Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill

Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill
Author: Edward Alexander
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 113502698X

This study defines the relationship between humanism and liberalism by comparing the two Victorian figures who were most concerned with the preservation of humanistic values in a free and democratic society: Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill. The book sets apart Arnold and Mill from their contemporaries and points out their similarities to one another in discussions of their theories of history, poetry, their celebration of the contemplative life and their willingness to welcome democracy. At the same time it examines the differences between the two men, which he uses to create a dialogue between humanism and liberalism on the question of how a high cultural ideal can be realized in democratic society.

Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill

Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill
Author: Edward Alexander
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2014-02-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1135026971

This study defines the relationship between humanism and liberalism by comparing the two Victorian figures who were most concerned with the preservation of humanistic values in a free and democratic society: Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill. The book sets apart Arnold and Mill from their contemporaries and points out their similarities to one another in discussions of their theories of history, poetry, their celebration of the contemplative life and their willingness to welcome democracy. At the same time it examines the differences between the two men, which he uses to create a dialogue between humanism and liberalism on the question of how a high cultural ideal can be realized in democratic society.

Overcoming Matthew Arnold

Overcoming Matthew Arnold
Author: James Walter Caufield
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2016-05-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317084497

Opening the way for a reexamination of Matthew Arnold's unique contributions to ethical criticism, James Walter Caufield emphasizes the central role of philosophical pessimism in Arnold's master tropes of "culture" and "conduct." Caufield uses Arnold's ethics as a lens through which to view key literary and cultural movements of the past 150 years, demonstrating that Arnoldian conduct is grounded in a Victorian ethic of "renouncement," a form of altruism that wholly informs both Arnold's poetry and prose and sets him apart from the many nineteenth-century public moralists. Arnold's thought is situated within a cultural and philosophical context that shows the continuing relevance of "renouncement" to much contemporary ethical reflection, from the political kenosis of Giorgio Agamben and the pensiero debole of Gianni Vattimo, to the ethical criticism of Wayne C. Booth and Martha Nussbaum. In refocusing attention on Arnold's place within the broad history of critical and social thought, Caufield returns the poet and critic to his proper place as a founding father of modern cultural criticism.

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill
Author: Professor John M Skorupski
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 853
Release: 2010-07-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1136866884

First Published in 1999. John Skorupski's book is a comprehensive revaluation of Mill as a philosopher. The opening chapters outline Mill's main doctrines and attitudes and provide an up-to-date account of his views on language, logic and the mind. Skorupski carefully examines Mill's analysis of connotation and denotation and brings out the affinities between Mill's naturalistic view of logic, mathematics and science and important themes in current philosophy. Mill's standing as a political philosopher rests on his insights into the bases of liberalism, and on the power and eloquence with which he grounds them in an appeal to general human good. His views on social science, on utilitarianism and on liberty are examined in the final three chapters. This book aims to re-establish Mill as a major philosopher whose ideas on issues as different as the nature of mathematics and the foundations of liberal democracy are strikingly relevant to today's philosophical debates and inquiries. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in political/social philosophy.

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill
Author: Nicholas Capaldi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2004-01-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781139449205

Nicholas Capaldi's biography of John Stuart Mill traces the ways in which Mill's many endeavours are related and explores the significance of Mill's contribution to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of education. He shows how Mill was groomed for his life by both his father James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham, the two most prominent philosophical radicals of the early nineteenth century. Yet Mill revolted against this education and developed friendships with both Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who introduced him to Romanticism and political conservatism. A special feature of this biography is the attention devoted to his relationship with Harriet Taylor. No one exerted a greater influence than the woman he was eventually to marry. Nicholas Capaldi reveals just how deep her impact was on Mill's thinking about the emancipation of women.

Tact

Tact
Author: David Russell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2019-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691196923

The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth. In an era when more and more people lived more closely than ever before with people they knew less and less about, tact was a new mode of feeling one’s way with others in complex modern conditions. In this book, David Russell traces how the essay genre came to exemplify this sensuous new ethic and aesthetic. Russell argues that the essay form provided the resources for the performance of tact in this period and analyzes its techniques in the writings of Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. He shows how their essays offer grounds for a claim about the relationship among art, education, and human freedom—an “aesthetic liberalism”—not encompassed by traditional political philosophy or in literary criticism. For these writers, tact is not about codes of politeness but about making an art of ordinary encounters with people and objects and evoking the fullest potential in each new encounter. Russell demonstrates how their essays serve as a model for a critical handling of the world that is open to surprises, and from which egalitarian demands for new relationships are made. Offering fresh approaches to thinking about criticism, sociability, politics, and art, Tact concludes by following a legacy of essayistic tact to the practice of British psychoanalysts like D. W. Winnicott and Marion Milner.

The State of the Jews

The State of the Jews
Author: Edward Alexander
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2017-07-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351473344

The State of the Jews examines the current predicament of the Jewish people and the land of Israel, both of which still stand at the storm center of history, because Jews can never take the right to live as a natural right.The volume comprises celebrations and attacks. Edward Alexander celebrates writers like Abba Kovner, Cynthia Ozick, Ruth Wisse, and Hillel Halkin, who recognized in the foundation of Israel shortly after the destruction of European Jewry one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame. He attacks Israel's external enemies—busy planners of boycotts, brazen advocates of politicide, professorial apologists for suicide bombing—and also its internal enemies. These are anti-Zionist Jews, devotees of lost causes willfully blind to the fact that Israel's creation was an event of biblical magnitude. Indifference to Jewish survival during World War II was the admitted moral failure of earlier American-Jewish intellectuals, but today's progressives and New Diasporists call indifference virtue, and mistake cowardice for courage.Because the new anti-Semitism, tightening the noose around Israel's throat, emanates mainly from liberals, Alexander analyzes both antisemitic and philosemitic strains in three prominent Victorian liberals: Thomas Arnold, his son Matthew, and John Stuart Mill. The main body of Alexander's book is divided generically into history, politics, and literature. At a deeper level, its chapters are integrated by the book's pervasive concern: the interconnectedness between the state of Israel and the spiritual state of contemporary Jewry.

The Critic in the Modern World

The Critic in the Modern World
Author: James Ley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2014-05-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1623563739

The Critic in the Modern World explores the work of six influential literary critics—Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling and James Wood—each of whom occupies a distinct historical moment. It considers how these representative critics have constructed their public personae, the kinds of arguments they have used, and their core principles and philosophies. Spanning three hundred years of cultural history, The Critic in the Modern World considers the various ways in which literary critics have positioned themselves in relation to the modern tradition of descriptive criticism. In providing a lucid account of each critic's central principles and philosophies, it considers the role of the literary critic as a public figure, interpreting him as someone who is compelled to address the wider issues of individualism and the social implications of the democratising, secularising, liberalising forces of modernity.