Paradise Lost and the Politics of the Corporation

This essay considers the effects of corporate activity on the life and work of John Milton. It analyses the ways in which the moral certainties of Paradise Lost are expressed through mercantile metaphors, especially the corporate idea of debt and credit. It further argues that Milton considers virtue through the manner of collective organisation – to be part of an equitable collective is to be virtuous (and vice versa). He therefore turns to the language of the body corporate in Paradise Lost when describing angelic society: this heavenly corporation is the fulfilment of Milton’s ideas of civic virtue, a modulation of his disappointment with the republic in England into an idealised collective.