Samson in Labour offers the first comprehensive discussion of John Milton’s engagement with an English constitutional crisis of labour as reflected in Samson Agonistes. Taihei Hanada argues that the secularizing of English politics in the century after the Restoration (1660) was due to a profound change in the conception and organization of labour. Drawing on the “theologico-political” dimension of early modern labour, Hanada reassesses Milton’s signification of labour as constituting a form of God-given freedom, putting Milton’s ideas in dialogue with the writings of other early modern thinkers (such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke) on commerce, labour, slavery, land, work and aesthetic form.
Samson in Labour is a powerful, startling and intellectually rich encounter set among philosophy, economic theory and Milton, engaging a range of powerful thinkers and theorists, from Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben and Max Weber to Karl Marx, Aristotle, Giambattista Vico, Hegel, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Kantorowicz. Hanada tackles the origins and nature of modernity, secularization, economic relationships, property, time, colonization and freedom of choice, centered on the key question: “Why, then, did Milton write Paradise Lost?”
