THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IN JAMES MILL'S POLITICAL THOUGHT

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
KRIS GRINT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Freedom Of The Press ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Commonplace Books ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Press

ABSTRACTThis article examines the Scottish philosopher and historian James Mill's views on the freedom of the press, predominantly as they are expounded in his unpublished commonplace books, and argues that not only were these ideas very radical, they were critical to Mill's wider political thought and, by extension, to that of the early Philosophic Radicals. By virtue of the use of manuscript material, this article also presents evidence for various intellectual influences upon Mill, and argues that whilst Jeremy Bentham is of central importance to Mill's ideas, he takes inspiration from a wide range of other authors, both modern and ancient, in part as a way of normalizing his views in the context of the reactionary and conservative political climate that he was writing about them in: early nineteenth-century Britain.

James Mill's ‘The History of British India’ and Utilitarianism as a Rhetoric of Reform

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Majeed
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The French Revolution

This paper is about the emergence of new political idioms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, and how this was closely involved with the complexities of British imperial experience in India. In particular, I shall concentrate on the radical rhetoric of Utilitarianism expressed by Jeremy Bentham, and especially by James Mill. This rhetoric was an attack on the revitalized conservatism of the early nineteenth century, which had emerged in response to the threat of the French revolution; but the arena for the struggle between this conservatism and Utilitarianism increasingly became defined in relation to a set of conflicting attitudes towards British involvement in India. These new political languages also involved the formulation of aesthetic attitudes, which were an important component of British views on India. I shall try to show how these attitudes, or what we might call the politics of the imagination, had a lot to do with the defining of cultural identities, with which both political languages were preoccupied.

The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Economics ◽  
The People ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Way

When in the summer of 1902 Helen Bosanquet published a book called The Strength of the People she sent a copy to Alfred Marshall. On the face of it, this might seem a rather unpromising thing to have done. Mrs Bosanquet, an active exponent of the Charity Organisation Society's ‘casework’ approach to social problems, had frequently expressed her dissatisfaction with what she regarded as the misleading abstractions of orthodox economics, and in her book she had even ventured a direct criticism of a point in Marshall's Principles. Marshall, then Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and at the peak of his reputation as the most authoritative exponent of neo-classical economics in Britain, was, to say the least, sensitive to criticism, and he had, moreover, publicly taken issue with the C.O.S. on several previous occasions. But perhaps Mrs Bosanquet knew what she was about after all. In her book she had taken her text from the early nineteenth-century Evangelical Thomas Chalmers on the way in which character determines circumstances rather than vice versa, and, as the historian of the C.O.S. justly remarks, her book ‘is a long sermon on the importance of character in making one family rich and another poor’. Although Marshall can hardly have welcomed the general strictures on economics, he was able to reassure Mrs Bosanquet that ‘in the main’ he agreed with her: ‘I have always held’, he wrote to her, ‘that poverty and pain, disease and death are evils of greatly less importance than they appear, except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character’.

scholarly journals THE NAUTICAL MELODRAMA OFMARY BARTON

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-95
Author(s):  
Robert Burroughs
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Amateur Theatricals ◽  
A Performance

In hisMemoirs of anUnfortunate Son of Thespis(1818), the actor Edward Cape Everard recalled a performance of Sheridan'sSchool for Scandalthat was interrupted in its third act by a rowdy bunch of sailors. At the sight of Charles Surface drinking, the sailors allegedly left the auditorium, entered the stage, and accosted the actor playing Charles, “exclaiming ‘My eyes, you're a hearty fellow! Come, my tight one, hand us a glass’” (qtd. in Russell 104). As apocryphal as the encounter seems, it is not the only account of mariners rushing the early-nineteenth century stage to join in with the drama. In her analysis of these anecdotes Gillian Russell comments that though they may have been intended to depict the sailor “as naïve and unsophisticated, unable to make the distinction between fiction and reality. . . it is not surprising that the sailor should have disregarded the rules of mimesis and the distinction between stage and auditorium” (104), for the sailor's life lent itself to, and was structured by, theatricality. Service in “the theatres of war,” or more generally in the “wooden world” of the ship, demanded strict performance of custom and ritual in the forging of social identities and relations, not least of all in the ritualistic initiation ceremonies and corporal punishments that were enacted in front of the amassed audience of the crew (Russell 139–57; see Dening). At sea and in dock sailors entertained themselves with amateur theatricals. On shore, they were keen theatre-goers, and in auditoriums and elsewhere they played up to the characteristics of the sailor in the brazen assertion of an identity that was celebrated in stories, songs, and plays, but frequently also belittled, bemoaned, and victimized, the latter particularly while the press gangs were active.

Introduction

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Máire ní Fhlathúin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
British India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Material Conditions

This study explores the crystallising of a colonial literary culture in early nineteenth-century British India, and its development over the course of the Victorian period. It focuses on a wide range of texts, including works of historiography, travel writing, correspondence, fiction, and poetry, produced by amateur writers as well as writers who were better known and more professionalised. Its aim is to delineate the parameters and operations of a literary culture that is both local, in that it responds to the material conditions and experiences specific to colonial British India, and transnational, in that it evolves from and in reaction to the metropolitan culture of Britain. The writers I discuss were British, and lived and worked in British India (anglophone writing by Indians falls outside the parameters of this study). They often published their work for limited circulation within the colonial marketplace, but also with an eye to the more extensive readership of ‘home’. While individual authors’ works may be inconsequential or ephemeral, and sometimes apparently derivative of metropolitan texts and genres, the corpus in total constitutes a significant body of literature with its own concerns, themes and formats....

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly J. McCammon ◽  
Verta Taylor ◽  
Jo Reger ◽  
Rachel L. Einwohner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Aerial View ◽  
History Of

The introduction to The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women’s Social Movement Activism, begins with an “aerial” view of the history of scholarship on U.S. women’s collective action, tracing the roots of this body of research to the early nineteenth century and following its trajectory to the present. In recent decades, the scholarly study of U.S. women’s activism has increased dramatically, with a wide range of investigations that reveal both the broad diversity of women’s politicized collective action and the theoretical sophistication in our understanding of the causes, processes, and consequences of women’s collective struggles. The introduction concludes with an overview of the Handbook’s five sections, which explore the history of women’s activism, the issues mobilizing women, the strategies and tactics women have employed, the targets and forums of women’s activism, and women’s participation in a variety of social movements, in addition to those concerned with women’s issues.

Women in the Ching-hua yüan: Emancipation toward a Confucian Ideal

1977 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 647-660
Author(s):  
Frederick P. Brandauer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vernacular Fiction ◽  
Wide Range

The Ching-hua yüan, the work of vernacular fiction by Li ju-chen (ca. 1763–1830) shows remarkable diversity in both narrative content and purpose. Critics have observed that it is encyclopedic in scope, and suggested that it reflects the wide range of interests and activities prevalent among scholars in early nineteenth- century China. The author's intention has been variously interpreted as private entertainment, display of erudition, or social criticism.

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