Tag Archives: john stuart mill

Question: Big or small government? Answer: effective

By Henry Vann | Published 27th January 2012 - 3:00 pm

One prominent member of Liberal Youth hits the nail on the head when she says ‘[I am] frankly sick of all this I’m a social liberal so I’m a better Lib Dem; no it’s Orange Bookers that are real Lib Dems… we’re in the same party ffs.’

And the contrasting Economist correspondent missed the target by a mile when he wrote - following our last conference – that ‘the Liberal Democrats are still in denial about their innate dividedness.’

You see according to this correspondent – quoted again in The Week – he has had a brilliant insight: ‘You cannot be both for, and against, the Big State.’ But whilst his truism is …

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John Stuart Mill symposium – Saturday 14 November, LSE, London

By Duncan Brack | Published 26th October 2009 - 6:40 pm

One hundred and fifty years ago, in 1859, the great Liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill published his most important and enduring work, On Liberty. Used today as the symbol of office of the President of the Liberal Democrats, On Liberty emphatically vindicated individual moral autonomy and celebrated the importance of originality and dissent. It set out the principle, still acknowledged as universal and valid today, that only the threat of harm to others can justify interfering with an individual’s liberty of action.

Mill himself was not only a philosopher, but also an economist, journalist, political writer, social reformer, and, briefly, …

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No, Christopher Wren and Isaac Newton were not great MPs

By Mark Pack | Published 16th May 2009 - 11:11 am

Matthew Engel in today’s Financial Times has a pop at our current MPs, saying:

The House of Commons used to be filled with men of renown. Sir Christopher Wren was an MP. So was Sir Isaac Newton – and John Stuart Mill.

It’s an easy jibe to make – ‘MPs aren’t as good as they used to be’ – but his examples seem to me to be rather badly chosen. John Stuart Mill, I’ll grant you, was a man of renown and an admirable, hard-working MP who used Parliament to promote the causes he believed in.

But Isaac Newton? He barely contributed …

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Posted in Parliament | Also tagged , , | 8 Comments