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in my early years of studying Mill—long before I made the naïve decision to write a book on him—I came across the following lines from Murray Rothbard: Mill “was the quintessence of soft rather than hardcore, a woolly-minded man of mush in striking contrast to his steel-edged father,” and his “enormous popularity and stature in the British intellectual world was partially due to his very mush-headedness.”1 And I had seen friendlier but comparable sentiments from some of his most notable progeny, like Isaiah Berlin. The conventional wisdom seemed to be that despite his palpable brilliance and focused insights, Mill was a thinker of far too many parts and all too many contradictions.
To many, Mill’s practical philosophy has all sorts of problems: a confused, abstruse hedonism; a perplexed, hesitant Utilitarianism; a jerry-built, gimcrack liberalism; a shaky attempt to synthesize Bentham with his other influences, like the Romantics and the Greeks; an ambiguous, faltering posture toward democracy; and the list goes on.2 Countless attempts to reconcile or reinterpret the moving parts in Mill’s thought have, in turn, generated a litany of scholarly debates, none of which have yet settled even the most fundamental issues: “Whether Mill is better read as advocating a eudaimonistic or hedonistic conception of the good is still a live issue, as is how this theory of value relates to his account of morality.”3 Moreover, the attempt to dispel these mysteries has, in each case, generated a plethora of clashing interpretations. The literature on Mill’s doctrine of the higher pleasures, for instance, abounds with so many idiosyncratic readings that one gets the sense that many scholars are basically just “testing” different approaches.
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