The Laissez Faire Political Vision of John Milton in Paradise Lost

John Milton's Paradise Lost, a work subject to an indefinite variety of readings, is here dissected to reveal the nature of Milton's political epistemology. Using his prose as the soil from which his ideas sprang and the whirlwind political climate of seventeenth century England as the catalyst of these ideas, the goal is to connect the implied political content of Paradise Lost with corresponding points in the prose and actual events of Milton's time, with the intent to form a blueprint of Milton's "political vision." Eden and Heaven from Paradise Lost offer a link between labor without constraints and the rewards of upward mobility, thus anticipating capitalism. The result is a political ideology which warrants comparison with the economic theory of laissez faire.