John Stuart Mill Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Stefan Collini

Critical Essay by Stefan Collini

SOURCE: "From Sectarian Radical to National Possession: John Stuart Mill in English Culture," in A Cultivated Mind: Essays on J. S. Mill Presented to John M. Robson, edited by Michael Laine, University of Toronto Press, 1991, pp. 242-72.

In the following essay, Collini traces Mill's posthumous reputation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century to argue that Mill's gradual incorporation into Britain's intellectual canon marks the consolidation of Britain's nationalist self-definition during this period of high imperialism.

In a fine passage in his essay on Malthus, Keynes celebrates, with a nicely judged sense of pride in his own intellectual ancestry, what he calls "the English tradition of humane science." It is a tradition, he suggests, which has been marked "by an extraordinary continuity of feeling, if I may so express it, from the eighteenth century to the present time—the tradition which is suggested by the names of Locke, Hume, Adam...
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