I’m usually reading two or three books anyway.

However, I can’t believe that clown thought that (socialist type) liberalism has some kind of ringing intellectual argument . I’ve yet to hear one…

Now classical liberalism is different. It is basically what conservatism is now, but I guess we’ll get into that later.

Also, unless it’s been mentioned above, I highly recommend Thomas Sowell’s “The Vision of the Annointed” – a veritable catalogue of leftist failures and philosophical inconsistencies beginning in the first half of the 20th Century (and even before.)

(And sorry, I usually have time to read all the other comments before posting, but not always. Wish I could get paid to do this stuff, but I got to work…)

Theodore Dalrymple’s “In Praise of Prejudice” describing how Mill’s wrting is indeed a prejudice against prejudice put’s Mill’s work in the dock and convicts it handily. For instance,

“Conformity to any rule is felt as a wound to personal sovereignty, as is the exercise of any authority exterior to that of the ego. Far from settling questions of the rightful exercise of power of one person over another, the attitude engendered by [even] a partial reading of Mill (or handed down as a sort of philosophical rumor) turns all human interactions into questions of power.”

Anyway, Dalrymple (a psuedonymous retired British doctor who healed the physical and emotional wounds of a prison hospital and a UK slum, among other things) has two or three chapters anhialating Mill. Besides, isn’t JSM a hero of the left?

Still, Dalrymple’s “Life at the Bottom”, “Not with a Bang but a Whimper”, “Our Culture: What’s left of it” and other books are highly instructive because they show plainly where Daniel Hannon insists the U.S. surely must not go — into an all powerful, nationalized healthcare, gun-banned, un-Christian, morrally relativistic, post-modern nightmare.

every man and woman becoming a sort of Cartesian interpreter of the world, i.e. trying to render every judgement from first principles, a practice which is next to impossible to execute in real ilfe. Not to mention the fact that if everyone has to reinvent the wheel every day, no time will be left for actual knowledge building. (Or anything else, for that matter.)

It also provides a learned segue into post-modern deconstructionism and the susequent assault on our Founding Fathers, not to mention the very tenets of freedom and individual responsibilty, among others, which is so prevelant in today’s neo-socialist academy. It is just such attacks which the left uses to undermine American exceptionalism and makes us, especially our children, suseptible to the cult of personality, i.e. Prez mmmmm Obeyme.

Besides, his contention (in “On Liberty”) that truth can never fully be known (moral absolutes aside for the nonce) is contradictory to the most basic conservative beliefs. Indeed, it was Mill’s father who believed that “moral action could be reduced to a mathematical formula.”

It was only after reading Wordsworth and Coleridge (and after having an existential crisis in the form of a nervous breakdown at age 20) that Mill Jr. attempted to “render radical individualism the most social of creeds and utilitarianism the most individualistic.” He thereby reconciled “the romantic cult of the individual with the puritanical utilitarianism of his father,” basically for his (Mill Jr’s) own sake.

Although rhetorically powerful and therefore highly appealing to the intelligentisia, according to Dalrymple, even a cursory glance at such a contention renders it foolish in the utmost. It revealed a quite “unrealistic view of both human beings and the society in which they lived.”

Philosophical quandaries resolved by handy, yet flawed, rhetorical expedients taken to their logical conclusion are maniacally dangerous to all concerned (think national socialism, communist socialism, etc.) Can you imagine a more “radical individualist” than Obama or a more “moral[ly] utilitarian[istic] policy than the provision of healthcare based on who has the most productive (useful to society) years left?

Unfortunately, most Western social policy can find its roots in Mill, which is the very thing we now strive mightily against. As you point out, without the context of 19th century Christianity, it can easily be, and indeed has been, twisted into a convenient philosophical excuse for license.

I’ve been out of town, thus the delay in my response. Sorry for the inconvenience. (And yes, I was out in the woods with no cell reception, much less internet.)