The Liberalism Trap: John Stuart Mill and Customs of Interpretation

ISBN-13: 9780197658550 / Angielski

Philips

Opis

Arguments about liberalism's meanings, endurance, imminent death, or revival are widespread in modern political thought. But what effect do these preoccupations with liberalism have on the way political questions are taken up? In The Liberalism Trap, Menaka Philips argues that the focus on liberalism has become a customary limit on our political imaginations. To examine the costs of that custom, Philips turns to John Stuart Mill-the so-called paradigmatic liberal. As she argues, Mill's famed liberal status is habitually substituted for his political arguments such that the now standard association of Mill with liberalism determines how and why he is read. Philips, however, takes a break from that ready association. Her comparative reading of Mill's work concerning women's emancipation, class reform, and the British Empire recovers a thinker guided not by the ideological certainties he is often made out to represent, but by a politics of uncertainty-a politics which generated radical, gradualist, and paternalist strategies throughout his proposals on domestic and imperial questions. By reading Mill against the limits of liberalism, Philips draws out the possibilities and risks of Mill's own political practice, while inviting a critical evaluation of the customs of interpretation that shape contemporary political thought.

Recenzje

The Liberalism Trap is an elegantly constructed and important investigation into both the thought of John Stuart Mill and the status and consequences of the term 'liberalism' as a primary frame for political inquiry and public debate. Drawing on his Autobiography, Menaka Philips stresses the central role of uncertainty in Mill's thought, and traces this through a number of central issues, from women's equality to questions of empire. In so doing, The Liberalism Trap points towards a new understanding of Mill's thought and to the possibilities of political thinking unshackled from the burdens of what we have come to call 'liberalism'.

O autorze

Menaka Philips is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She writes on a range of issues in historical and contemporary political thought and has published in journals such as The American Political Science Review, European Journal of Political Theory, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.