Milton and the Possibility of Unconscious Tyranny

This week, I wish to take up Kate’s question from two weeks ago of the subconscious tyrant: “What does it mean when a ‘tyrant’ doesn’t know he’s terrorizing his ‘subjects’? Milton draws heavily on the language of tyranny to craft his arguments, drawing on both historical tyrannies such as the Inquisition and that of the Holy Roman Empire, but also numerous times refers to a more metaphorical intellectual tyranny potentially in play upon the passage of the 1643 licensing order. Tyranny and its synonyms circulate throughout the treatise, stopping short of attaching to the English Parliament, but invoked as a potential consequence in the future (or raised as a spectre of the past).

Milton’s treatise carries an incredible awareness of tyranny, then, and the question of ignorant or unconscious tyranny seems irrelevant in this case. However, one of Milton’s rhetorical devices does just what Kate theorizes: he constructs Parliament to be ignorant of the tyrannical effects of the law they passed. Perhaps to stay on Parliament’s good side, or perhaps to give them the benefit of the doubt and encourage repealing of the law, Milton repeatedly words his arguments to suggest that governments may accidentally pass laws without knowing the full consequences. He writes in one example: “I could recount what I have seen and heard in other countries where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes, when I have sat among their learned men…and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought” (363).

He assumes a generally benevolent government: “we are already in good part arrived, and yet from such a steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into our principles as was beyond the manner of a Roman recovery,[1] it will be attributed…to your faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom” (338). Additionally, the stakes for Milton are not yet as high as in Mbembe’s article: the law Milton writes about deals not with the regulation of life and death, but rather of knowledge, so that minds are being subjugated, not bodies.[2] Milton assumes a benevolence that modern theory (Foucault in particular) has gone a long way to showing cannot exist.

However, Milton presents a possible reason for the distinction between early modern sovereignties and contemporary ones: the capabilities for surveillance and control differ vastly. Milton can mock the mass licensing of music, dancing, windows, balconies, garments, discourse, and people as implausible because the resources simply did not exist to observe every aspect of early modern English life (355). And who would watch the watchers? Milton also acknowledges that licensers of “infallibility and uncorruptedness” did not exist, and therefore the processes of censorship had an impracticability inherent in them. Today, however, we have learned of the Panopticon and know that a society can censure itself, making Milton’s proposed army of book and guitar-censors unnecessary. Is it a logical necessity, then, that with greater interconnectivity, firepower, and subject-managing, power must also become more self-aware? In a technological age, is accidental tyranny impossible?

Even in Milton’s time, kings were conscious of their subjects, and on the best of days, aware that they had a responsibility to govern them well. But we are speaking of power on a large scale; both Mbembe’s article and Milton’s treatise deal with powers on the national or global scale rather than the intimate and familial, as Kate writes of. And while Milton constructs Parliament as accidentally tyrannous (with the power to reverse their mistake), he also does so in service of his own agenda and to make his critique more palatable—leaving us to question whether unconscious or subconscious tyranny exists as a possibility only in the microcosm, and whether large-scale emergent powers are necessarily conscious of their tyranny.


[1] Referring to the overthrow of Charles I.


[2] The links between sovereignty and necropolitical violence begin to form, however, as control over the mind leads to control over the body. Milton’s spectre of tyranny may also be a state tyranny, not yet like the modern surveillance state but certainly carrying the connotation of unjust and excessive rule.