- Paperback: 272 pages
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0300096100
- ISBN-13: 978-0300096101
- Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 13.7 x 1.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 295 g
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4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bromwich and Kateb Edition is Very Helpful., Jan 19 2009
By Kevin Currie-Knight "Education Grad Student" - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
I ihave read Mill's On Liberty three times now. The Bromwich and Kateb version is the most helpful, as we not only get to read Mill's essay, but 6 supplementary essays - two "introductions" and four sometimes critical "reinterpretations" by respected theorists.Milll's basic point is simple: people should be left free to think and do as they please unless what they are doing causes actual harm to others. Mill's essay is spent both giving reasons for this principle, and exlporing what the principle means in practice.
He offers a plurality of reasons for his libertarian ideas, some utilitarian in nature and some based on (what some might call) natural law. Not only does freedom of action and thought encourage innnovation, keep public discussion vigorous, and lead to a more effective social network than government incursion, but people just-plain prefer directing their own lives to being directed from outside.
Mill gets into sticky territory, however, when he talks about the libertarian principle in concrete terms, as his distinction between what is private and what is public is often less clear than he might want. Should persons be free to tell others to do harm to themselves? Yes. Should parents be free not to educate their children? No. Should "vice-merchants" like bars, gambling parlors, and pornographers be free to conduct business without heavy government regulation? No. Should people be free to marry a plurality of spouses? If mormon, yes. If British, no.
My biggest criticism - and a criticism offered in Richard Posner and Jeane Bethke Elshtain's essays - is that Mill is all over the map when his principle is "put to the real world" because the distinction between public and private is just-plain fuzzy. Another interesting criticism, brought up in Elshtain's essay, is that Mill demonstrates a very unjustified bias in favor of experiment over tradition (where the former seems always presumed inferior to the latter).
In short, I like Mill's essay but see it as an edifice built on not-quite-solid sand. Mill relies on seperate categories, public and private, that are just not clear and distinct enough to be distinct. (While Dewey may have gone too far in the "all acts are social" direction, I think Dewey hit closer to the truth.) This is why the six supplementary essays in this edition are a nice touch.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nice Condition, Feb 13 2012
By AMS - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: On Liberty (Rethinking the Western Tradition) (Paperback)
Book is in great condition and arrived promptly. I have not had a chance to actually read the book yet (it is for a class I am taking).
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