This book began in Beijing, China in 1987. My students there lent human substance to what had been previously only a hypothetical proposition: that many of us in the United States were teaching or being taught a badly skewed version of Milton. The Milton to whom the students at Peking University responded was, as Joan Bennett has described him, a radical humanist, who not only hated tyranny and superstition but who, unlike more quiescent intellectuals and artists, put himself on the line fighting against them. That last is important, since Milton's ethics, social agenda, and, I shall argue, artistic and a esthetic expressions imply each other and express an open-ended tolerance, in the societal and structural senses of that term.

My students in China, then struggling with rigorous state censorship, deeply admired Areopagitica. It has been argued recently that every grant of liberty rests on an implicit exclusion or limitation of that liberty. Freedom of expression is always already censorship. Yet these students understood, and brought me to understand, that while social policy may always set limits to freedom, differences in degree are of much greater practical moment than some theoretically minded Western Milton scholars seem willing to recognize. Milton, for all his idealism, was a practical man, and a practical champion of liberty. The students at Peking University revered him for that. Living under a totalitarian regime is in some ways an excellent preparation for Milton studies, especially when the government is willing to end one's life for advocating too stubbornly a larger degree of individual liberty or for challenging the absolutist ideology by which it governs.