Volume 21, Number 17 · October 31, 1974
Did Mill Go Too Far?
By Ronald Dworkin
On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill
by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Knopf, 345 pp., $8.95
John Stuart Mill's famous essay On Liberty has on the whole served conservatives better than liberals. From Fitzjames Stephen to Wilmore Kendall and Lord Devlin, critics of liberalism have been pleased to cite the essay as the most cogent philosophical defense of that theory, and then, by noticing the defects in its argument, argue that liberalism is flawed. Miss Himmelfarb uses the essay in the same way, but with this difference. She does not attack Mill's arguments, but argues ad hominem against Mill himself. She says that he himself condemns, in his other writings, the philosophical premises upon which On Liberty is built. Friedrich Hayek made the same point years ago, and Miss Himmelfarb touched upon it in her 1962 edition of Mill's essays. Now she documents her case in great detail.
Review, 2843 words
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