Mill on Civilization and Barbarism

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Overview

John Stuart Mill's best-known work is On Liberty (1859). In it he declared that Western society was in danger of coming to a standstill. This was an extraordinarily pessimistic claim in view of Britain's global dominance at the time and one that has been insufficiently investigated in the secondary literature. The wanting model was that of China, a once advanced civilization that had apparently ossified.

To understand how Mill came to this ...
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More About This Book

Overview

John Stuart Mill's best-known work is On Liberty (1859). In it he declared that Western society was in danger of coming to a standstill. This was an extraordinarily pessimistic claim in view of Britain's global dominance at the time and one that has been insufficiently investigated in the secondary literature. The wanting model was that of China, a once advanced civilization that had apparently ossified.

To understand how Mill came to this conclusion requires one to investigate his notion of the stages from barbarism to civilization, and also his belief in imperialism as part of the civilizing process. Here India plays a central role, as both Mill and his father worked for the East India Company. This study, then, investigates the relationship between Mill's liberalism and his justification of imperialism. It takes us into the Utilitarianism of his family background, and such other influences as Romanticism, Scottish political economy and such key French thinkers as Saint-Simon, Guizot, Comte and Tocqueville. Mill, then, provides the focus of a debate on the origins, meaning, and consequences of Western civilization. It encompasses discourses on colonialism and orientalism, on Enlightenment optimism and conservative despair, on the need for leadership and the advance of democracy; in short, on the blessings, curses and dangers of modernization from approximately the time of the American and French revolutions to that of the so-called mid-Victorian calm in which On Liberty was written. Furthermore, current political issues concerning the West and Islamic countries have heightened interest in just the kind of question that this book discusses: that of how theWest relates to, and assesses, the rest of the world.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780714655901
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis
  • Publication date: 8/13/2004
  • Edition description: New Edition
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 168
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.50 (h) x 0.50 (d)

Meet the Author

Michael Levin is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Goldsmith's College, University of London. He previously taught at the Universities of Leicester, Leeds and Wales and has been twice Visiting Professor of Sociology at San Diego State University. He is the author of Marx, Engels and Liberal Democracy (1989), The Spectre of Democracy: The Rise of Modern Democracy as Seen by its Critics (1992), and The Conditions of England Question: Carlyle, Mill, Engels (1998).

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Table of Contents

Chronology 1. Introduction 2. Civilization 3. Barbarism and the Imperial Remedy 4. Progress 5. Civilization Threatened 6. Standstill: The Case of China 7. Aftermath

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