Lexington Books
Pages: 246
Trim: 6 x 9
978-1-4985-6395-6 • Hardback • October 2018 • $105.00 • (£81.00)
978-1-4985-6396-3 • eBook • October 2018 • $99.50 • (£77.00)
Jay M. Eisenberg is an independent scholar in the history of ideas, with masters and doctorate degrees from Brandeis University and Drew University.
Chapter 1: The Scottish Enlightenment and the Idea of Philosophical History
Chapter 2: The Utility of History
Chapter 3: Human Nature and History
Chapter 4: Statics, Dynamics, and the Historical Method
Chapter 5: History and Progress
Chapter 6: Stationary States in Practice and Theory
To understand John Stuart Mill, philosophers must yield to historians of ideas—for Mill is one of their own. Grounded in current Mill studies and a close reading of the entire range of Mill’s work, Jay Eisenberg identifies Mill’s historical method in the moral sciences and his speculations on the future of progressive civilization as both cause and consequence of his break from Benthamism. The epilogue is a thoughtful reflection on the ways Mill is relevant for our own times.
— Eldon J. Eisenach, University of Tulsa
In his crisply written book, Jay Eisenberg artfully underscores the role of historical understanding in John Stuart Mill’s political theory. Scholarship in recent decades has clarified how Mill’s ideas about freedom, democracy, and individuality must be grasped in the context of Mill’s moral philosophy. Eisenberg shifts the focus to Mill’s philosophy of history. In so doing he sheds new light on the relevance of Mill’s analysis of threats to human progress in the age of mass society and speculations about ‘stationary state’ political economy to current worries over human ‘progress.’— Bruce Baum, University of British Columbia
Jay Eisenberg's new study on John Stuart Mill weaves together themes from Mill—such as history, human nature, the normativity of utility, freedom, and self-development—that many readers of Mill find inconsistently and unsystematically combined. Anyone interested in nineteenth-century classical utilitarianism in general, as well as in Mill's version of it in particular, should read this very clearly written book.— David Weinstein, Wake Forest University