I've chosen as this quarter's primary text John Milton's Areopagitica, his 1644 defense of free speech and critique of restrictive censorship laws. More about the context available here.
The blurb below is from Thomas Fulton's 2004 article "Areopagitica and the Roots of Liberal Epistemology" (English Literary Renaissance 34.1 (2004): 42-82).
"During the Civil War and Commonwealth period, England experienced a "legitimation crisis"--to use Habermas' term--in which warring factions sought to give their convictions legitimacy. New methods for making rational claims developed as a consequence. Skinner observes in Liberty before Liberalism that the vocabulary of the state of nature and Milton's use of it was "wholly foreign to Roman and Renaissance texts." This exception points to an important change in the formulation of political arguments in the 1640s and afterwards.... The new methodology focused on finding irreducible laws of human nature, often in "state of nature" models, instead of using previously established authorities. These self-consciously innovative writers use something close to Cartesian standards to gauge the accuracy of moral and political claims, but they are also interested in something quite different. Their theories of human understanding focus not on the accuracy of truth claims, but on the process by which humans obtain knowledge (48)."
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