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ABSTRACT
Although he is little read today, especially by Anglophone academics, Charles Dupont-White (1807–78) deserves the attention of historians of political thought for two reasons. First, he was an original and powerful theorist of a more statist brand of liberalism that in several ways proved a harbinger of later liberal and social-democratic ideas. Second, he was responsible for the original translations into French of two of John Stuart Mill’s most important works, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government. Unlike most author-translator relationships, however, Dupont-White was anything but an uncritical admirer. This essay reconstructs Dupont-White’s general political-social theory as well as examines his specific differences from and criticisms of Mill, including his attempt to construct an alternative defense of freedom of speech. It also examines Mill’s response to Dupont-White and considers why Mill judged his translator to have espoused a philosophy ‘opposite’ to his own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The author would like to thank Anatole Grieu and Joseph Puchner for valuable research assistance; the attendees at a Caesarism Conference held in 2019, which helped crystallize several ideas for this paper; and Richard Whatmore and the reviewers at GIH. He would also like to express his gratitude to the referees at a previous journal to which this essay was submitted for perceptive comments which helped improve the paper significantly.
2 E.g. Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, 428–30; Weinberg, Theodor Gomperz and John Stuart Mill.
3 Three of these were by Mill (what are titled in the standard English edition ‘Grote’s Plato,’ “Thornton on Labour and Its Claims,” and the Chapters on Socialism) and one by Harriet Taylor Mill (‘The Enfranchisement of Women’); Molnar, “John Stuart Mill as Translated by Sigmund Freud,” 195–205.
4 The great exception to this rule in Anglophone research is Sudhir Hazareesingh: see his Intellectual Founders of the Republic; “A jacobin, liberal, socialist, and republican synthesis,” 145–71. This disregard surely owes something to his works not having been translated into English; consequently, all translations of his work are my own. Likewise, Mill carried on his correspondence with Dupont-White in the latter’s native language; quotations from those documents will be my translations as well, as will any citations with a title given in French regardless of authorship.
5 Mill, “Centralisation,” in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill XIX, 585. All citations to Mill will refer to this edition.
6 E.g. Glaeser, ed. Biographie nationale des contemporains, 217.
7 La Liberté par M. John-Stuart Mill, traduit et augmenté d’une Introduction par M. Dupont-White came out in three editions (1860, 1864, 1877, all Paris); Le gouvernement représentatif par M. John-Stuart Mill, traduit et préfacé d’une Introduction par M. Dupont-White likewise had three editions (1862, 1865, 1877, all Paris). Citations will be to the second edition of the former (a further foreword was added at that point) and the first of the latter. It ought to be mentioned that the labor of the actual translating fell mostly on his daughter Marie-Pauline-Cécile, although from questions Dupont-White posed to Mill with regard to the meaning of particular English expressions, we can see that the translations were carried out under his supervision; see Villey, Charles Dupont-White, sa vie, son oeuvre, sa doctrine, 25. This daughter would go on to marry the aforementioned politician Sadi Carnot, apparently after the latter had bonded with Dupont-White over his own translation of Mill; Clerc, “Connaissez-vous Dupont-White?” 100–5. Notably, Dupont-White received the blessing of the ‘saint of rationalism’ to produce his translations; they were in a manner the authorized Mill in French. And Mill continued to praise them after they appeared; see Mill to Dupont-White of 29 Oct. 1859, 5 Nov. 1859, and 24 Dec. 1860, in CW XV, 641–2, 644–5, 714–5.
8 Mill, Autobiography, CW I, 251.
9 E.g. Guillin and Souafa, “La réception de Stuart Mill en France”; Conway, Interpreting Mill’s On Liberty, 1831-1900; Collini, “Liberalism and the Legacy of Mill,” 237–54.
10 The two finest recent commentators on Dupont-White, Jean-Fabien Spitz and Sudhir Hazareesingh, both give scant attention to Dupont-White’s readings of Mill. This is especially unfortunate because, while allusions to Mill are present from early in Dupont-White’s career, his translations of Mill and the peak of his correspondence with him occurred amidst his most fertile period of political theorizing. And yet the only substantive treatment of Dupont-White as a reader of Mill remains an article from long ago by the Catholic intellectual and liberal economist Daniel Villey: Villey, “Sur la traduction par Dupont-White de La Liberté de Stuart Mill,” 193–231. This remains an enlightening analysis and I am indebted to it.
11 There was nothing of the fidelity that Auguste Comte’s Victorian translators were contemporaneously showing to the founder of positivism, nor of the patient devotion of Étienne Dumont in preparing Jeremy Bentham’s manuscripts for French audiences. E.g. Wright, The Religion of Humanity; Blamires, “Étienne Dumont: Genevan Apostle of Utility,” 55–70.
12 Mill to Dupont-White, 6 Apr. 1860 and 26 Feb. 1859, CW XV, 690, 596. Such was the ‘difference of opinion’ that Mill initially expressed fear that Dupont-White would lack the interest to ‘follow through with the project’ of translating On Liberty; Mill to Dupont-White, 29 Oct. 1859, CW XV, 642.
13 Yung, “La liberté moderne,” 5–26. Another French analyst saw their divergences more as complementary than antagonistic: the Frenchman’s prefatory disquisitions ‘enlarged the horizon’ and ‘supplied what was missing’ from Mill’s original texts; Pichot, “Chronique et bulletin biographique,” 245–6.
14 Mill to Henry Reeve, 1 May 1861, CW XV, 726.
15 On the origins of the article, with a rare recognition of its significant place in Mill’s corpus, e.g. Alexander Brady, “Introduction” to Mill, CW XVIII, xc.
16 Filipiuk, “John Stuart Mill and France,” 80–120.
17 For just a small sampling, e.g. Varouxakis, “Guizot’s Historical Works and J.S. Mill’s Reception of Tocqueville,” 292–312; Kremer-Marietti, “Introduction: Comte and Mill – the Philosophical Encounter,” 1–34; Suh, “Mill and Tocqueville,” 55–72; McCabe, “John Stuart Mill and Fourierism,” 35–61.
18 Even Georgios Varouxakis, in his outstanding reconstruction of Mill’s uptake of ideas and events across the Channel, neglects Dupont-White; Varouxakis, Victorian Political Thought on France and the French.
19 This biographical sketch draws from: Villey, Charles Dupont-White, sa vie, son oeuvre, sa doctrine; Laveleye, “Un Précurseur, Charles Dupont-White,” 525–46; Spriet, Dupont-White: étude sur les origines du socialisme d'État en France; Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders of the Republic, ch. 2.
20 Audier, “Une conception de l’État ‘socialiste libérale’?” 85–146.
21 Tocqueville was born in 1805, Dupont-White in 1807. Mill came in between, in 1806.
22 ‘After God, freedom comes from England’; quoted in Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen, 183.
23 Dupont-White, Essai sur les relations du travail avec le capital.
24 Dupont-White, République ou Monarchie; La république conservatrice.
25 Dupont-White, La Centralisation, title page; Mill, “Centralisation,” 598.
26 Dupont-White, La liberté de la presse et le suffrage universel.
27 E.g. Marc Montoussé, Dupont-White, un classique critique du XIXème siècle, 8–9, 177.
28 Mill to Dupont-White, 1 July 1858, CW XV, 555. For an assemblage of similar verdicts, see Hazareesingh, Intellectual Founders of the Republic, 85–8.
29 E.g. Ghins, “What Is French Liberalism?”
30 Dupont-White, Mélanges philosophiues, 142.
31 Dupont-White, “Avant-Propos du traducteur,” to Liberté, xii–xiii.
32 Mill assented to Dupont-White’s logic equating the ‘two questions’; Mill, “Centralisation,” 598.
33 E.g. Jack Hayward, “Solidarist Syndicalism,” 17–36.
34 E.g. Riviale, “Présentation.”
35 Dupont-White, Relations du travail, ch. 4.
36 In the diagnosis of industrial capitalism’s potential for a unique kind of cruelty, Dupont-White, Carlyle, Tocqueville, and Louis Blanc can all be found using quite similar expressions, even if their prescriptions diverged. E.g. Carlyle, Chartism; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 649–52; Blanc, L’Organisation du travail.
37 Dupont-White, Relations du travail, chs. 1, 21–3.
38 Dupont-White, L’Individu et l’État, second ed., chs. 2, 4.
39 E.g. Relations du travail, 246–7: ‘underneath this veneer of progress that decorates our society, it is painful to recognize such a base of violence and iniquity. And yet, it is a very simple thing: the miracle would be if it were otherwise. In the ancient world wealth was gained through violations of liberty; in the monarchical and feudal age through violations of property. And how this past disturbs and pursues us still among the conquests of modern reason.’
40 Dupont-White, L’Individu, 110–1. He continued: ‘today we find miseries unmerited, hereditary, passed down to the lower-class man (l’homme du peuple) from a father or a grandfather who had himself been miserable because he bore the brunt of bad institutions, because he alone paid taxes to the king, fees to the nobles, tithes to the priests … .The vicious institutions of the past have created in this country depths of evil which do not permit indifference, nor an inert sympathy.’
41 Ibid., 110.
42 L’individu, third ed., 207: ‘Regulation must march step-by-step with innovation; the development of the State must stay apace with the unfolding of society.’
43 E.g. Dupont-White, Mélanges philosophiues, 182.
44 The state had even to soften the effects of inequalities derived from different levels of natural ability; Relations du travail, 2–3, 345.
45 As he put it pithily: ‘There is a power, a domination, inherent in wealth’; Relations du travail, 276.
46 L’Individu, 196–7.
47 Tellingly, the original title of large portions of L’Individu when they were first published as journal articles was Le Progrès par le gouvernement; Villey, Charles Dupont-White, 23.
48 L’Individu, 3.
49 Ibid., 15–6.
50 Ibid., 178–81.
51 Dupont-White, Mélanges philosophiques, 181–2.
52 Martin, Essai sur les doctrines sociales et économiques de Dupont-White, 73–4. Although she does not seem to have known of him, Dupont-White would have been a fitting target for Judith Shklar’s scorn about the kinds of persuasive definition by which law was identified with what the author’s idea of how the right kind of state regulated activity; Shklar, Legalism.
53 For Dupont-White, the true state, law-based as opposed to privilege- or custom-ridden, was itself the greatest achievement of modernity; e.g. Le Progrès politique en France, 37. Although he naturally did not say so in the modern idiom, he had something like the notion of ‘the inner morality of law’; Fuller, The Morality of Law.
54 Hazareesingh, “A jacobin, liberal, socialist, and republican synthesis,” 152.
55 Dupont-White, Centralisation, 163–4.
56 E.g. Dupont-White, La liberté politique considérée dans ses rapports avec l'administration locale, ch. 4, sections 5–6.
57 Villey summed up his outlook well: ‘When one treated workers without humanity, Dupont-White was ready to defend them … But in his eyes, the working class, victim of poverty and the iniquity of institutions, deprived of the leisure and comfort necessary to progress, was truly an inferior class’; Villey, Charles Dupont-White, 525.
58 Dupont-White, “Préface,” to Liberté, 34, 63.
59 Ibid., 79.
60 Ibid., 23. He admired England for having what he thought of as an open, permeable aristocracy leading its politics.
61 Dupont-White to Emile de Laveleye, quoted in Laveleye, “Un Précurseur,” 535. Dupont-White self-consciously built his centralizing argumentation here on the eighteenth-century thèse royale template that had cast the nobility, parlements, and corporations as obstacles to the more just and prosperous France which the monarchy and its administrators were seeking to create; Spitz, “Charles Dupont-White, L’Anti-Tocqueville,” 231–43.
62 Dupont-White, “Introduction” to Gouvernement représentatif, lviii; Progrès politique en France, 4.
63 Relations du travail, 360–1.
64 Dupont-White, “Préface,” to Liberté, 33. He put the point in an even more striking way elsewhere: ‘When the ancients treated man as a political animal, they were saying this fact in the most pertinent manner. Political, that means made for society, for discipline, such is man by nature’; Centralisation, 133–4.
65 L’Individu, 178.
66 Across the Channel, the most fitting parallel for Dupont-White’s ideas here is found in the work of Matthew Arnold, who (inspired by his own interpretation of France) desired the English government to take a stronger hand as educational-cultural arbiter; Collini, Matthew Arnold. Given his classical-aristocratic preferences in literature, manners, and familial relations, it would not be unfair to say of Dupont-White that he was ‘a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture’ long before Daniel Bell applied the description to himself: Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, xi.
67 Ibid., 194.
68 E.g. Dupont-White, Centralisation, chs. 1–3.
69 L’individu, 173.
70 Centralisation, 23, 19, 25.
71 The state was ‘man minus passion, man at an altitude where he comes into touch with truth itself, where he associates only with God and his conscience’; Dupont-White as quoted by F.M. Marx, associating him with later dictators; Marx, “The Bureaucratic State,” 457–72.
72 ‘Personally, I believe that men gain a certain exultation when they become legislators or sovereigns. Just as the abyss calls forth the abyss, we raise ourselves to the heights, we transform into Alpine mountains’; Centralisation, 170.
73 While Jones does not mention him, Dupont-White was aa harbinger of Third-Republican liberals’ construal of sovereign power as a protector of, rather than a threat to, the rights of the vulnerable; Jones, “French Liberals and the Revolutionary Tradition, c. 1860-1914,” 189–203.
74 Centralisation, 98, 30, 77, 84.
75 Laveleye, “Un précurseur,” 526.
76 E.g. Spriet, Dupont-White, 175–8.
77 E.g. Gide and Rist, A history of economic doctrines from the time of the physiocrats to the present day.
78 Relations du travail, ch. 28. Dupont-White framed his notion of ‘legal charity’ to walk a conceptual tightrope: while the state had a duty to provide poor relief, the individual (he distinguished perhaps untenably) did not have a right to demand aid. He was afraid that the latter claim would give rise to an insurrectionary mindset; L’Individu, 90. While they differed vastly in the degree of government involvement in the economy and public subvention of the needy that they were willing to endorse, there is an interesting overlap here between Dupont-White and his fellow Norman. When Tocqueville came to accept a measure of guaranteed public assistance for the indigent, he nonetheless wanted this articulated in a way that was clean of any association with revolutionary socialism. For him, unlike for Dupont-White, however, the crucial conceptual-rhetorical maneuver was to define government aid in a way that was ‘Christian and democratic’ rather than socialist. See Drolet, Tocqueville, Democracy, and Social Reform; Tocqueville, “Speech on the Right to Work,” 60–5.
79 E.g. L’Individu, 89–91; Relations du travail, 5; Montoussé, Dupont-White, 105–12.
80 E.g. L’Individu, 145–6, 266.
81 ‘This point is crucial: it is principally the collective character of an interest which deters men from it. Men only do those things which interest them the most, which they can be led to accomplish by their own effort, and the profits of which will belong to them alone … .Thus as a rule the individual abstains even from the things which to him are the most advantageous when he either can do them by himself nor constrain others to contribute to doing them’; ibid., 267–8.
82 Ibid., 269–71.
83 Relations du travail, 398.
84 E.g. Henry Michel, L'Idée de l'État, 572–8; Martin, Essai sur les doctrines sociales et économiques de Dupont-White, 4, 150.
85 See note 78 above.
86 Dupont-White, L’Individu, 141; “Avant-Propos,” to Liberté, viii.
87 E.g. Höpfl, “Isms,” 1–17.
88 Dupont-White, “Introduction” to Gouvernement représentatif, xxxii; L’Individu, xxix–xxx.
89 To this point he was in accord with Constant’s famous analysis in “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns,” 308–28.
90 Spitz, “The ‘illiberalism’ of French liberalism,” 252–68.
91 L’Individu, 208, 69; Centralisation, 144.
92 Centralisation, 172.
93 Dupont-White, “Préface,” to Liberté, 104.
94 Centralisation, 160.
95 Mélanges philosophiques, 181.
96 Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Revolution.
97 E.g. Jaume, “La tradition française de l’égalité,” 715–30.
98 E.g. Centralisation, chs 10–11.
99 E.g. Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville.
100 E.g. Dupont-White, Centralisation, 355–7.
101 ‘The government is the organ of the general interest, which becomes every day more complicated in a progressive society. This complication calls for new attributes of the State’; Mélanges philosophiques, 18. And see “Préface,” to Liberté, xv, 35.
102 E.g. Hazareesingh, “From Democratic Advocate to Monarchist Critic of the Republic,” 1143–79.
103 E.g. Corley, Democratic Despot.
104 Hayward, The idea of solidarity in French social and political thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 122.
105 To Mill liberalism was ‘not restricted to those who conform, or who pretend to conform, to those of a distinctive creed … The bond which holds us together is not a political confession of faith, but a common allegiance to the spirit of improvement, which is a greater thing than the particular opinions of any politician or set of politicians’; “W.E. Gladstone [I],” 97. He was here speaking of the English Liberal party, but this tracks well with his sense of “Continental Liberalism”; Autobiography, 64.
106 Compare Mill’s attitude on the Second Empire with the more open-minded approaches of Walter Bagehot and Matthew Arnold; e.g. Varouxakis, Victorian Political Thought on France.
107 E.g. Rosenblatt, “The Rise and Fall of ‘Liberalism’ in France,” 174–5.
108 E.g. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 400.
109 For a more sympathetic assessment, e.g. Zeldin, The Political System of Napoleon III.
110 Price, The French Second Empire, 99–120.
111 E.g. Dupont-White, Politique actuelle, xliii.
112 E.g. Dupont-White, Progrès politique en France, 44: he scorned the view that ‘a society could belong to a man or to a god, could be possessed by Caesarism or theocracy.’
113 E.g. Centralisation, 178, 183; Progrès politique, 25.
114 E.g. République ou monarchie, 27.
115 E.g. Hazareesingh, How the French Think, 134.
116 Selinger and Conti, “The Lost History of Political Liberalism,” 341–54.
117 On both these third and fourth points Dupont-White was joined by a professor of the revolutionary socialism to which his interventionist-meliorist statism was meant to offer an alternative. For these were equally planks of Marx’s revulsion at the Second Empire: that it originated from and was sustained by the most ignorant and retrograde portion of the population, and that making the executive the leading power destroyed the ‘autonomy’ of the nation, which could only manifest itself in the legislature; Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
118 On Dupont-White’s disquiet about democratic sovereignty, see Rosanvallon, Le sacre due citoyen, 310–2.
119 E.g. Price, The French Second Empire.
120 L’Individu, 219–33.
121 E.g. Groenewegen, “Was John Stuart Mill a Classical Economist?” 9–31.
122 L’Individu, 141.
123 Mill, On Liberty, in CW XVIII, 293.
124 To be clear, I am reconstructing Dupont-White’s reading of Mill, not endorsing it.
125 Ibid., ch. 2.
126 Centralisation, 173.
127 Dupont-White, Liberté de la presse, 27.
128 Ibid., 26–8, 32.
129 Dupont-White, “Introduction” to Gouvernement représentatif, xvii–xix.
130 There is a close resemblance with deliberative democrats today who argue for the ‘civilizing force of hypocrisy’ and contend that ‘arguing publicly for a position’ could ‘reshape one’s private desires’; e.g. Elster, “Introduction” and Fearon “Deliberation as Discussion,” 1–18, 44–68.
131 Dupont-White, “Introduction” to Gouvernement représentatif, xix.
132 E.g. Lukes, “The Meanings of ‘Individualism’,” 45–66.
133 Compare with Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.ii.6.
134 Dupont-White, Liberté de la presse, 40.
135 Ibid. 45.
136 There is an interesting parallelism with the theories of rights advocated in the so-called liberal revival in France of the late-twentieth century. E.g. the first two essays in Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory; Moyn, “The Politics of Individual Rights,” 291–310.
137 Blanc, L’État et de la Commune, 9–10. Interestingly, Blanc, who was also a friend of Mill, saw this theory of rights as stemming from Mill’s own insights, rather than being orthogonal or antagonistic to them as Dupont-White viewed it.
138 Dupont-White, Liberté de la presse, 30–2.
139 de Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville.
140 L’Individu, 210.
141 Liberté de la presse, 33, 36–7.
142 Ibid., 38; “Introduction” to Gouvernement représentatif, xxxii.
143 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I.ii.3.
144 E.g. Rader, The Journalists and the July Revolution in France. The persistence of these categories was far from unique to Dupont-White among those who fancied themselves upholders of the free press; see for example the strikingly similar language of the right-wing politician the Marquis de Castellane a few years later: ‘How many people seek to make themselves into a noxious celebrity, either via the press or public meetings, by the greatest extravagances of subversive language … Let no one say that [rules against such speech] are an attack on liberty; no, it’s the suppression of license. In the freest nations, the severest penalties are pronounced against disorderly men. There, one can say everything, write everything; but when the writer or orator has exceeded the limits of right, he falls into the grip of very harsh laws’; Antoine de Castellane, Essai sur l’organisation du suffrage universel en France, second ed., 40–1.
145 Liberté de la presse, 67.
146 Dupont-White, “Préface,” to Liberté, 50. This distinction tracked another between recognizing that ‘the newspaper … filled a necessary function and warranted a legal existence’ (true) and treating it as an illimitable “right of man” (false); Liberté de la presse, 45.
147 Liberté de la presse, 67.
148 Ibid., 67–8.
149 Progrès politique en France, 22; Liberté de la presse, 29.
150 ‘Education’ and ‘religion’ were equally domains that government had to regulate; Centralisation, 3.
151 Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 18.
152 On Liberty, 225–6.
153 “Préface,” to Liberté, 49.
154 E.g. Relations du travail, 346; ‘Electoral Proclamation to the Electors of la Seine,’ June 1848, quoted in Villey, Charles Dupont-White, 545–6.
155 E.g. “Préface,” to Liberté, 85: ‘the State does its job, by putting rules everywhere. But you must remember that rule is synonymous with liberty … For example, take some capitalists running gas or railway or steamboat companies. They are subject, in this position, to infinite regulations concerning policy and taxes. But compare these same personages before and after their company came about! It seems to me that these administrators, these directors are even more active, even more flourishing and uplifted than they are contained or bridled.’
156 “Préface,” to Liberté, 63. Dupont-White’s elitism shown through here: because ‘thought must win the enlightened classes, which are in general the governing classes, depositaries of force. And yet for this goal, thought has need only of discussion. Insult and provocation to violence, everything which smacks of passionate invective is de trop at the summits of society.’
157 “Préface,” to Liberté, 43–4. He continued: ‘If the world that he inhabits had no tomorrow, did not promise him a future, how would he employ his highest faculties: foresight, cooperation, laborious effort, the will to abstain and to save? Man cannot be himself if nature and institutions deceive him by their instability. To speak merely of the laws: do not forget, if some day they appear bad to you, that they were reputed salutary and excellent in their own time.’
158 ‘The most correct, most irreproachable thought, one which the future will perhaps accept completely, becomes dangerous if it assails the bases of society itself, as it exists here and now’; ibid., 50.
159 Ibid., 42–3.
160 On Liberty, 259.
161 Centralisation, 173. He went on: ‘as no one is infallible, none has the right … to close discussion and impose silence.’
162 “Préface,” to Liberté, 48; Centralisation, 173.
163 Centralisation, 173; “Préface,” to Liberté, 55.
164 “Préface,” to Liberté, 55–6.
165 Villey, “Sur la traduction,” 218.
166 “Préface,” to Liberté, 53: ‘The limit to the rights of the mind resides not in its subject-matter … but in the manner of expression and the circumstances of its appearance. It is a question of form.’
167 Mill, On Liberty, 258–9.
168 Liberté de la presse, 68. ‘Speculative’ philosophers who prepare social ‘evolution’ did ‘necessary work which did not undercut the public peace’; Mélanges philosophiques, xvi.
169 “Préface,” to Liberté, 53–4.
170 It was perhaps impossible to ‘rigorously define’ the ills of form; ibid., 53.
171 Ibid., 53, 49, 62, 88; Centralisation, 173. This conception of free speech as not a special higher-order right but simply part of the fabric of ordinary law and legal procedure in a rule-of-law society is closer to the theory that would be put forward the leading constitutionalist of the late-Victorian era, Albert Venn Dicey, than it is to Mill’s own views; Walters, A.V. Dicey and the Common Law Constitutional Tradition.
172 “Préface,” to Liberté, 56. This legislation was one of the cardinal achievements of the young François Guizot and his comrades in their opposition to Restoration royalist government. Guizot was one of the great historians of the first half of the century and a leading figure of the politics of the succeeding regime, the July Monarchy, where he epitomized bourgeois liberal-conservatism or what has been called the ‘authoritarian’ strain of liberalism in that period; see Jaume, “The Unity, Diversity, and Paradoxes of French Liberalism,” 36–4; Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege. Dupont-White’s admiration for this law was in keeping with his affection for Guizot as a politician; this distinguished him from Mill, who admired Guizot as an intellectual only and not for his political-legislative record.
173 For a summary of the restrictions and guardrails of this legislation – which included a ‘caution-money system whereby the publishers of newspapers were required to deposit a significant sum of money with the state in order to secure permission for publication’ – and the rationales the doctrinaires supplied for them, e.g. Jennings, “A note on freedom of the press in Restoration France,” 568–73; Jaume, “La conception doctrinaire de la liberté de la presse: 1814-1819,” 111–23. These regulations stemmed from his notion that running a newspaper was not a natural right but a public trust, and therefore subject to assurances that it would be exercised capably. Famously, Mill held this view of the franchise; Dupont-White agreed with him there, and simply extended the logic to the press; Liberté de la presse, 115–6.
174 Liberté de la presse, 75.
175 E.g. anon., L’aristocratie des journaux et le suffrage universel.
176 “Préface,” to Liberté, 36–8.
177 Spitz, “Twilight of the Republic?,” 47–61.
178 This marks another point of resemblance to Hobbes. One way to understand Dupont-White’s theory is as an update of Erastianism for an epoch of mass media and politicized populaces. Erastians, among whom Hobbes was the most famous, were early-modern defenders of the supremacy of the state over the church, usually in the interests of toleration. In parallel with Hobbesian toleration, Dupont-White insisted that la libre pensée and la libre parole depended on the sovereign state. It is illuminating to compare Dupont-White’s debates with his fellow liberals to seventeenth-century English controversies pitting Erastian or ‘prerogative’ toleration against natural-rights conceptions of religious liberty; see Collins, In the Shadow of Leviathan.
179 E.g. L’Individu, 36, 219–20.
180 “Préface,” to Liberté, 70.
181 On Liberty, 222.
182 “Préface,” to Liberté, 68–70.
183 L’Individu, 221–2. He spoke even of ‘the innate tolerance of the State.’
184 Mill, On Liberty, ch. 1.
185 “Préface,” to Liberté, xv, 22–3.
186 “Introduction” to Gouvernement représentatif, xxviii; “Préface,” to Liberté, 70, 90.
187 Mill, On Liberty, 226; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.ii.6.
188 E.g. Rosanvallon, Le Modèle politique français.
189 Dupont-White, Centralisation, 353.
190 Hazareesingh, “A jacobin, Liberal, Socialist, and Republican Synthesis,” 154.
191 Hence his broad definition of ‘caste’ as ‘any particular society of which the link is neither territorial nor economic’; Centralisation, 113.
192 L’Individu, ch. 2, section 2. In this façon de penser Dupont-White was straightforwardly in line with the Revolutionary hostility to ‘corporate bodies’ of all sorts as redolent of the privileges of the ancien régime and likely to become ‘masters’ of citizens in competition with the state; e.g. the Loi le Chapelier and Isaac Le Chapelier’s speech of 20 Sept. 1791, in The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 247–9, 278–80.
193 On Liberty, 268.
194 Centralisation, 353; Progrès politique, 21.
195 E.g. Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals; Marcel Gauchet, La condition politique.
196 Dupont-White’s criticisms here were very close to (although less measured in tone than) Tocqueville’s examination of the ‘corporative individualism’ that set ranks and orders against one another and inhibited the emergence of a feeling of a single humankind; e.g. George, “Montesquieu and de Tocqueville and Corporative Individualism,” 10–21.
197 L’Individu, 24. There were equally potent articulations in Centralisation (347): ‘In the crushing of the caste, two parts were carved out: one for individuals, consisting of liberty; the other for the State, consisting of the increase of its remit.’ This lesson held as well for the abolition of ‘les corporations et maîtrises.’
198 Centralisation, 176.
199 “Préface,” to Liberté, 84, 21, 44, v. Also Centralisation, 134, 160.
200 Warren, “How Representation Enables Democratic Citizenship,” 39–60.
201 “Préface,” to Liberté, 38.
202 Centralisation, 149. ‘In a word, progress is an amelioration of man, without man losing his egoism’; Mélanges philosophiques, 182.
203 Dupont-White sounded distinctively Millian in proclaiming that ‘all that one could expect even from the greatest mind studying human nature was to perceive a part of the complex truth’; Mélanges philosophiques, 166.
204 “Préface,” to Liberté, 18, 63, 33.
205 Ibid., 35: ‘the assistance of the State is given almost always with funds derived from taxation, which has nothing optional about it.’
206 Ibid., 35–6.
207 Mélanges philosophiques, 142; L’individu, 254. Mill’s own imperialism, Dupont-White thought, ought to have kept him from underrating the positive impact that coercion could have. ‘The intervention of the State, that is to say of force, is essential, you say, to the progress of barbarous peoples. I beg you to take one step further, and to admit as much with respect to these barbarous classes which exist at every stage of civilization. If you recognize the rights of an Akbar or Charlemagne over the coarseness of their epoch, why not admit the rights of an aristocracy, of an elite, over the vulgar who are present in all times. The title is the same in each case: superiority of mind and conscience’; “Préface,” to Liberté, 33.
208 Welch, “Anti-Benthamism,” 134–51.
209 “Introduction” to Gouvernement représentatif, xlix.
210 Mélanges philosophiques, 146.
211 “Introduction” to Gouvernement représentatif, xlix–xlx.
212 “Introduction” to Gouvernement représentatif, xil–xl. This criticism was ill-founded. When speaking favorably of ‘interests’ in the context of representation, Mill meant not the private material desires of individuals, but organic communities bound by similar needs and viewpoints. He rejected any other version of the ‘doctrine of the representation of interests’ as ‘sophistical.’ The diversity that Mill desired in a legislative assembly was ultimately that of perspectives and forms of knowledge: ‘As regards interests in themselves, whenever not identical with the general interest, the less they are represented the better. What is wanted is a representation, not of men’s differences of interest, but of the differences in their intellectual points of view. Shipowners are to be desired in Parliament, because they can instruct us about ships, not because they are interested in having protecting duties’; Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, in CW XIX, 358.
213 “Introduction” to Gouvernement représentatif, xxxix. In this dimension of his anti-pluralism he was again faithful to the Revolutionary legacy: it was central to the greatest pamphlet of 1789 that citizens were to ‘be represented’ only for what they had ‘in common’; Sieyès, “What is the Third Estate?”, 155.
214 Politique actuelle, xlvi. And see Conti, “Inegalitarian Inclusivity,” 98–130.
215 Centralisation, 167.
216 E.g. Politique actuelle, 73.
217 “Introduction” to Gouvernement représentatif, xl–xliii.
218 Ibid., xlvii, lviii–lix. He found much admirable with the elitist ethos of the graduated suffrage, which he equated with Guizot and the doctrinaire’s notion of ‘capacity,’ but thought that any attempts at implementation would be judged unpalatably arbitrary in a democratic age; ibid., li–lv.
219 Laveleye, “Un précurseur,” 545.
220 Conti, Parliament the Mirror of the Nation.
221 “Introduction” to Gouvernement représentatif, lv.
222 E.g. Collini et al., That Noble Science of Politics, chs. 6, 8.
223 E.g. “Préface,” to Liberté, 69–70.
224 E.g. Eisenberg, John Stuart Mill on History.
225 On Liberty, 223.
226 “Préface,” to Liberté, 35.
227 On Liberty, 217.
228 “Préface,” to Liberté, 69; Mill, On Liberty, 304.
229 Relations du travail, chs. 3, 11, 27.
230 E.g. Relations du travail, 440.
231 ‘Poverty is not only responsible for the growth of population, but also for immorality and crime, ills more frequent among the poor than among other groups … It is poverty which engenders intemperance, vice, disorder, and immorality, and it is the precarity and instability of incomes which aggravates all these evils. It is not the poor man who is responsible, but society’; Montoussé, Dupont-White, 83.
232 “Introduction” to Gouvernement représentatif, vii.
233 “Préface,” to Liberté, 38.
234 ‘Rather than taking the individual to be the supreme unit, then stripping him bit by bit in order to build and arm the State, we could proceed differently. We could begin from society and stipulate its organs and essential functions until we encounter once again the individual endowed as he is with free agency and an immortal soul. The two methods are of equivalent value … society and the individual are two equally original and necessary facts’ (“Préface,” to Liberté, 36). This idea of getting to ‘the same destination’ but ‘not in the same manner’ was mirrored in his description of the trajectories of England and France, which he interpreted as each heading toward the centralized-but-free state, with the former gradually adding the gouvernement concentré and the latter adding the freedom; Centralisation, 355–6.
235 “Centralisation,” 595. La liberté de le presse was written after ‘Centralisation’ and Dupont-White’s translations; we have no evidence about Mill’s thoughts on it.
236 Nicholson, “The reception and early reputation of Mill’s political thought,” 469–70.
237 A striking example of this lack of interest in responding on questions of intellectual-expressive liberty came in his reaction to James Fitzjames Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Understood then and now as a bracing attack on On Liberty, Mill is reported to have simply responded that Stephen ‘does not know what he is arguing against; and is more likely to repel than to attract people’; Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, 404. Mill died not long thereafter, at which point his acolyte John Morley rallied to compose a response to Mill’s behalf.
Interestingly, the criticisms from Dupont-White which Mill ignored presaged much of Stephen’s attack from 1872–73, even though it appears that Stephen had no knowledge of Dupont-White. (Dupont-White did read Liberty, Equality, Fraternity later, but seemingly not with much care.) To list just a few areas in which Stephen’s better-known critique dovetailed with Dupont-White’s earlier one: Stephen stressed that his dissent at the level of principles and concepts was consistent with overlap on many practical matters. He charged Mill with utopianism and with refusing to face up to the permanence of conflict and coercion. He diagnosed a disjuncture between a sound early Mill up to the Principles of Political Economy and a later radical who had lost his way. He perceived incoherence between Mill’s purported utilitarianism and his aspiration to articulate absolute rules of liberty. He argued that On Liberty’s logic led to nightwatchman-state libertarianism, and that it was inconsistent with the taxation required to fund the very reforms for which Mill longed. He denied the possibility of the moral neutrality of the state and emphasized the educational impact of all governance and law, espousing a kind of liberal Erastianism. And he likewise turned Mill’s endorsement of despotic alien rule over backward peoples against Mill himself, denying that a hard line could be drawn between imperial and domestic contexts. See Stapleton, “Introduction” to Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, xix–xxxviii; Conti, “James Fitzjames Stephen, John Stuart Mill, and the Victorian Theory of Toleration,” 364–98. Stephen would not, however, have accepted Dupont-White’s economics.
238 Mill, “Centralisation,” 581.
239 Mill to Dupont-White, 1 July 1858, 556. And see Autobiography, 201, where he attributed to his encounter with Tocqueville in the mid-1830s his avoidance of the ‘great danger’ that ‘philosophic reformers’ ran of underrating the ‘mischiefs’ of centralization.
240 Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain Since 1850, ch. 1.
241 Mill, Autobiography, 201–3. In his article on Dupont-White he was rather kinder to the opinions of his compatriots, characterizing their resistance to expansion of the central government as not a ‘blind prejudice against having recourse to the State’; “Centralisation,” 609.
242 Ibid., 582, 591.
243 Ibid., 585.
244 Mill to Dupont-White, 1 July 1858, 556.
245 Mill, “Centralisation,” 581.
246 Ibid., 587.
247 E.g. Considerations, ch. 15.
248 “Centralisation,” 598, 603–5.
249 ‘A nation which relinquishes to its government all concern to think for itself about the practical affairs of social life, is not and cannot be free’; Mill to Dupont-White, 1 July 1858, 556.
250 ‘I find very dangerous the tendency that you signal by the expression “England is bureaucratizing [s’administrative]”’; ibid, 556.
251 “Centralisation,” 605; On Liberty, 305–6.
252 “Centralisation,” 582; Mill to Dupont-White, 1 July 1858, 556.
253 Selinger, Parliamentarism: From Burke to Weber.
254 Mill, Considerations, ch. 5.
255 “Centralisation,” 586–7.
256 “Centralisation,” 607–8.
257 Cf. van Waarden, “John Stuart Mill on Civil Service Recruitment and the Relation between Bureaucracy and Democracy,” 625–45.
258 “Centralisation,” 608–9.
259 E.g. On Liberty, 308.
260 E.g. Principles, 943.
261 Considerations, ch. 3.
262 “Centralisation,” 608–9.
263 Ibid., 610. This criticism of Dupont-White essentially rehashed the charge Mill had made the year before against the ‘French people’ of caring insufficiently for ‘liberty’ and instead treating politics as a series of ‘struggles’ to acquire ‘the power of meddling in everything.’ For all Dupont-White's virtues, Mill thought that in this dimension of his writing Dupont-White was giving philosophical expression to the ‘type of character’ that had doomed ‘representative government’ in his homeland through ‘excess of corruption’ and the bestowal upon ‘one man [of] the power of consigning any number of the rest, without trial, to Lambessa or Cayenne, provided he allows all of them to think themselves not excluded from the possibility of sharing his favours’ (e.g. the very Bonapartism that Dupont-White despised); Considerations, 420–1.
264 Ibid., 605, 609–10, 590.
265 Ibid., 590, my italics.
266 Ibid., 603–4, my italics. And see Levy, Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, 221–3.
267 Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism.
268 E.g. López, “‘Advanced Liberalism’ and the Politics of Reform in Victorian Parliamentary Debates of the 1860s,” 73–96; McCabe, John Stuart Mill, Socialist.
269 Stafford, “How Can a Paradigmatic Liberal Call Himself a Socialist?,” 325–45.
270 As one of the section titles in Chapters on Socialism put it succinctly, ‘the idea of private property [is] not fixed but variable,’; Mill, Chapters, CW V, 749. My thanks to a reviewer of a previous iteration of this paper for pointing out this phrasing.
271 E.g. Turner, “John Stuart Mill on Luck and Distributive Justice,” 80–93.
272 Unlike with Dupont-White, the center of Mill’s most radical economic proposals concerned property in and taxation of land, and his radicalism here increased in the final years of his life, after his encounter with Dupont-White, due to the heating up of the land question in Ireland; e.g. de Mattos, “John Stuart Mill and the Irish Land Question,” 43–60.
273 On the distance between Mill and modern liberalism, e.g. Conti, “John Stuart Mill and Modern Liberalism”.
274 E.g. Claeys, “Justice, independence, and industrial democracy,” 122–47.
275 E.g. the essays in Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain, ed. Mandler; Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen, ch. 3.
276 E.g. Freeden, The New Liberalism. And as Élie Halévy noted long ago, the philosophic-radical circles in which Mill matured were deeply ambivalent about the scope of state activity: Halévy, La Formation du radicalisme philosophique.
277 Mill, “Coleridge,” CW X, 117–63.
278 Mill, “Bentham,” CW X, 90.
279 E.g. Prutsch, Caesarism in the Post-Revolutionary Age, ch. 4.
280 E.g. Mueller, John Stuart Mill and French Thought.
281 E.g. Mill’s joke when he sent a revolver to his stepdaughter in France: ‘I believe importation of arms is prohibited, not to mention that they may think I intend to fire at the Emperor’; Mill to Helen Taylor, 23 Feb. 1860, CW XV, 686. See also his remark about a famous assassination attempt gone awry: ‘What a pity the bombs of Orsini missed their mark, and left the crime-stained usurper alive’; Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, 504.
282 Varouxakis, “French Radicalism through the Eyes of John Stuart Mill,” 433–61.
283 “Centralisation,” 585, 604.