scholarly journals AFTER THE FREEHOLDER: REPUBLICAN AND LIBERAL THEMES IN THE WORKS OF SAMUEL LAING

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOCELYN PAUL BETTS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Central Government ◽  
International Markets ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Active Citizenship ◽  
Wage Labor ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
John Austin

Samuel Laing was a key figure in propagating both an academically respectable defense of peasant proprietors and a critique of bureaucratic central government in Victorian Britain, his writings cited and argued with by John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, and John Austin (among others). This article corrects misapprehensions that Laing was a libertarian apologist for unfettered commercialism and complacent patriotism. It situates Laing in his argumentative contexts to show him as a critic of conventional political economy who called for a “natural” society of self-governing freeholders like that he observed in Norway, but who gradually became ambivalently caught between a British commercial and aristocratic order and a Continental model of greater property diffusion and strong central government. Laing's story sheds new light on the complex afterlives of republican and civic themes in nineteenth-century Britain, and their interaction with emergent concerns over the dangers to active citizenship of both wage labor in international markets and centralizing bureaucracies.

Political Economy and the Science of Economics in Victorian Britain

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Tribe
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Access To Higher Education ◽  
Teaching And Research ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
New Science ◽  
University Life

This chapter looks at the historical understanding of political economy. It also describes the transformation of political economy as a general understanding of wealth and its distribution to a new science of economics. This transition can be linked to the expanding system of public education during the later end of the nineteenth century and the reorganisation of university life around teaching and research in modern subjects. The movement for wider access to higher education was associated with the formation of new university subjects in the humanities. Among these modern subjects, commerce and economics were prominent as new disciplines of study relevant to the modern world.

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on Women and Marriage

Utilitas ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Mendus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Radical Feminism ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Persuasive Power ◽  
Legal Equality ◽  
Positive Statement

This paper focuses on two works of nineteenth-century feminism: Harriet Taylor's essay, Enfranchisement of Women, and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women. My aim is to indicate that these texts are more radical than is usually allowed: far from being merely criticisms of the legal disabilities suffered by women in Victorian Britain, they are important moral texts which anticipate central themes within twentieth-century radical feminism. In particular, The Subjection of Women is not merely a liberal defence of legal equality; it is a positive statement of the inadequacy of ‘male” conceptions of reason and its powers. So understood, I shall argue, it coheres with Mill's other moral and political writings, and draws much of its persuasive power from the doctrines advanced in Harriet Taylor's Enfranchisement of Women.

scholarly journals JOHN STUART MILL, VICTORIAN LIBERALISM, AND THE FAILURE OF CO-OPERATIVE PRODUCTION

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOCELYN PAUL BETTS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Profit Sharing ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
Construction Of Knowledge ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Valid Form

ABSTRACTJohn Stuart Mill's support for, and predictions of, co-operative production have been taken as a coherent wedding of liberal and socialist concerns, and as drawing together later nineteenth-century political economy and working-class radicalism. Despite its evident significance, the alliance of political economy and co-operative production was, however, highly conflicted, contested, and short-lived, in ways that help to shed light on the construction of knowledge of society in nineteenth-century Britain. Mill's vision should be seen as developed in contrast to the sociological and historical perspectives of Auguste Comte and Thomas Carlyle, as an attempt to hold together political economy as a valid form of knowledge with the hope of a new social stage in which commerce would be imbued with public spirit. This ideal thus involved debate about competing social futures and the tools of prediction, as well as entering debates within political economy where it was equally embattled. Even Mill's own economic logic tended more towards support of profit-sharing than co-operative production, and hopes for the latter became significantly less persuasive with the introduction of the concept of the entrepreneur into mainstream British economics during the 1870s and 1880s.

The Long Peace of the Nineteenth Century and the Birth of Sociology

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Joas ◽  
Wolfgang Knöbl
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Research Programs ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Liberal Thought

This chapter examines how the progressive optimism nourished by liberal doctrines gradually began to take hold and how sociology as a discipline took a particularly wide variety of institutional forms and featured very different theoretical and research programs. Toward the end of the eighteenth and during the first third of the nineteenth centuries, utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and later James and John Stuart Mill were already singing the praises of free trade and its peace-promoting effects. This laid the foundations for at least one strand of liberal thought in the nineteenth century, on which early “sociologists” such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer could then build. Despite the hegemonic status of liberal doctrines, other views were always present beneath the surface. This includes Marxism, which in many respects embraced the legacy of liberalism.

John Stuart Mill

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Close Relationships ◽  
Rare Case ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
Best Friends ◽  
The Future ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Secular Life

John Stuart Mill observed in his Autobiography that he was a rare case in nineteenth-century Britain because he had not lost his religion but never had any. He was a freethinker from beginning to end. What is not often realized, however, is that Mill’s life was nevertheless impinged upon by religion at every turn. This is true both of the close relationships that shaped him and of his own thoughts. Mill was a religious sceptic, but not the kind of person which that term usually conjures up. The unexpected prominence of spirituality is not only there in Mill’s late, startling essay, ‘Theism’, in which he makes the case for hope in God and in Christ. It is everywhere—in his immediate family, his best friends, and his vision for the future. It is even there in such a seemingly unlikely place as his Logic, which repeatedly addresses religious themes. John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life is a full biography which follows one of Britain’s most well-respected intellectuals through all of the key moments in his life from falling in love to sitting in Parliament and beyond. It also explores his classic works including, On Liberty, Principles of Political Economy, Utilitarianism, and The Subjection of Women. In this well-researched study which offers original findings and insights, you will encounter the Mill you never knew; the Mill that even some of his closest disciples never knew. This is John Stuart Mill, the Saint of Rationalism—a secular life and a spiritual life.

scholarly journals The Hostility of William Stanley Jevons toward John Stuart Mill

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-99
Author(s):  
David Stack
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Fourth Dimension ◽  
Psychological Dimension

This article explores the basis for the well-known hostility of William Stanley Jevons toward John Stuart Mill, and offers an alternative explanation to those which have hitherto dominated discussion. After reviewing the importance of disagreements over economic doctrine and questions of scientific method, as well as the “psychological dimension” to the hostility, the article makes the case for considering a “fourth dimension”: the centrality of religion and, more particularly, an urgent fear of religious unbelief in the 1860s and 1870s. The article concludes that by identifying religion at the root of Jevons’s hostility to Mill we are reminded of the need to routinely consider religion and religious concerns when analyzing later nineteenth-century political economy.

John Stuart Mill and the Catholic Question in 1825

Utilitas ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce L. Kinzer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
University System ◽  
Political Journalism ◽  
Single Piece ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Irish Question ◽  
Land Question ◽  
Made In

John Stuart Mill's connection with the Irish question spanned more than four decades and embraced a variety of elements. Of his writings on Ireland, the best known are his forty-three Morning Chronicle articles of 1846–47 composed in response to the Famine, the section of the Principles of Political Economy that treats the issue of cottier tenancy and the problem of Irish land, and, most conspicuous of all, his radical pamphlet England and Ireland, published in 1868. All of these writings take the land question as their paramount concern. The fairly absorbing interest in the subject disclosed by Mill during the second half of the 1840s arose from the fortuitous conjuncture of the disaster unfolding in Ireland and his engagement with the principles of political economy. Between 1848 and 1871 Mill's Principles went through seven editions (excluding the People's edition) and the substantive revisions he made in the section on Ireland from one edition to the next illumine both the essence and the accidentals of his bearing towards that country. Mill's cogent and controversial advocacy of fixity of tenure in England and Ireland constituted the heart of his answer to the Fenian challenge. The land question aside, Mill was drawn into the battle over the Irish university system in the 1860s largely through his friendship with John Elliot Cairnes, professor of jurisprudence and political economy at the Queen's College Galway. On this subject, however, Mill wrote almost nothing for publication. The longest single piece he ever drafted on Ireland was his first, an essay that predated the Morning Chronicle articles by two decades. In his own bibliography this essay is referred to as ‘An article on the Catholic Question which appeared in the Parliamentary Review for 1825’. Although the essay of 1825 could justly have borne the same title as the pamphlet of 1868, the particulars of course differ markedly. Ireland never ceased to pose a question during the course of the nineteenth century, but the dynamics shaping that question changed much between the mid-1820s and the late 1860s. Even so, the 1825 essay prefigures something of Mill's later involvement with the Irish question, and also invites examination as a quite remarkable piece of political journalism from the pen of a young man not yet twenty, who would subsequently establish himself as the most influential thinker of his generation.

John Stuart Mill

2021 ◽  
pp. 137-159
Author(s):  
Manolis Manioudis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Economic History ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical School ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Factual Data

This article attempts to illustrate the interrelations between theory and history in John Stuart Mill’s political economy. Mill follows a stages theory from the tradition of the Scottish historical school and viewed history as an essential part in understanding economic phenomena. The article stresses the affinities between Mill and the Scottish historical school while at the same time showing how Mill moves between theory and history to verify his views or to show the limit of his economic analysis. This movement, viewed as a part of his attempt to sketch out a middle way between Ricardianism and inductivism, provided Mill the opportunity to make an extensive use of factual data before the professionalization of economic history proper in the late nineteenth century.

Herbert Spencer and the Political Economy of Mean-Spiritedness Revived

1999 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-143
Author(s):  
Rick Tilman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Rhetorical Question ◽  
Policy Issues ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Social Theorist ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Century Thought

In recent years the reputation of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) has undergone a transformation. Indeed, until the mid-1970s the answer to the rhetorical question, “Who reads Spencer now?” would surely have been “hardly anyone.” However, since then sociologist Jonathan Turner, intellectual historian Robert Bannister, political scientist Robert Perrin and dozens of economists and humanists have contributed to reconsideration of his role in nineteenth-century thought. They have also reinterpreted the corpus of his work and suggested new ways to utilize his contributions as a social theorist. Most important for our purposes is their effort to demonstrate that his stances on policy issues were not as mean-spirited as his critics have claimed. Indeed, Bannister, for example, forcefully argues that neither Spencer nor his American contemporary, William Graham Summer, were as consistently in favor of laissez faire or as harsh in their attitudes toward the underprivileged and the lower classes as scholarly convention once had it.

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