Liberty Fund Books

Description

By examining the thought of four seminal thinkers, Shirley Robin Letwin in The Pursuit of Certainty provides a brilliant record of the gradual change in the English-speaking peoples' understanding of "what sort of activity politics is." As Letwin writes, "the distinctive political issue since the eighteenth century has been whether government should do more or less." Nor, as many historians argue, did this issue arise because of the Industrial Revolution or "new social conditions [that] aggravated the problem of poverty" but, Letwin believes, because of the "profoundly personal reflection" of major thinkers, including Hume, Bentham, Mill, and Webb. David Hume, for example, believed that to "reach for perfection, to seek an ideal, is noble, but dangerous, and is therefore an activity that individuals or voluntary groups may pursue, but governments certainly should not." By the end of the nineteenth century, as Letwin observes, Beatrice Webb came to "equate the triumph of reason over passion with the rule of science over human life." Thus did the "pursuit of certainty" displace the traditional English understanding of the limitations of human nature—hence the necessity of limits to governmental power and programs. Consequently, in our time, "Politics was no longer one of several human activities and at that not a very noble one; it encompassed all of human life" in quest of philosophical "certainty" and social perfection. The Liberty Fund edition is a reprint of the original work published by Oxford in 1965.

Shirley Robin Letwin (1924–1993) was a Professor of Political and Legal Philosophy at Harvard, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Introduction ix

PART I
David Hume: Pagan Virtues and Profane Politics

1 A Man of Moderation 3
2 The Kirk 9
3 The Combat of Reason and Passion 21
4 A New Scene of Thought 34
5 Virtue in a Bundle of Perceptions 54
6 The Philosophical Enthusiasm Renounced 68
7 A Matter of Degree 75
8 The Science of Politics 83
9 The Proper Political Disposition 94
10 The End of Profane Politics 114

PART II
Jeremy Bentham: Liberty and Logic

11 Blackstone’s Challenger 131
12 Utilitarianism—A System of Tolerance 142
13 A Perfect System of Legislation 162
14 Gadgets for Happiness 186
15 A Modest Utopian 194

PART III
John Stuart Mill: From Puritanism to Sociology

16 James Mill 203
17 The Young Disciple 216
18 The Failure of Utilitarianism 227
19 Intimations of a New Creed 240
20 Many-Sidedness 253
21 The Creed of Progress 263
22 Radicals in Politics 274
23 Sociology 286
24 Sociology Applied 307
25 Liberty and the Ideal Individual 317
26 The Liberal Gentleman 341

PART IV
Beatrice Webb: Science and the Apotheosis of Politics

27 A New Climate of Opinion 351
28 The Making of a Socialist 375
29 The Apotheosis of Politics 401

Index 417