Nationalism's Double-Bind: Individualism and the Global Implications of Milton's Nationalism

Abstract

abstract:This essay argues that the emergence of the modern nation-state in the seventeenth century paradoxically produced or made possible the kind of individualism or sense of self, specifically the confidence in individual agency and human rights, on which globalism now seems to rest secure. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of Milton, a claim the article tries to illustrate with a comparison of the Treatise of Civil Power with The Readie and Easie Way.