dis- i cussion of the state of nature and the state of war in different chapters i of his Second Treatise. (Milton's state of nature is not so clearly defined in opposition to a doctrine which would deprive men of what he saw!

[25]

as their inherent rights.) Thus Locke asserts 'the plain difference i between the state of Nature and the state of war, which however some i men have confounded, are as far distant as a state of peace, goodwill, mutual assistance, and preservation; and a state of enmity, malice, violence and mutual destruction are one from another'. People are 'equal, and independent' because all belong to God and so no one has the right to domineer over anyone else (2T §19, §6). For Hobbes, by contrast, equality is a function of the fact that although there may be differences between men in physical strength or mental acuity, no claims can be based on these differences because 'the weakest hath strength enough: to kill the strongest', and (a little dry wit here) every man 'is contented with his share' of wisdom (Lev. 183-4 / 60-1).

The law of nature figures in Hobbes solely as a means of strengthening the sovereign. On the one hand, it appears as a set of 'prudential maxims which will recommend themselves by their logical force to any man desirous of avoiding violent death', thus reducing 'the natural law I to counsels of self-preservation'.(20) The 'Fundamentall Law of Nature
...is, to seek Peace, and follow it.' Since the state of nature is the antithesis of peace, the 'law of Nature' means that we are 'obliged to transferre to another, such Rights, as being retained, hinder the peace of Mttnkind' (Lev. 190 / 64, 201 I 71), It makes sense to seek peace' through submission to a common power. The law of nature determines the extent of this power, but with consequences very different to those: to be found in Milton and Locke. Once a sovereign is instituted, the law of nature is what he says it is. For Locke, laws' are only so far right as 'they are founded on the law of Nature, by which they are to be regulated and interpreted' and which is 'plain to a rational creature'. The law of nature can act as a standard by which such a creature can regulate his own actions and those of others, including the government. Milton, too, is adamant on this point. In Tenure he argues that those who can recognize 'the Law of nature and right reason" are entitled 'to: judge as they find cause' cases of tyranny. In Readie Milton asserts that parliament is bound 'by the law of nature only, which is the only law of laws truly and properly to all mankinde fundamental; the beginning and the end of all Government' (2T §12; Tenure, CPW 3.197; Readie, CPW 7.412-13). By contrast, for Hobbes, even if a sovereign breaks the law of nature 'this is not enough to authorise any subject, either to make warre upon, or so much as to accuse of Injustice, or any way to speak evill of their Soveraign'. No law, even one of his own making, is above the sovereign, since this would imply 'a Judge above him, and a Power to punish him; which is to make a new Soveraign; and again for the

[26]

same reason a third, to punish the second; and so continually without end, to the Confusion, and Dissolution of the Commonwealth' (Lev. 297 / 128, 367 / 169). Such a vision of infinite regress assumes an absence of common interpretations of the law of nature. A chaotic state of nature implies that it is useless to expect the law of nature or common reason to keep men in order, not only because they have conflicting, interests, but also, more fundamentally, because they can't agree. There is 'no common Rule of Good and Evill' and so the buck of interpreting the law of nature has to stop somewhere other than 'the people'. The: 'unwritten Law of nature' is denied any practical efficacy apart from dictating the need for a sovereign and any other content it may be given by state power, whose right 'and, further, duty it is to interpret and enforce it (Lev. 120 / 24, 322-3 / 142-3).21 Partiality is not, as iI1 Milton! and Locke, an unfortunate possibility which may prevent justice being i done, but is so pervasive that the law of nature 'is now become of all laws the most obscure; and has consequently the greatest need of able Interpreters'." It is the sovereign who determines who is an able interpreter: 'The Interpretation of the Law of Nature, is the sentence of the Judge constituted by the Soveraign Authority, to heare and determine such controversies, as' depend thereon.' Without this determination by the sovereign power there would be 'no end of such Inter pretation'. Natural law (what is right according to reason) is dissolved into positive law (the actual, written laws of a state), which denies it any effective independent content while claiming its moral force (Lev. 322-3 f 143, 326 / 145, 120 / 24).(22) Consequently, once out of the state of nature, freedom, which is mere absence of impediment, consists only in what the sovereign is prepared to allow:

The Liberty of a Subject, lyeth therefore only in those things, which in regulating their actions, the Soveraign hath praetermitted: such as is the Liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another; to choose their own aboad, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves think fit; and the like.

(264 / 109)

As was discussed in the Introduction, the distorting effect of associating Milton with such a position can be seen in Francis Barker's account of Milton's political modernity in The Tremulous Private Body. The inadequacy of this reductive account of political modernity as a description: of Milton's politics opens the way to the misleading representation of

[27]

these politics as non-modern. An example is Stanley Fish's acceptance of Francis Barker's characterization of the 'modern settlement' in terms of a distinction between public and private realms, combined with a denial of the applicability of these terms to Milton, in whose writings.

Rather than being segregated from one another, the realms of the political and the private form an unbroken continuum united by the overriding obligation to be faithful to an unwritten but always-in-force law. The result, as Barker observes, is an extraordinary (because unrelenting) 'inner discipline' (47), but far from being in the service; of the state, it is a discipline that threatens to subvert the state (as it will in 1649) because in the event of a clash between what it demands and what the state would compel, the state will always be the loser.

Fish is quite right to emphasize Milton's distance from modernity as characterized by Barker, and to affirm that Milton 'is much more revolutionary than Barker takes him to be'.(23) But an 'unbroken continuum' between the polltical and the private is by no means foreign to modernity. Fish is misleading in distinguishing as sharply as he does between the implication of Milton in the story of 'the steady unfolding of a classic liberal vision' and a Milton understood in his preferred, theological terms as an 'antinomian', or one who privileges the promptings of the spirit within over the externalities of the letter of the law. Fish's theological perspective on Milton is illuminating. But while an exclusive focus on the theological aspects of his texts may be of considerable help in the search for 'tensions and discontinuities', it is not without its costs.(24) It obscures important continuities between Milton's texts and the discourses 'of an incipient liberal humanism. It also downplays significant differences between the writing of those whose view of politics can properly be said to be theocratic, and Milton's political texts, in which an admittedly ultimately theological worldview underpins a political freedom which, while not identical with our conceptions, is nonetheless rooted in a recognizably modern conception of political practice as the human business of free individuals.

It is true that Milton's confidence in the freedom of men is ultimately based on the idea that they are 'the image and resemblance of God himself', as he puts it in Tenure (CPW 3.198). But this is not markedly more theological a conception than Locke's belief that men are free in relation to one another because they are God's property and can therefore be owned by no man.(25) This emphasis on freedom distinguishes both Milton and Locke from the literature of religious resistance to

[28]

which they owe many debts. Such is the extent of this indebtedness that Quentin Skinner actually describes the Two Treatises (Milton warrants only a footnote) as 'the classic text of radical Calvinist politics'. This is a tradition of thought which, in broad terms, seeks to define states which go against the manifest word of God as merely human! rather than sacred institutions in order to deprive them of divine legitimacy, and to allow, in principle at least, resistance to one's ruler in the name of religion. In the case of an ungodly king one need not merely look forward to his accounting with God but can actively resist him.(26)

Milton's insistent denunciation of idolatry in relation to the office of king is in large part grounded in this tradition. For example, Milton rejoices in the fact that although Charles might have thought he could, 'scape unquestionable, as a thing divine' he discovered that 'the equal and impartial hand of justice' found him 'no more to spare then another ordinary man' (Tenure, CPW 3.214, 234; see also Readie, CPW 7.426). This echoes a phrase to be found in Calvin, among others: 'if a king or prince or magistrate conducts himself in such a way as to diminish the honour and right of God, he becomes nothing more than an ordinary: man'.(27) Milton cites opinions from a number of Protestant divines at the end of Tenure, including Luther, Zwingli, Bucer and Christopher
Goodman, whom he quotes as follows:

When Kings or rulers become blasphemers of God, oppressors and murderers of thir Subjects, they ought no more to be accounted Kings or lawfull Magistrates, but as privat men to be examind, accus'd, condemn'd and punisht by the law of God, and being convicted and punisht by that law, it is not mans but Gods doing. ...

(italics mine; CPW 3.250)

This implies a distinction between the office and person of the magistrate, which of course is incompatible with any idea that rulers are, in themselves, God's annointed on earth. (28) The legacy of this position can i also be discerned in Locke when, for instance, he criticizes absolutist theories because they put' a man' above the laws. For Locke, obedience' to the magistrate is obedience not to a person but to law 'which, when: he violates, he has no right to obedience, nor can claim it otherwise than as the public person vested with the power of the law'. If he acts 'by his own private will, he degrades himself, and is but a single private person without power and without will' (2T §94, 151).

Nonetheless, there is a crucial difference between the position of Milton and Locke and that of radical Calvinism. Louis Dumont

[29]

describes Calvinist theories of the state as exemplary models of 'modern artificialism': the given is without inherent value, and is instead subjected to the systematic application of an extrinsic, imposed value.(29) But, as in the case of Hobbes, artificialism --the notion that government is founded in some kind of contract --is not the key issue. Where Hobbes subordinates religion to questions of political expediency, however, Calvinist political theory conceives politics as entirely ancillary to religion. For Goodman, following Calvin, the institution of society, effected by men, is sealed by a covenant with God, exemplified by God's instruction to the Israelites to 'put or constitute a kinge to thee: but who thy Lorde thy God shall chose'.(30) Similarly Samuel Rutherford, despite, unlike Goodman, owing many debts to 'natural-law constitutionalism', is above all concerned with 'something that fallen natural reason could never tell him -the covenant obligations of a godly nation'. Rutherford's overriding concern with these obligations means that for him a godly king 'hath a political resemblance of the King of heavens, being a little god and so is above any one man '.(31)

While the given is not sacred per se, government which is not directly contrary to God's Will is an expression of that will since 'kings and gouernors' were 'appoynted of God to preserve his people'. So far is this the case for Goodman that even personally evil rulers, 'so longe as their wikednesse bra[k]eth not out manifestly agaynst God, ad his Lawes', have the same divine right to obedience as 'euil and roughe Maisters'.32 By the same token, the political activity that overthrows an ungodly monarch is a religious duty and is undertaken in order to establish a state which will enforce a particular form of godly discipline. It is held to please God first and man second, or rather, to please man only insofar as it pleases God. Calvin's concern is whether' a king or prince or magistrate conducts himself in such a way as to diminish the honour and right of God', not whether he trespasses on men's right to 'oeconomize, 'invades' their property or disregards their liberty. The resistance which is legitimized in this way is conceived as the work of God. As Christopher Goodman put it in the passage quoted earlier, a bad king is 'punisht by the law of God' and in consequence even though such punishment is meted out by men 'it is not mans but Gods doing'. This duty is couched in terms of contempt for the merely human, above all human reason. Goodman refers to 'vile man' who 'will measure obedience with the crowked lyne of his owne corrupte iudgement, and not with the infallible trueth of Goddes holie worde', dismissing 'corrupt reason' by comparison with God's 'holie Lawes and preceptes'.(33) Even Rutherford, who lays less emphasis on the vileness of man did not

[30]

consider a merely human concern, such as Charles's imposition of taxation without parliamentary consent in the form of Ship Money, to be sufficient cause for disobedience.(34) In Locke, by contrast, there can be discerned, in Skinner's phrase, 'the modern and strictly political concept: of a moral right of resistance'.(35) It is clear that Milton, too, has crossed this threshold. Although there are appeals to God's will in Tenure, these are, 'as Michael Fixler has noted, restricted to the defence of the killing of the king (that is to say, to the part of the tract which, given that the execution was the act of a minority, was in need of whatever rhetorical weapons were to hand), and any apocalyptic faith in England's destiny as a holy nation is, in the context of other writings of the time, 'conspicuously absent'. Tenure is far removed from the theocratic sectarianism which would claim power 'for the saints exclusively as saints.(36) People have not only a right of resistance but (a matter of emphasis here) a right of changing their government as they see fit. Humans have the power to 'execute '. ..the wrath of God upon evil doers without exception', but God is wrathful in such cases because it is evil to abrogate tyrannically men's natural freedom. Tyrants 'may bee as lawfully depos'd and punish'd, as they were at first elected'. Indeed, since the ruler's authority stems from the people, 'then may the people as oft as they shall judge it for the best, either choose him or reject him, retaine him or depose him though no Tyrant, meerly by the liberty and right: of free born Men, to be govern' d as seems to them best' (Tenure, CPW i 3.198, 202, 206). ',Not only can a ruler be resisted for contravening the will of God ,in matters of religion, he is, simply, accountable to those who have delegated their power to him. This is the language of liberty! and rights, not of sainthood.

Milton and Locke legitimize this greater concern with human affairs, and with the right of men to manage their own destiny, by reference to natural law.(37) However, it is important to attend to the substance of this law and the outlook it expresses; if unduly archaic conceptions of the nature of their thought are to be avoided. One such is to be found in Joan Bennett's argument that in his formulation of natural law as the basis of government by consent, Milton owes a specific debt to Hooker.(38) As far as this goes, this is unexceptionable. Hooker was referred to and used by everyone in the seventeenth century, from those Royalists who founded government in an original but irrevocable contract, to the Levellers, who wanted constitutional government selected by regular elections, possibly based on a near-universal male franchise.(39) The presence of some such influence on Locke, who is given to quoting 'the judicious Hooker' at strategic points in his argument, is a commonplace,

[31]

although there is disagreement about its significance.(40) But the distance between Milton and Hooker (and, equally, between Locke and Hooker) is brought out by Bennett in the very act of bringing them together. According to Bennett, the legacy of Hooker in Milton's thought is such that for Milton only a ruler's violation of the natural order of things could justify revolution on earth.(41) However, not only would it be difficult, empirically, to find many seventeenth-century governments which did not, in Milton's view, contravene natural law, but, further, such an assertion totally excludes that side of .Milton for whom, as discussed earlier, the people may change government as often as they see fit. Keith Staveley is right to say, in his comparison of the myth of the social contract in Hooker and Milton, that 'The difference, and it makes all the difference, is one of emphasis. In Hooker the accent 'is on orderly submission to necessity, in Milton, on constructive actions that are necessary.(42) The key to this difference is the presence in Milton and Locke of epistemological and political individualism, and its absence in Hooker and the scholastic natural law tradition on which he was drawing.(43) For Hooker, 'The general and perpetual voyce of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of nature, her voyce is but his instrument.' Hooker did believe that political society had its foundations in the consent of the people, 'an order expressly or secretly agreed upon, touching the manner of their union in living together'. But the notion of such a decision being 'secretly agreed' is clearly of a piece with the idea that 'to be commanded we do consent, when that societie whereof we are part hath at any time before consented, without revoking the same after by the like universal agreement'. Hooker liked the idea of consent, affirming that 'for manifestation of this their [rulers'] right, and mens more peaceable contentment on both sides, the assent of them who are to be governed, seemeth necessarie', but, as F. J. Shirley recognizes, 'any real exercise of that consent would have horrified him'.(44) This is because the consent of the governed is for him not a precondition of legitimacy and a right to be exercised, but part of the perfection of a Christian commonwealth. Unsurprisingly, as a defender of the status quo of the Elizabethan Church settlement, Hooker was writing not with change in mind but with a conviction of the benign and providential inevitability of hierarchically ordered society as presently constituted.

By contrast with this rather static evocation of the wisdom of ages, the will of the people is conceived by Milton and Locke as consisting in an aggregate of epistemologically independent and pointedly

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individual conclusions. Unity is desirable, but real unity is contrasted with forced incorporation. Rational behaviour consists, not in doing what one is told, but in making up one's own mind. For instance, the opening to The Reason of Church-governement urges the importance of embracing the good 'not of custome and awe, which most men do, but of choice and purpose, with true and constant delight' (Reason, CPW 1.746). This is the impulse which lies behind Milton's famous opinion that 'a man may be a heretic in the truth' if it is not a truth he has arrived at for himself (Area, CPW 2.527), and Locke's assertion that 'The floating of other men's opinions in our brains, makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true.(45) Each man must be left to exercise 'his owne leading capacity'. When God gave Adam reason, 'he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing' (CPW 2.513, 527)'. The ideal is of a host of individually directed, dynamic and spontaneous harmonizations of energy: 'To be still searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body is homogeneal, and proportionall) this is the golden rule in Theology as well as in Arithmetick, and makes up the best harmony in a Church; not the forc't and outward union of cold, and neutrall" and" inwardly divided minds' (CPW 2.551). The political nature of such a position is clear in Locke's great work of epistemology, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke inveighs against those who 'taking things upon trust, misemploy their power of assent, by lazily enslaving their minds to the dictates and dominion of others, in doctrines which it, is their duty to examine'. His well-known opposition to the notion that certain truths are innate in us, most famously and extremely expressed in his representation of the human mind as a tabula rasa, 'or blank slate, is at least in part politically motivated. Once certain truths had been declared innate, he opines:

...it was of no small advantage to those who affected to be masters and teachers, to make this the principle of principles, --that principles must not be questioned. For, having once established this tenet, that there are innate principles, it put their followers upon a necessity of receiving some doctrines as such; which was to take them off from the use of their own reason and judgement, and put them on believing and taking them upon trust without further examination: in which posture of blind credulity, they might more easily be governed by, and made useful to some sort of men, who had the skill and the office to principle and guide them.(46)

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Although Locke and Milton differ in their epistemologies, Milton confidently referring to 'those unwritten lawes and Ideas which nature hath ingraven in us' (CPW 1.764), in this context it is more significant that they are united in an individualist politicization of questions of knowledge. The activist strain of Areopagitica, and Milton's contempt in that tract for the man who finds 'himself out som factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs' (CPW 2.544), is of a piece with Locke's condemnation of those who are prepared, lazily, to take their truths on trust. Locke's sensitivity to the relation between credulity and servile manipulability in affairs of government finds a precise parallel in Milton's condemnation of tyrants for indulging the 'blind affections' and licentiousness of their people in order to keep them servile (Tenure, CPW 3.190).

Of course, as well as grounds for comparison there are important differences between Milton and Locke. Locke is less insistently religious in his rhetoric. He is generally held to have favoured limited monarchy while Milton's sympathies were republican, a side to him which debates in today's Britain may have caused scholars to re-emphasize.(47) Locke is a more sophisticated political thinker than Milton, partly by virtue of entering the debate later. Perhaps most significant is the relative absence in Locke's discourse of assertions regarding the rights of the virtuous over the vulgar. It is impossible to work out, from his texts alone, who has membership of political society (that is to say, without detailed and disputed historical argument about what is meant, in which contexts, by terms such as 'men', 'the people' and 'society').(48) Milton, too, is unspecific on the franchise and on who constitutes 'the people' (though, of course, for both he and Locke, 'the people' is a masculine entity), but his discourse is shot through with a 'classical republican' strain which surfaces not only in his vibrant evocations of public action, above all in Areopagitica, but in his exclusion from political consideration of those lacking sufficient virtue. Central to Milton's political vision was 'the middle class, which produces the greatest number of men of good sense and knowledge of affairs. Of the rest some are turned from uprightness and from their interest in learning their country's laws by excessive wealth" and luxury, and others by want and poverty' (CPW 4: 1.472).(49) Tenure begins by proclaiming that 'none can love freedom heartilie, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence' (CPW 3.190). In The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, Milton suggests a sliding scale for the weight of votes which unstably mixes social class and virtue.(50) In the Second Defence

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Milton avers that 'Those whose power lies in wisdom, experience, industry, and virtue will, in my opinion, however small their number be a ' majority.' Milton is always ready to oppose the qualitative question of merit to the quantitative logic of election by an aggregate of preferences,
, .
'there being in number little vertue' (CPW 4: 1.636; CPW 7.415). Milton's overriding concern with morality contrasts with Locke's theoretical abstention from these questions and disqualifies him, despite his having continued stridently to employ a language of popular sovereignty and rights, from description as a liberal political thinker in today's
terms.(51)

However, the political modernity of Milton and Locke resides in their implication in the development of what Jurgen Habermas (among many others) has termed the 'public sphere'.(52) As outlined in the Introduction, this was the arena, irreducible either to the private world of the family and economic affairs, or to the public authority of the state, in I which 'the private people, come together to form a public' called on 'public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion.(53) Milton and Locke's belief in the individual exercise of reason in the light of the law of nature expresses an ethos of debate 'in principle without regard to all preexisting social and political rank and in accord with universal rules', the results of which 'lay claim to being in accord with reason; intrinsic to the idea of a public opinion born of the power of the better, argument was the claim to that morally pretentious rationality that strove to discover what was at once just ande right'. Their belief in 'depersonalized state authority' is expressive of the belief that domination could be replaced by the rule of 'reason and law. The principle of accountability to the public was advanced in the name of the idea, the inverse of Hobbes's, that 'veritas non auctoritas (acit legem (truth not; authority makes law). (54) Their emphasis on the individual's use of reason! rather than reliance' on authority becomes the watchword of a new political dynamic. Government is not an intricate and providential; mystery to be apprehended rather than comprehended, as it is for Filmer, whose declaration of his incompetence to pronounce on affairs of state --'arcana imperii, or cabinet councils' --explicitly valorizes those 'secrets of state' to which 'the principle of publicity was . . . held up in opposition'.(55) People need not be happy with what they have whatever it is, as recommended by Hobbes, whose lack of faith in an objective law of nature reflected his disbelief in the efficacy of peaceable public discussion and caused him categorically to exclude private men 'from the public sphere objectified in the state apparatus.(56) God's will is important, insofar as it is He who has made men free. But politics

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belongs to rational participants in public debate, not saints following the lead of expert Interpreters of scripture. People are not assumed to be happily subsumed in a mystical community, their reason taking the form of recognizing that what they see is good, as Hooker's rhetoric implies. Instead, the rational exercise of natural rights, underpinned by natural law, takes absolute precedence over custom ('but error grown old') and 'meer positive law,' Reason has an active and critical rather than a contemplative and apologetic role, and is exercised by free men of whom government is the servant (CPW 3.485; CPW 7425).

The significance of this commitment to a self essentially free and capable of self-management is sometimes, surprisingly, overlooked in accounts of mode,n political thought. Marx famously contrasted the heroism of the bourgeois revolution with the unheroic nature of the societies they established, and argued that this was because the danger inherent in such actions necessitated 'self-deceptions' on the part of those who engaged in them. For the French, it was images of the Roman republic, while

...at another stage of development, a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed speech, passions and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution. When the real aim had been achieved, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habbakuk."

This amounts to a considerable downplaying of the radical side of Locke, aligning him with what is implicitly presented (by virtue of the contrast with Old Testament zeal) a, the more placid, stolid and sober readjustment of 1688 Locke becomes the emblem of the subordination of virtue to self-interest. But this seems an inadequate representation of the outlook of a man who, over a number of years, exposed himself to considerable risks in a revolutionary cause.(58) A better understanding of the motivation for such behaviour is to be gained from the work of Edward Andrews, who criticizes Marx for underestimating the causal role played by self-image (and therefore Ideology) in the Revolution of 1688, and for down playing the continuing importance of self-image to the post-revolutionary middle class, not just as a cover for their interests but as an ideal which could exceed them:

Marx obscures both the 'revolutionary' side of Locke and the problem of materialists risking their lives for a cause. First, the suggestion that Locke was an exponent of post-revolutionary doctrine,

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of the unheroic possessive individualist, is misleading. Habbakuk's vision of divine justice and prayer for violent deliverance from tyranny was as present in Locke as in Marx. ..And the solid faith of Habbakuk. ..that 'the righteous man shall live by his faithfulness' combines the self-righteousness and self-assertiveness of the revolutionary rights-claimant. Second, Marx enormously oversimplified in presenting civic humanism to be a form of poetic self-deception necessary to cover the prosaic character of possessive individualism. Perhaps possessive. individualism and civic humanism are not incom- , patible but were in fact combined in the person of Locke and others.

Andrews goes on to suggest that a Hegelian perspective might redress this deficiency in Marx, since 'What Marx saw as class struggle, Hegel understood as a struggle on the plane of ideals and self-images. The master-slave conflict is a struggle for rights, not material things, a struggle for the recognition of personality.(59) Thus, it is misleading to emphasize only Locke's distance from the classical republican or civic humanist rhetoric of his political allies. In The Machiavellian Moment and elsewhere, G. A. Pocock takes Locke's abstention from the language of many of his closest associates as an indication that he was probably, among the adversaries of this tradition of 'participant civic virtue'. He is associated with a discourse of rights (that is to say, proprietary claims against others) which emerges at the expense of active citizenship.(60) However, the employment of a discourse of rights need not be taken to imply that Locke is concerned only with private affairs, or that his preferred model of society is one in which atomized selves ask only to be left alone to keep their noses to the grindstone of capital accumulation.(61) Locke held that it was 'every Man's indispensible Duty, to do all the Service he can to his Country; and I see not what Difference he puts between himself and his Cattle, who lives without.that Thought'.(62) Such a commitment was by no means Incompatible with the conceptualization of political life in terms of natural freedom and rights. Indeed, Andrews suggests that the shift in terminology from the 'civil interests' of the Letter Concerning Toleration to the 'natural rights' of the Two Treatises in fact indicates an activist turn: one looks out for one's interests' but fights for one's rights.(63)

The notion of rights as an individual possession can be. problematic insofar as it leads 'every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty.(64) But in the political writings of Milton and Locke rights are associated with a dignified view of human nature which operates not only. as a theoretical postulate., but

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as an ideal self-image in the name of which the text seeks, as it were, to recruit the reader to the cause of reason. This underpins a politics quite different to the kind of narrowly self-interested liberalism one can, in manifest contradiction of his intentions, construct out of Hobbes's texts.(65) A tone of indignation runs through the texts of both Milton and Locke. Legitimate government is that which treats men as rational and adult, Tyrannical force is that which treats men as slaves, cattle or children. The imagery of the man capable of rational liberty is perhaps more; compelling and insistent in Milton than it is in Locke. His is more obviously a rhetoric of mobilization, hitting a higher rhetorical pitch in moments of more extreme crisis. Sometimes, in keeping with Marx's characterization of the revolutionary period, he dons the guise of an Old Testament-style prophet, as at the end of Readie when he cries 'with the Prophet, O earth, earth, earth! to tell the very soil it self, what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to'. The legacy of the classical world is also frequently evoked. Earlier in Readie, Milton, referring to those who established the commonwealth, says that their actions and words 'testifi'd a spirit in this nation no less noble and well fitted to the liberty of a Commonwealth, then in the ancient Greeks and Romans'. The commonwealth is a matter of pride, as becomes even clearer when
Milton imagines what their enemies will say 'scoffingly' of 'the whole English name' if they restore the king:

Where is this goodly-tower of a Commonwealth, which the English! boasted .they would build to overshaddow kings, and be another Rome in the West? The foundation indeed they laid gallantly; but i fell into a wors confusion, not of tongues, but of factions, then those i at the tower of Babel; and have left no memorial of thir work behinde them remaining, but in the common laughter of Europ.(66)
(CPW 7.463, 420, 422-3)

But more important here than the particular rhetorical reservoir being drawn on is the appeal to the intended audience's self-esteem. In Readie Milton describes it as 'madness. ..for them who might manage nobly thir own affairs themselves, sluggishly and weakly to devolve all on a single person; and more like boyes under age then men, to committ all 'to his patronage and disposal' (CPW 7.427). Rational self-management is counterposed to an insulting tutelage. Locke opens his First Treatise, responding to Filmer's Patriarcha, with the observation that 'Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be

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conceived that an "Englishman", much less a "gentleman" should plead for it.' He rejects Filmer's work as

...a rope of sand, useful, perhaps, to such whose skill and business: it is to raise a dust, and would blind the people the better to mislead them, but it is not of any force to draw those into bondage who have their eyes open, and so much sense about them as to consider that chains are but an ill wearing, how much care soever hath been taken to file and polish them.(67) (IT §1)

In the Second Treatise he accepts that absolute rulers make laws and have judges to interpret them, but, in terms which are revealing, does not accept that this "amounts to the rule of law: 'this is no more than what every man, who loves his own power, profit, or greatness, may, and naturally must do, keep those animals from hurting or destroying one another who labour and drudge only for his pleasure and advantage' (2T §93). Law not based in the rational apprehension of a law of nature in principle accessible to all is, an insult to the humanity of those ~ expected to live under it.

This is not to say, however, that Milton and Locke simply have a rosy picture of human nature. Both Milton and Locke, who consider that to treat a man as though he is incapable of rational self-determination is to insult his human nature and reduce him to the status of an animal, are certainly ready thus to insult those they deem incapable of such responsibility. It often seems that the most important issue is not to describe the nature of political order but to decide, quite bluntly, who is in and who is out, or rather, to lay the basis for such decisions by asserting forcefully that some are in and some are out. Something more seems to be at stake than the ideological masking of self-interest in terms of which Habermas accounts for the exclusivity of the 'bourgeois public sphere'. According to Habermas, the 'constitutional norms' appealed to in the discourses of the public sphere 'implied a model of civil society that by no means corresponded to its reality. . . the "private people" on whose autonomy, socially guaranteed by property, the constitutional state counted just as much as on the educational qualifications of the public formed by these people, were in truth a small minority', while the whole idea of rule by 'the people' meant that 'The public sphere of civil society stood or fell with the principle of universal access.' However, restriction of the franchise' did not necessarily have to be viewed as a restriction of the public sphere itself as long as it could be

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interpreted as the mere legal ratification of a status attained economically in the private sphere', that is to say, as the recognition not of a privilege granted by virtue of one's heredity, but of a right consequent i upon a position in principle open to all men. Of course, this disregarded. the differential distribution of opportunities to attain such a status, and I so the ideological dimension of the idea of a public sphere consisted .. in this 'identification of domination with its dissolution into pure reason' .(68)

However, to interpret such exclusions simply as the result of self-interest, gives little sense of how the 'inside' of the public sphere may have been constituted by, and thus dependent on, the definition of an 'outside'. A dual view of human nature seems to be intrinsic to the appeal to the righteous made by Milton and Locke. The category of 'the people' is constructed through exclusions which help define, by contrast, a category of rational liberty, in a discourse which seeks to recruit i the reader as 'subjects as well as the objects of social control', as Michael Walzer put it with regard to Calvinism.(69) This urge would seem to be of a piece with broader cultural developments. Aldon T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan have discerned a 'widespread concern in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over distinctions between crucial opposites --humans and beasts, civility and savagery, innocence and corruption, order and anarchy'. Foucault describes in Madness and Civilization what he calls 'the great tragic caesura in human existence' whereby 'Nature' ceased to be a cosmos 'rich in internal communications, and symbolisms' and became instead 'an extremely abstract law, which nonetheless forms the most vivid and concrete opposition, that of day and night.'(70) For Claude Lefort, whose focus is more directly' political, these developments appear less metaphysically dramatic: 'in bourgeois ideology, the essence of man is affirmed with regard to a subhumanity'. Once there is no fixed place of power, guaranteed by a ' transcendent principle (for example, the king as God's annointed), arid all is determined only through discourse, the bourgeois subject empowers himself through the production of a discourse which distinguishes between himself, representative of the norm, and the other:

...it is essential... to bring out the distinction, at every 'level, between the subject, who establishes himself by his articulation with the rule and expresses himself in expressing the rule, and the other, who, not having access to the rule, does not have the status of subject. The representation of the rule goes hand,in hand with the representation of nature; and this opposition is converted into a

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series of manifest terms: for example, the 'worker' is represented in opposition to the bourgeois, the uneducated in opposition to the cultured man, the uncivilized in opposition to the civilized, the mad in opposition to the sane, the child in opposition to the adult.(71)

One is reasonable or mad, human or bestial, a part of the political nation i or politically disqualified, equal or an object of contempt. For Locke, 'Madmen' and 'children' cannot be free (the same applies to women, , though for Locke, as for Milton, this goes without saying) because freedom is grounded in a man 'having reason, which is able to instruct him in that law he is to govern himself by, and make him know how far he is left to the freedom bf his own will'. To leave such a being in 'unrestrained liberty' would be 'to thrust him out amongst brutes, and abandon him to, a state as wretched and as much beneath that of man; as theirs". Consequently, they are 'never set free from the government of their parents' (2T §60, 63). Criminals, on the other hand, cast themselves out of community. A man who, 'quitting reason', uses force, 'the way of beasts. . becomes liable to be destroyed' (2T §181). "Through such assertions Locke constructs his audience not as Hobbesian pragmatists of power, caught up .in a no-holds-barred battle for survival, but i as righteous extirpators of immorality. The assumed coherence of men! which derives from their adherence to the law of nature, a 'rule ... of reason and common equity, which is that measure God has set to the actions of men for their common security', implies that those incapable of such lawfulness are either subject to eternal surveillance or thrust out: of human community by individuals who, although perhaps acting in isolation, are nevertheless by virtue of their reason representatives or guardians of that community. Miscreants will deservedly meet an 'executioner of the law of nature' (2T §8). Universal ideals legitimize the denial of liberty to those who cannot, and the use of force against those: who will not, recognize them (or recognize themselves in them), and create by contrast a community of the just.

Similarly, Milton's Tenure opens with the assertion that 'none can love freedom heartilie,but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence' (CPW 3.190). The process of definition continues when Milton counsels that 'milde and tender dispositions' avoid being 'foolishly softened from thir duty and perseverance, with the unmaskuline Rhetorick of any; puling Priest or Chaplain' (CPW 3.195). As is suggested by Milton's connection of liberty to the right to 'oeconomize ...as Maisters of Family" (CPW 3.236)} this is business for hardened men, not whining women

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written to perform begins when he considers the rational basis of kingship. For Milton, 'he that bids a man reigne over him above Law, may bid as well a savage beast'. Indeed, he says, there is: '

...no Prince so native but professes to hold by Law; which when he himself overturns, breaking all the Covnants and Oaths that gave him title to his dignity, and were the bond and alliance between him and his people, what differs he from an outlandish King, or from an enemie? For look how much right the King of Spaine hath to govern us at all, so much right hath the King of England to govern us'tyrannically ...Who knows not that there is a mutual bond of amity and' brotherhood between man and man allover the World, neither is it the English sea that can sever us from that duty and relation: a straiter bond yet there is between fellow-subjects; neighbours, and friends; But when any of these doe one to another so as hostility could doe no worse, what doth the Law decree less against them, the op'n enemies and invaders? ...Nor is it distance of place that makes enmitie, but enmity that makes distance. He therfore that keeps peace with me, neer or remote, of whatsoever Nation, is to mee as farr as all civil and human offices an Englishman and a neighbour: but if an Englishman forgetting all' Laws, human, civil and religious, offend against life and liberty, to him offended and to the Law in his behalf, though born in the same womb, he is no better then a Turk, a Sarasin, a Heathen.
(CPW 3.206, 213-15)

Where, for instance, James I or Filmer is concerned to describe the form of political order, asserting that it is an essentially familial relation, over which the king presides as father, this passage is concerned not with the description of a particular regime but with the principle which informs any legitimate order, in the light of which an offending family member, such as a brother, can suddenly become no more to a man than a Turk. The most apparently natural relations, even those of the womb, are subordinated to the primacy of reason. The passage opens with a pun on the word 'native'. This is in response to the biblically derived argument, that since, in killing Eglon, King of Moab, in order to liberate the jewish nation, Ehud was killing a foreigner and an enemy, his act is not pertinent to the present case (the execution of Charles) (CPW 3.213 n8S). But since in its root 'native' is to do with birth per se (and not just to do with having been born in a particular country), Milton is able to make a neat transition from geographical place, through the notion of

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holding a place by virtue of one's birth, to an assertion that the king holds his place not by birth but by virtue of an agreement of the people, which is to say by 'Law' and by 'all the Covnants and Oaths that gave him title to his dignity', because they signified an 'alliance' with his people.(72) These are, as Milton goes on to say, 'the onely tie of our obedience to him.(73) Milton then, as Merritt Hughes points out, describes the brotherhood of all men in words which 'invoke the principle of a universal human society resting upon man's gift of reason and dictating a just law of nations, as Cicero repeatedly affirmed' (CPW 3.214 i n87). This is a model example of the way history can imbue ideas with ~ active significance. When Milton evokes Cicero, he is evoking more' than an ideal or aspiration, since he does so in the context of Puritanism's internationalist thrust and draws the conclusion that this bond implies duties to be fulfilled overseas. This text is 'a part of the Puritan invention of politics, if politics is defined not as the stuff of intrigue and 'faction' but as a programme aimed at changing the world so that it conforms to reason.(74) But in the midst of this internationalism, it becomes clear that the bond of universal fellowship is consituted by a force of exclusion so powerful that it questions the usual Protestant i order of things. To behave unreasonably or offensively is to be expelled I from the community of man as a representative of the (supposedly) barbaric Orient, menacing what becomes, by contrast, and rather surprisingly in the light of Milton's views on Catholicism, a more or less; Christian Europe.(75)

The coherence of this Europe could take on quite material forms, such as military cooperation. Milton himself wrote on behalf of Cromwell to Catholic rulers asking them to unite with other Christians against the Turk.(76) Milton is caught up and active in the cultural project whereby 'European political thinkers in the age of Absolutism repeatedly sought' to define the character of their own world by opposition with that of the Turkish order.'(77) Although the main thrust of the text seems to be to undermine the claims of nativity, and although, in its applicability to Charles, the term 'Turk' is clearly not conceived in exclusively racial terms, it would seem that nativity --or race --nevertheless grounds and defines what might otherwise be a limitless community of men. This is implicit in the ghostly coherence of Europe, but also, with much more apparent solidity, in the notion of being English. Nationhood, it appears, is first and foremost a natural fact: a nation is the place where I one is born. Certainly, while a covenant is the only tie that binds the English people and their king, the ties that bind the English people to one another can simply be assumed. There is a 'brotherhood between

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man and man allover the World', but 'a straiter bond yet...between fellow-subjects, neighbours, and friends'. So much can simply be assumed. Certainly there is no mention of nationality having a basis in a covenant. One can be excluded, in the light of the universal law of nature, regardless of how 'native' one is, but this formulation does not, challenge the fact of nativity. In fact it seems that the law of nature in this passage polices the boundaries of a naturally given community.(78) Tenure disqualifies Charles, by virtue of his ungodly pride, from membership of both the English nation and European Christendom. He is in a position analogous to that of the 'Wen' (Milton's image for episcopacy) in Of Reformation, an excremental impurity which must be cut off to leave the 'lawfull and free-borne members' whole and clean, and i to reaffirm England as an example of 'liberty and the flourishing deeds i of a reformed Common-wealth... wherein we have the honour to precede other Nations who are now labouring to be our followers' (CPW 1.583-4). Through his execution in the name of the 'mutual bond of amity' that unites all men, England leads the way to freedom, presumably leaving behind 'the people of Asia', who are 'much inclinable to slavery' (CPW 3.202-3).

The combination of the natural fact of the nation with universal principles which it can incarnate and even export is a powerful one, and has been massively destructive. At least one critic, Herman Rapaport, has raised the question of Milton's affinity with totalitarianism (although Rapaport's argument that this affinity consists in Milton's reflection of a situation in which, with the passing of religion, the state has no transcendental imperative and is accountable to nothing beyond itself, is both a little difficult to square with Milton's writings, and a perfect description of those of Hobbes).(79) Milton's political discourse veers closer to totalitarianism as described by Claude Lefort, for whom it is best understood as an offshoot of democracy in which a party, instead of accepting that; once the nation is not conceived as united in the body of the prince, power belongs to no one in particular and the nation, the people and the state have lost absolute definition, seeks rather 'to give society a body once more'. The party claims 'to represent the aspirations of the whole people, and to possess a legitimacy which places it above the law'. Such a representation of the people-as-one' requires a defined enemy to constitute them, by contrast, as a potentially unified entity: 'the integrity of the body depends on the elimination of its parasites.(80) Clearly aspects of Milton's political discourse are reminiscent of this schema. In Of Reformation, in which he counsels the excision of the parasitical tumour of episcopacy, Milton also declares

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that 'a Commonwealth ought to be but as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth, and stature of an honest man, as big, and compact in vertue as in body' (CPW 1.572). The trial of Charles by the Independents, which Tenure was written to justify, was characterized, as Andrew Milner notes, by a marked indifference to technical legality, since they felt themselves to be concerned simply with justice.(81) But' Milton's political discourse is too early and inchoate to be meaningfully categorized in'this way. There is too much emphasis on virtue for him to be described as a liberal, but Milton is too preoccupied with freedom,' and a natural law which transcends positive institutions for him consistently to view any organization as embodying such principles absolutely. Nonetheless, the intimate link in both Milton and Locke between a community of rational individuals and a drive to expel those who do not conform to the norms of rationality might well incline us to favour. Foucault's response to Habermas's search for consensus: 'The farthest I would go is to say that perhaps one must not be for consensuality, but one must be against nonconsensuality.(82) Despite manifesting a principled wariness of any particular positive consensus, such caution about siding with the majority nonetheless presupposes the i desirability of consent, an ethos intrinsic to the notion of the self as a bearer of rights, the expansion of which is inseparable from the modern, discursive regime Milton and Locke helped to impose.(83)