Abstract
In this chapter, Panton argues that the liberal-enlightenment model of the individual self reaches its apotheosis in the work of John Stuart Mill. Mill’s individual is not, however, the self-interested anti-social individual of other more classically liberal accounts, but a deeply socially engaged individual interested in the pursuit of truth and engaged in a project of development of the self which is necessarily also a process of the development of society as a whole. This individual is inevitably more robust than contemporary accounts of the individual self allow it to be.
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Notes
- 1.
See Chap. 7 of this book, Tim Black, ‘Autonomy and the birth of authenticity’, for a longer discussion.
- 2.
See Chap. 3 of this book, Jamie Whyte, ‘In Praise of Selfish Individualism’.
- 3.
‘That which has no existence cannot be destroyed—that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.’ (Bentham 2002)
- 4.
I am grateful to Michael Freeden for this insight: according to my tutorial notes, it was he who suggested this resolution to the conflict between liberty and utility.
- 5.
In 2018, to take one example of many, BBC Woman’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray pulled out of a talk at Oxford University after LGBTQ+ students argued that allowing airtime to ‘publicly transphobic speakers’ risked doing harm to the welfare of trans students and staff.
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Panton, J. (2019). ‘Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Wellbeing.’ J.S. Mill and the Nineteenth-Century Liberal Individual. In: Kennedy, A., Panton, J. (eds) From Self to Selfie. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19194-8_5
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