In this paper I intend to do two things. The first is to discuss a method of doing philosophy, the method of ‘ordinary language’ philosophy, as it is commonly and misleadingly called. (Its other common title: ‘Oxford Philosophy’ is even more misleading, since the roots of the method lie in Cambridge, and many of the most flourishing branches are in the United States rather than England.)If it needs a name, perhaps the best is—adapting Popper to our purpose—‘piecemeal philosophical engineering’. Such (...) a title would emphasise the attention to detail and the caution about conclusions that characterise the best of such work. The second aim of this paper is to apply the method thus discussed and defended to three questions connected with the concept of freedom. These problems arise out of three recent discussions of freedom—Thought and Action and Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom by Professor Hampshire, and Two Concepts of Liberty by Professor Berlin. (shrink)

Contextualizing his views of government and the political community within the Ancient World, this history of political philosophy explores the revolutionary ideas from Plato's greatest pupil that built the foundation for a democratic tradition that is still alive today.

"When John Dewey died in 1952, he was memorialized as America's most famous philosopher, revered by liberal educators and deplored by conservatives, but universally acknowledged as his country's intellectual voice. Many things conspired to give Dewey an extraordinary intellectual eminence: He was immensely long-lived and immensely prolific; he died in his ninety-third year, and his intellectual productivity hardly slackened until his eighties." "Professor Alan Ryan offers new insights into Dewey's many achievements, his character, and the era in which (...) his scholarship had a remarkable impact. He investigates the question of what an American audience wanted from a public philosopher - from an intellectual figure whose credentials came from his academic standing as a philosopher, but whose audience was much wider than an academic one." "Ryan argues that Dewey's "religious" outlook illuminates his politics much more vividly than it does the politics of religion as ordinarily conceived. He examines how Dewey fit into the American radical tradition, how he was and was not like his transatlantic contemporaries, why he could for so long practice a form of philosophical inquiry that became unfashionable in England after 1914 at the latest."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

Applies a philosophical analysis of the natural sciences to the social sciences.

The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill demonstrates that Mill both saw his views as part of a systematic defense of empiricist epistemology and utilitarian ethics, and was to a large extent successful in offering a coherent and connected defense of this system. At the time Alan Ryan's highly acclaimed study was first published, it was unusual in insisting on the systematic character of Mill's philosophy. Since 1970, however, many writers have contributed to a more systematic understanding of Mill's (...) program for philosophy, ethics and social science, and Alan Ryan's new preface to the second edition assesses the way Mill appears in this new climate of opinion. (shrink)

Introduction 1 Part 1: Conceptual and Practical 19 1. Liberalism 21 2. Freedom 45 3. Culture and Anxiety 63 4. The Liberal Community 91 5. Liberal Imperialism 107 6. State and Private, Red and White 123 7. The Right to Kill in Cold Blood: Does the Death Penalty Violate Human Rights? 139 Part 2: Liberty and Security 157 8. Hobbes’s Political Philosophy 159 9. Hobbes and Individualism 186 10. Hobbes, Toleration, and the Inner Life 204 11. The Nature of Human (...) Nature in Hobbes and Rousseau 220 12. Locke on Freedom: Some Second Thoughts 233 Part 3: Liberty and Progress, Mill to Popper 255 13. Mill’s Essay On Liberty 257 14. Sense and Sensibility in Mill’s Political Thought 279 15. Mill in a Liberal Landscape 292 16. Utilitarianism and Bureaucracy: The Views of J. S. Mill 326 17. Mill and Rousseau: Utility and Rights 346 18. Bureaucracy, Democracy, Liberty: Some Unanswered Questions in Mill’s Politics 364 19. Bertrand Russell’s Politics: 1688 or 1968? 381 20. Isaiah Berlin: Political Theory and Liberal Culture 395 21. Popper and Liberalism 413 Part 4: Liberalism in America 427 22. Alexis de Tocqueville 429 23. Staunchly Modern, Nonbourgeois Liberalism 456 24. Pragmatism, Social Identity, Patriotism, and Self-Criticism 473 25. Deweyan Pragmatism and American Education 489 26. John Rawls 505 Part 5: Work, Ownership, Freedom, and Self-Realization 521 27. Locke and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie 523 28. Hegel on Work, Ownership, and Citizenship 538 29. Utility and Ownership 556 30. Maximizing, Moralizing, and Dramatizing 573 31. The Romantic Theory of Ownership 586 32. Justice, Exploitation, and the End of Morality 600 33. Liberty and Socialism 617 Notes 631. (shrink)

Explores Russell's activities as a polemicist, agitator, educator, and popularizer and discusses the evolution of his moral philosophy and its application, including his final battle against American intervention in Vietnam.

Writers of very different persuasions have relied on arguments about self-ownership; in recent years, it is libertarians who have rested their political theory on self-ownership, but Grotian authoritarianism rested on similar foundations, and, even though it matters a good deal that Hegel did not adopt a full-blown theory of self-ownership, so did Hegel's liberal-conservatism. Whether the high tide of the idea has passed it is hard to say. One testimony to its popularity was the fact that G. A. Cohen for (...) a time thought that the doctrine of self-ownership was so powerful that an egalitarian like himself had to come to terms with it; but he has since changed his mind. I have tackled the topic of self-ownership glancingly elsewhere, but have not hitherto tried to pull together the observations I have made in passing on those occasions. The view I have taken for granted and here defend is that self-ownership is not an illuminating notion—except in contexts that are unattractive to anyone of libertarian tastes. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was born in London, son of the Scottish historian of India and philosopher, James Mill, by whom he was educated in, among other things, the principles of British empiricism and Benthamite utilitarianism. Like his father, he worked for the East India Company, being in charge of the Company's relations with the native states 1836–1856, and head of the examiner's office from 1856 until the powers of the Company were transferred in 1858. The book which established Mill (...) as a philosopher was his System of Logic (1843), described in its full title as ‘a connected view of the principles of evidence and the methods of scientific investigation’. Book 6 of the System of Logic was ‘On the logic of the moral sciences’, and at the end of it Mill declared, without trying to justify it, his opinion that there is a ‘general principle to which all rules of practice ought to conform’; namely that of ‘conduciveness to the happiness of mankind, or rather, of all sentient beings’. For example, we should keep our promises not because we can see intuitively the truth of the precept, but because it passes the utilitarian test. Mill's justification for this opinion was in his Utilitarianism (1863). Mill's version of utilitarianism differed from Bentham's in that he recognized not only quantitative but also qualitative differences between pleasures. (shrink)

Anyone trying to give a brief account of liberalism is immediately faced with an embarrassing question: are we dealing with liberalism or with liberalisms? It is easy to list famous liberals; it is harder to say what they have in common. John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, T. H. Green, John Dewey and contemporaries such as Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls are certainly liberals – but they do not agree about the boundaries of toleration, (...) the legitimacy of the welfare state, and the virtues of democracy, to take three rather central political issues. They do not even agree on the nature of the liberty they think liberals ought to seek. (shrink)

Introduction The unusually wide range of John Stuart Mill's interests and abilities does much to make him an intellectually live figure a century after his ...

Friends since childhood, Anais Darnby and Lindsay Markham have long harbored a secret passion for one another. When they finally confess their love, their future together seems assured, sealed with their searing embrace. But when a debauched Lindsay is seduced by a scheming socialite, a devastated Anais seeks refuge in another man's bed while Lindsay retreats to the exotic East. There, he is seduced again--this time by the alluring red smoke and sinister beauty of opium. Back home, Lindsay's addiction is (...) fed by the vogue for all things Oriental--especially its sensual pleasures--in fashionable London society. In his lucid moments, Lindsay still lusts after Anais, who can neither allow him near nor forget his smoldering touch. Tortured by two obsessions--opium and Anais--Lindsay must ultimately decide which is the one he truly cannot live without. (shrink)

The paper puts forward a pluralistic account of fairness within which concepts of equality of sacrifice and outcome, desert, and randomized outcomes within a fair framework all have their place. The distinction between efficiency and fairness is set out early on, and it is later argued that only efficient social arrangements can withstand the questioning about the fairness of the way they distribute their benefits to their beneficiaries and impose demands on those whose taxes pay for them that the modern (...) welfare state increasingly has to face. (shrink)

The paper puts forward a pluralistic account of fairness within which concepts of equality of sacrifice and outcome, desert, and randomized outcomes within a fair framework all have their place. The distinction between efficiency and fairness is set out early on, and it is later argued that only efficient social arrangements can withstand the questioning about the fairness of the way they distribute their benefits to their beneficiaries and impose demands on those whose taxes pay for them that the modern (...) welfare state increasingly has to face. (shrink)

This is a simple essay. It raises a familiar question about equality, adduces a very small amount of empirical evidence about the social consequences of equality as distinct from prosperity, and broods on the difficulty of providing a really persuasive answer to the question raised. I begin with the view that there simply cannot be anything intrinsically wrong with inequality, move on to the view that there are extrinsic reasons for anxiety, dividing these into conceptual and empirical reasons, though without (...) any great commitment to the clarity of that distinction in this context, and end with some reflections on recent social and political theory. The essay thus begins with what I hope are clear and (what I am sure are) very simple thoughts, before muddying the water pretty thoroughly thereafter. (shrink)

Excerpt: …I here tackle three topics: first, the lowly place of happiness among the goals of political action in the great tradition of political thought; second, the novelty of the idea of happiness is the proper aim or public policy; and last, the importance of the distinction between what was aptly described by T.H. Green as "hindering hindrances to the good life" and the promotion of happiness by political action. As that might suggest, I shall say some unkind things about (...) the paternalism implicit in some recent emphasis on happiness as an object of state action. (shrink)

This collection of essays by philosophers, political theorists, and social critics ranges over two millennia--from the ideas of Plato and Aristotle to those of contemporary thinkers such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick. It examines the nature of justice, its importance in human life, and its place among the other virtues. The scope of the collection gives a clear picture of the differences and continuities that have marked the debate: Plato's emphasis on the ideal of "sticking to one's task" contrasts (...) with the modern emphasis on individual rights, while the account of justice as part of the law of nature offered by Aristotle and Cicero contrasts with Hume's analysis of justice as an artificial virtue. Alan Ryan's introductory essay emphasizes the stringency of justice--showing how its demands can conflict with considerations of the general welfare. The book concludes with a discussion of Marx's view that justice is perhaps merely a concession to a world of scarcity and selfishness created by capitalist necessities. An excellent guide to interpretations of one of the central values of political life and thought, this book will interest students and scholars of political theory and philosophy. (shrink)