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Historians of ideas usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; but there was as well a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine.
--Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
I.
In the 1640s and 1650s, while Milton was earning a name for himself through the achievements of his "left hand," a prodigious number of utopias were being written and published in England.(1) There were as many as two hundred sects in England in the middle of the century, and almost every sect had its utopia.(2) Most famous among these were Gabriel Plattes's A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria (1641), Samuel Gott's Nova Solyma (1648), Gerrard Winstanley's The Law of Freedom (1652), and James Harrington's Oceana (1656). Milton's response to utopianism was divided. In Areopagitica he rejected imaginary commonwealths as inefficacious, claiming that to imagine an ideal commonwealth was "to sequester out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian polities, which never can be drawn into use
and
will not mend our condition." But the previous year in An Apology against a Pamphlet . . . against Smectymnuus, Milton praised More and Bacon for "that great and noble invention which the greatest and sublimest wits in sundry ages, Plato in Critias, and our two famous countreymen, the one in his Utopia, the other in his new atlantis, chose."(3) In this essay I will suggest that Milton's equivocal admiration for the utopian model persists in Paradise Lost.
Connections between utopia and Paradise Lost have usually been reserved for discussions of Eden, but as Barbara Lewalski has argued, the most ideal aspects of Eden are pastoral rather than utopian.(4) Instead it is the commonwealth of Heaven-populous, fortified, and perhaps the least appealing of all the "placeless" places in Milton's poetry--that most closely resembles the model of utopia in Paradise Lost.(5) My argument is that Milton's Heaven borrows its secrecy and institutional rigor from other English utopias.
Heaven is most fully described in the archangel Raphael's descent to Eden, which spans books 5-8 of Paradise Lost. Here all of the topoi of the utopian masterplot are present: the traveler from a distant...