Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton.

Blair Hoxby. Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton.

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. xii + 320 pp. index. illus. $40. ISBN: 0-300-09378-0.

In Mammon's Music, Blair Hoxby effectively interweaves two projects: he maps the emerging discourse of economics occasioned by the commercial revolution of seventeenth-century England, and he rereads the poetry of Milton and a few other contemporaries against the background of this discourse. In both projects Hoxby's book is revelatory. In the first case, while the period's economic history has been much studied, no one has so thoroughly investigated its discursive dimension. In the second, Hoxby will surprise many readers who assume Milton's lack of interest in economics, as he demonstrates convincingly that the poet is a sophisticated economic thinker who engaged his period's great economic themes throughout his career.

Hoxby's attention to the discourse of economics as a "discipline in the making" (5) begins with the trade depression of the 1620s, which led to the writing of "newly sophisticated economic treatises that had a profound influence on English society" (2). These influences included a new identification of national interest with economic productivity and a new emphasis on the economy as a dynamic system of production, trade, and consumption. Milton's initial response was negative, for in his 1634 Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle the new economic discourse is taken up by the evil enchanter Comus and roundly rejected by the masque's heroine, who prefers an older discourse "predicated on the economy's being static rather than dynamic" (23).

As Milton's career evolved in its middle phase from poetry to pamphleteering in support of the Puritan revolution, he shifted ground radically, enthusiastically embracing the dynamic model, applying it not to commodities but to the open marketplace of ideas. In the 1644 Areopagitica, "traditionally suspect qualities like flexibility and opportunism" (44) become positives in the marketplace's search for Truth through unfettered production and exchange. Similarly, Milton's regicide tracts and defenses of the English people use the new economic discourse to link political and religious tyranny to the state's destructive suppression of market forces.

England's next serious trade depression began soon before the death of Cromwell in 1658. This confluence of events allowed Royalists to portray the monarchy's restoration as a necessary condition for prosperity in an empire based on trade rather than dominion, reversing the new economic discourse's political valence. Milton countered, in the 1660 Readie and Easie Way, with a proposal for a model of governance borrowing features from the United Provinces and the American colonies. Hoxby, rejecting the received wisdom, which finds little value in the tract's politics, finds instead a sophisticated vision of a dynamic federalism constructed on free market principles.

Following the Restoration, the ideal of a trade-based empire dominated English economic discourse, receiving its most eloquent early advocacy in Dryden's 1667 Annus Mirabilis. Hoxby argues that the 1667 Paradise Lost was "a direct response on Milton's part to Dryden's poem" (151) and, more generally, an attack upon the Restoration regime's commercial imperialism. Hoxby shrewdly avoids the monological approach of a number of critics who dwell on Satan's association with trade and empire. He concludes that while "largely negative" on trade, the poem is, nevertheless, based on the "profoundly abstract and mobile conception of the individual and the community" (177) central to the new economic discourse.

The Great Fire of London in 1666 further aligned the Restoration regime with the cause of trade, allowing the labor of rebuilding a ruined London to become identified with the "work" of the restored monarchy. Hoxby sees in the 1671 closet drama Samson Agonistes Milton's "antagonism toward the discourse of work, building, and production" (228) used to support the regime's imperial-commercial project. Responding to the increasing tendency of economic analysis to portray the market as equivalent to a natural force, and so to de-emphasize "the moral evaluation of internal states" (232), the poet seeks to liberate the notions of "labor" and "work" from the economic sphere. Milton does so by both displaying the troublesome mental labor Samson must apply to the problem of privately received divine impulses and, through the poem's studiously sustained "profound ambiguity" (228), demanding "interpretive labor of the private reader" (232).

PATRICK J. COOK

George Washington University