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    John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand
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    John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand
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    John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand
    Ebook924 pages20 hours

    John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand

    By Richard Reeves

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A young activist and highly-educated Cambridge Union debater, Mill would become in time the highest-ranked English thinker of the nineteenth century, the author of the landmark essay On Liberty and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his revolutionary, opinionated age. As a journalist he fired off a weekly article on Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve free-speech and opposed slavery, and, in his private life, pursued for two decades a love affair with another man's wife.

    To understand Mill and his contribution, Richard Reeves explores his life and work in tandem. His book is a riveting and authoritative biography of a man raised to promote happiness, whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and liberty for all.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtlantic Books
    Release dateFeb 9, 2015
    ISBN9781782397137
    Unavailable
    John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand
    Author

    Richard Reeves

    Richard Reeves is the author of presidential bestsellers, including President Nixon and President Kennedy, acclaimed as the best nonfiction book of the year by Time magazine. A syndicated columnist and winner of the American Political Science Association's Carey McWilliams Award, he lives in New York and Los Angeles.

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    Reviews for John Stuart Mill

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      This is pretty much everything you could ask for in a biography of Mill. It covers the whole spectrum, from his personal life to his work to the intellectual and political contexts in which he did it, and does so with sympathy and verve. You could do much worse for a history of the progress and development of liberal reform in Victorian England, which is appropriate since his ideas were so central to it. What's unique here is that the author makes it clear that Mill was much more than a man of ideas, and that his was a throughgoingly humanist life, in which he was willing to put his fortune and reputation on the line to fight for his beliefs, even when the times were not yet ripe and the odds weren't in his favor. The one strange exception to his universal generosity and esteem was his family, and it was a bit jarring to learn that someone who I admire so much and who seemed so far ahead of his time on so many issues, could be so callous to some of the people closest to him in life, albeit for complicated reasons arising from his nonconformist beliefs and his famed relationship with Harriet Taylor. That's a good lesson though, and reinforces the need to judge the personal, political, and intellectual spheres separately and on their own merits.
    • 5/5
      J S MILL – “The most open-minded man in England”Although he was a Liberal, don’t get confused by his ‘open-mindedness’ when leading Victorian Liberal William Gladstone labelled the great John Stuart Mill. I suspect all students will have tremendous affection for Mill even though they may not care for liberals.In this short review, I will concentrate on the value of the book for the jurisprudence undergraduate because Richard Reeves has produced the first proper and worthwhile study of Mill for 50 years which will be of great benefit to scholars aiming for a ‘First’.The Content of the BookThe first thing to do is look at the index at the back because the fifteen chapters, plus the prologue and epilogue, give you the essence of the man as a human being whilst some careful cross-referencing with the likes of Bentham and Co. will give you your legal learning and quotes. Look specifically at chapters 11(‘On Liberty’) and 12 (‘To Hell I Will Go’) because Reeves offers some useful twenty-first century quotable insights into our “Victorian Firebrand” and some of his overt political failings such as his opposition to the introduction of the secret ballot! Frankly, I have never thought of Mill as a firebrand as the world he left us with was unquestionably better for his efforts as Reeves acknowledges... and, as he concludes, it still is.UTILITARIANISMThis masterly work gives Mill his proper place in jurisprudence and the wider field for his utilitarianism, described by Reeves as “a word with a divided personality, meaning one thing in common use and the opposite in formal philosophy”. What I found particularly inspiring with this biography is the political and historic context in which Mill has been placed because, to understand the value of philosophy and the importance of jurisprudence either as a tutor or learner, is clearly to understand also the historical period in which the thoughts first prevailed, and I am not talking Plato here. Mr Reeves manages to succeed with his task magnificently throughout the 487 pages and the massive details contained in the notes afterwards. Of particular delight, as a break from the prose, are the splendid series of illustrations and the photographs which firmly place this book at the forefront of both legal and political biography. It is a work which I felt at home with from the outset, written in readable English with the detail needed (and without the footnotes). I am sure that great American, Benjamin Franklin, whom Mill so clearly admired, would agree entirely.As some commentators have acknowledged, this work is long overdue but it does give us the complexities and contradictions of the man together with his ideals which many of us would like to have if we had our feet firmly taken out of the cemented ground. Will Hutton feels the book comes at a timely moment ‘when both socialism and liberalism have lost their way’! Hmm! I would not really equate today’s Liberal Democrats or New Labour (if it still is under Gordon Brown) in any way, shape or form with John Stuart Mill- Mill was a man of his time just as my forebears were liberals and radicals, whilst I am a radical Tory in the modern David Cameron tradition as contemporary politics continues to be turned on its head ideologically. THE BABYI will end where Reeves begins...which is a defining moment for Mill in the 1823 St James’s Park walk and discovery of the newly killed baby which led to the sort of behaviour which singles Mill out as the highest-ranking philosopher of his century and someone we need a great many more of today: being a human being, an activist and a thinker. This authoritative work illustrates that the problems faced by Mill in the nineteenth century have such similar relations today when one reads of his passion for reforms of alcohol, gambling, prostitution (and their lordships), and whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and liberty, and the promotion of happiness for all. It is a remarkable story and Richard Reeves gives us a new insight into this radical reformer who’s shaping of Victorian England has so many messages left still unread now: it is a great read as well as being a great book about a great man - I am a fan, and you will be, too, when you read the book.