ABSTRACT This article examines Leo Strauss’s understanding of Milton’s Areopagitica, in particular Milton’s idea that “reason is but choosing,” which Strauss took to be the work’s central thesis. Strauss saw Milton as an exponent of the virtues of public reasoning, which Strauss treated as a great folly of modern (as opposed to classical) thinkers. Strauss’s Milton was simple-minded on the issue of thinking in public. But Milton, this article argues, understood the exercise of reason in public as a difficult and dangerous practice, despite the fact that he was calling for the free publication of contradictory and conflicting pamphlets on the subject of religion. Reconstructing the intellectual context of Milton’s claim that “reason is but choosing” illustrates how Miltonic reason was hardly a simple matter, but one connected to an ongoing and potentially endless project of personal education and transformation. Intellectual freedom in public life was simply the enabling condition of this project.
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft (Sun,) studied this question.