V. James Mill's Politics: A Rejoinder
1971; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1017/s0018246x00023335
ISSN1469-5103
Autores Tópico(s)Emile Durkheim and Sociology
ResumoI am grateful to Professor W. R. Carr for giving my article on James Mill more attention than it deserved. I had many doubts about its suggestions, and more about the way they were expressed, and had hoped that an expert critic versed in Mill might help to remove them. His ‘James Mill's Politics Reconsidered: Parliamentary Reform and the Triumph of Truth’ contains so much that I can accept and profit from, that I am only at a loss to account for the captious vehemence of his language. For our arguments do not seem to me so much to conflict, as to cross and diverge. I was concerned with the Essay on Government as a practical document. I argued that it had less bearing on the movement for parliamentary reform culminating in the Act of 1832 than had been supposed. The effect of his criticism is to remove the Essay into a world of abstract speculation, even more divorced from the problems which beset the parliamentary reformers in the 1820s than I had claimed. Probably he would not admit this, because his real charge is not that I think Mill and his followers made no practical contribution to the Reform Act, but that I have not, as he has, pieced together the various parts of Mill's thought into that mosaic of ‘glittering clarity’ cemented by ‘strenuous logic’ which he conceives it to be.
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