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Comment: Overcoming His-story? Ms. Hughes's Treatment of Mr. Mill

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

George Feaver
George Feaver
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

There is something intrepidly parochial in Patricia Hughes's account of Mill's views. Her very opening statement, with its new vision of society, its “emerging social forces,” its principals “trapped by traditional influences,” sets the tone for the enterprise which follows—an historical melodrama with J. S. Mill, the patron saint of contemporary liberalism, reborn in Canada without his aspergillum, an affable enough character, a sort of Bruno Gerussi of the political thought set, his do-gooder's heart generally in the right place but his head usually muddled: an admirably earnest figure, even, who some how always misses the point but, up to now, has gotten away with it. Our aspiring script-writer intends to set things right, to show how we can redo the storyline (which may require substituting another nineteenth century great in the leading role), so as to combine passion and theory in a really radical vision of a fully liberated society.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , September 1979 , pp. 543 - 554
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1979

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References

1 See, for example, Wolfe, Willard, From Radicalism to Socialism: Men and Ideas in the Formation of Fabian Socialist Doctrines (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

2 My reference here is to Gilman's, Charlotte PerkinsHerland: A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel (1st pub. 1915, New York: Pantheon Books, 1979)Google Scholar.

3 Cf. Marx, Karl, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. by McLellan, David (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 269 (with apologies)Google Scholar.

4 In Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. by MacGibbon, James (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), 94Google Scholar.

5 Throughout the remainder of the paper, my references are to the Mill editions used by Dr. Hughes in her article. Italics are my own, and I will hereafter identify the Mill texts and pagination in my own text as they occur.

6 McCloskey, H. J., John Stuart Mill: A Critical Study (London: Macmillan, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Rose, Michael, The Relief of Poverty, 1834–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1972)Google Scholar. Rose warns that such figures are an unreliable guide to the real extent of poverty, as the pioneering studies of Booth, Rowntree and others later suggested. To a lesser extent, of course, the definition and extensiveness of poverty remain politically controversial down to our own day.

8 See “Textual Introduction,” in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. 2, ed. by Robson, J. M. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), lxxix–lxxxGoogle Scholar.

9 Oakeshott, Michael, “The Tower of Babel,” in his Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962), 59Google Scholar. This disposition may lie at the basis of Dr. Hughes's critical account of Mill's views on democracy, which I think it is fair to say seem to her to lack enough participatory emphasis. But as John Robson comments, “Mill is still an advocate of representative democracy, as were his father and Bentham, but his modifications are more significant than his allegiance; many men are democrats, but few are thoughtful and careful democrats.” See Robson's, The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 244Google Scholar. Compare Mill's approach with that of, say, Macpherson, C. B., The Real World of Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966)Google Scholar and more recently, his The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (New York, Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, of which Maurice Cranston has declared: “Professor Macpherson has… succeeded where Woodrow Wilson failed: he has made the world safe for democracy by the adroit device of proposing that almost all known forms of government may be classified as democratic.” Cranston, Maurice, The Mask of Politics (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 10Google Scholar.

10 Reproduced in Robson, John (ed.), John Stuart Mill: A Selection of His Works (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966), 422Google Scholar.