Troubling appropriations

JS Mill, liberalism, and the virtues of uncertainty

Bibliographic Data

ID6260618
AuthorsMenaka Philips (0000-0001-5097-0185, Tulane University, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume18
Issue1
Pages68-88
Publication date2019-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEuropean Journal of Political Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1474-8851 • E-ISSN: 1741-2730
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1474885116631201
OpenAlexW2397710275
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited34

Described as the ‘exemplary liberal’, John Stuart Mill is employed to support a dizzying array of different, even competing visions of liberalism. That he has been so widely appropriated is certainly a result of the plural perspectives and tensions embedded in Mill’s political writings. Yet, while Mill scholars have generally been attuned to these tensions, contemporary critics of liberalism have been less careful in their uses of his work. Mill is used as an archetype of liberalism, and is often depicted as a less complex thinker than is justified. He is now a popular target in debates concerning the dilemmas of liberal individualism, and the inadequacies of liberal approaches to culture, harm, and to progress in the context of empire. Such studies present Mill as a thinker driven by ideological certainty, whereas he is more appropriately regarded as someone moved by political uncertainty. Drawing on his Autobiography, I recover Mill’s appreciation for the uncertainties of political thought and action to provide a more complex, and capacious view of Mill’s work than is allowed in contemporary studies of liberalism. My examination thus troubles those contemporary appropriations, and suggests that scholarly focus on liberalism can unduly restrict interpretive work in political theory

Aesthetics · Classical liberalism · Context (archaeology · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Ideology · Individualism · Law and economics · Liberalism · Mill · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Vision · European Political History Analysis · History · Law · Metal-Catalyzed Oxygenation Mechanisms · Philosophy · Political Theory and Influence