The Religion of Humanity has typically been associated with Auguste Comte's positivism. Within liberal philosophical debate, John Stuart Mill's measured advocacy for it has received some attention, especially given his otherwise well-known emphasis on the tension between religion and liberty. Yet Alexis de Tocqueville's perceptive awareness of the Religion of Humanity as an evolving phenomenon, expressed through his discussion of democratic poetry, remained largely unnoticed. Of course, Tocqueville's essential religio-political task was to promote a modified version of Christianity and buttress (...) the standing of religious morality as an outside barrier against human action motivated by democratic materialism, notwithstanding the secular doctrine of self-interest well understood. Indeed, despite the neutral tone of Tocqueville's discussion of democratic poetry, elsewhere his critique of democratic pantheism, writers and orators, theatre, and historians warned against excessive veneration of humanity, which amounted to a sublimation of the dogma of the sovereignty of the people. (shrink)

ABSTRACT John Stuart Mill’s posthumously published Three Essays on Religion have been seen as standing in a problematical relationship with his better‐known works, especially On Liberty, which emphasize the negative sides of Mill’s approach to religion. The Three Essays are less easy to characterize. A careful reading shows Mill’s concern to subject religious views to rational scrutiny, but also to acknowledge the important and largely beneficent role religion has played, and presumably will continue to play, in human affairs. This role (...) will not, Mill predicts, continue to be that of keeping selfish impulses in check. Rather, it will be to inspire people to assist a benevolent but, plainly, less‐than‐omniscient deity; and, as well, to spark an imaginative identification with an ongoing process of intellectual and moral perfection that transcends our mortal lives. (shrink)

Among the tasks of modern political philosophy is to develop a favored conception of the relations among modern citizens, among people who can know little or nothing of one another individually and yet are deeply reciprocally dependent. One might think of this as developing a favored conception of civic friendship. In this essay I sketch two candidate conceptions. The first derives from the Kantian tradition, the second from the 1844 Marx. I present the two conceptions and then describe similarities and (...) differences. My approach is both taxonomic and programmatic. My taxonomic goal is to provide an initial sketch of the conceptual territory. My programmatic goal is to provide reasons to think that the conception derived from Marx is both appealing and feasible. (shrink)

This paper explores the historic philosophical contributions ofMill and Marx toward a comprehensive conception of intellectual freedomas a basic educational entitlement. In a perhaps surprising confluence,Marx's theory of a material base for freedom of thought is then extendedin a discussion of contemporary freedoms including, importantly,academic freedom and its implication for teaching, the profession andits training.

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In this paper, we show that the question of the relative importance of innate characteristics and institutional arrangements in explaining human difference was vehemently contested in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus Sir Francis Galton’s work of the 1860s should be seen as an intervention in a pre-existing controversy. The central figure in these earlier debates—as well as many later ones—was the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill. In Mill’s view, human nature was fundamentally shaped by (...) history and culture, factors that accounted for most mental and behavioral differences between men and women and among people of different classes, nationalities, and races. Indeed, Mill’s whole program of social reform depended on the assumption that human differences were not fixed by nature. To identify the leading figures in these disputes about difference and the concrete context in which they occurred, we explore three debates in which Mill played a key role: over the capacities and rights of women, the viability of peasant proprietorship in India and Ireland, and the status of black labor in Jamaica. The last two draw our attention to the important colonial context of the nature–nurture debate. We also show that ideas that for us seem of a piece were not always linked for these earlier thinkers, nor did views on innateness necessarily have the political correlates that we now take for granted. (shrink)