Kirjahaku

Bruce L. Kinzer provides the first comprehensive investigation of J.S. Mill's multifaceted engagement with the Irish question. Mill, the pre-eminent thinker of his generation, sought to come to terms with the fundamental issues inherent in British-Irish politics. The Irish famine, the question of land reform, the controversy over higher education, and the various dimensions of the Fenian challenge, hallmark the landscape of Mill's more than forty years of writing on the Irish question. Kinzer's discussion of these episodes pays close attention to the ebb and flow of the issues as they touched upon the English political consciousness. Many of the factors shaping Mill's handling of the Irish question are reflective of a changing English political environment, one in which he sought to create for himself an influential place as radical critic and purposeful agent. This study argues that Mill's perspective on the Irish question, his trenchant assaults on English parochialism notwithstanding, had a decidedly Anglocentric tilt. The condition of Ireland mattered to him mainly for what it said about the condition of England.

When John Stuart Mill was elected in the "blue-ribbon" liberal constituency of Westminster, there was great interest in seeing how a man of intellect would stand the practical political test. The watershed parliament of 1865-8 in which he served saw the growing polarization of politics between the new Liberal Party and the Conservatives. Mill gained greater eminence - and notoriety - by promoting women's suffrage, proportional and working-class representation, Irish land reform, and racial justice, and generall attempting to radicalize the Liberal party. But in 1868 he was defeated in controversial circumstances, and returned to private life. This detailed study places the political and personal beliefs and behaviour of Britain's leading philosopher in the context of the crucial changes resulting from the growing democratization of society and culture in Britain. His electorial triumph and subsequent defeat ate studies as revealing both individual character and public perception. Central is the effect on Mill's reputation of his insistence on moral principle in tension with flexible political pragmatism. The authors also cast light on election campaigning in a key urban constituency being transformed from a radical stronghold to a conservative bastion.