Very recommendable!
"The notion that genuine liberty is predicated upon [wise and] virtuous self-government was an accepted ideal among many of the United States' founders. During the Founding era, this ideal was perhaps best expressed in a 1791 letter by the Irish-born British parliamentarian Edmund Burke, who wrote: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites . . . It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Burke's convictions and concerns were anticipated by the English poet and Interregnum statesman John Milton (1608-74). ..."
Following is a great description of men's license and its symbiotic relation to tyranny:
"Milton's discussion of liberty, license, and virtuous self-regulation is perhaps most explicit in his regicide tract, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, written just before the January 30, 1649 execution of King Charles I. In this tract's opening paragraph, Milton asserts: "For indeed none can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license; which never hath more scope or more indulgence than under Tyrants." According to Milton, "bad men" are "all naturally servile," they desire "to have the public State conformably governed to the inward vicious rule, by which they govern themselves," and they "color over their base compliances" with "the falsified names of Loyalty, and Obedience." In sum, Milton argues that tyrants and bad men get along quite well because bad men, loving license, governed by vice, and incapable of self-regulation, do not threaten tyrants but contentedly submit to them as long as they do not disturb their self-indulgence. ..."
I believe, Friedrich von Hayek made similar arguments in his writings. The Road to Serfdom contains some of it if I am not mistaken.
John Milton on liberty, license, and virtuous self-government | Acton Institute
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