Word: himmelfarber
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...which Ford and his top aides can drink in the views of eminent intellectuals (TIME, Dec. 23). At the third such session last Saturday, Ford conferred informally with four people of diverse interests: Thomas Sowell, a black U.C.L.A. economist, author of a forthcoming book on race and economics; Gertrude Himmelfarb, professor of history at the City University of New York; Edward Banfield, a specialist in urban affairs who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and wrote the iconoclastic The Unheavenly City; and Herbert Storing, a University of Chicago political scientist and expert on the founding fathers...
...central figure in Himmelfarb's thesis is Harriet Taylor, the imposing feminist whom the not so liberated Mill married two years after her first husband's death in 1849. Mill just met her in 1830, beginning 21 long and proper years of platonic intimacy. Widow of a prosperous merchant and mother of three children, this humorless firebrand longed for the Irish to stage a revolution to match France's, adding: "The Irish would, I should hope, not.be frightened but urged on by some loss of life...
...Himmelfarb indicates, Mill was not only "deferential" to Harriet's every wish but "respectful of her every opinion, quick to reverse himself on any issue." In the dedication to On Liberty, he characterized Harriet as "the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings." And Himmelfarb sees enough of Harriet's single-minded radicalism in the essay to pronounce her a collaborator in its spirit if not in its prose...
Natural Feeling. Nobody reads Mill today. If people did, Himmelfarb warns, they would discover a man who is often in contradiction with Harriet's Mill, the author of On Liberty. This other Mill spoke suspiciously of the "desires and impulses" and the "natural feeling" that the Liberty Mill so glorified. Mill understood that human nature was so far from naturally good that the ultimate object of education should be "restraining discipline." The man to whom conformity, obedience and even law were dirty words could demand, in another mood, the retention of capital punishment and call for a penal code...
...short, a conservative Mill dwelt within the liberal Mill, and in fact tended to dominate everywhere but in On Liberty. Here, Himmelfarb insists that Mill, under the goading of the formidable Harriet, became more radical than he realized or wanted to be. In extending the common piety about freedom of speech to freedom of action, he committed an act of intellectual subversion for which the 20th century has paid with the impossible drunken dream of total freedom. Lord Acton's dictum -power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely-we have learned all too well. It is time...