Word: milles
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LIBERTY AND LIBERALISM: THE CASE OF JOHN STUART MILL by GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB 345 pages. Knopf...
What a delicious irony Gertrude Himmelfarb suggests: behind every hippie crying "Do your own thing" and "Let it all hang out" stands an uptight Victorian with tics and twitches. Her Exhibit A is that pre-eminent Victorian John Stuart Mill, child protégé and author of On Liberty (1854). Himmelfarb, professor of history at the City University of New York and author of Victorian Minds, constructs a careful case about Mill as the sponsor of what she takes to be the fallacious modern argument that since liberty is good, the more liberty the better...
...begins with Mill's revealing vocabulary. His approved words-originality, spontaneity, diversity, choice -smack of today's obsession with individual expression for its own sake in ways she scarcely needs to emphasize. So do the proposals the words support. Mill's gospel was that the individual could fulfill himself only in a climate of maximum freedom, and that the fulfillment of the individual was the supreme purpose in life. Could anything sound more contemporary? Indeed, Professor Himmelfarb dares to say that On Liberty has "far more" in common with our times than with Mill...
...Mill write On Liberty when he did? Contrary to still-popular opinion, Victorian England was far from a world of class suppression and psychological repression. The established church had slipped in moral authority. Even sex was under a less terrible taboo than has sometimes been assumed. That has been proven by recent explorations of the pervasiveness of Victorian pornography (albeit hidden). Mill was preaching liberty to the converted, Hirnmelfarb argues, except in the area of women's liberation. In his essay The Subjection of Women, Mill protested that "the social subordination of women" stood out as "an isolated fact...
...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...