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“The simple idea is the location of an observer at the center and the observed at the circumference, whether the construction is a prison, workhouse, factory, or school. We can thereby, Bentham assures us, 'see a new scene of things spread itself over the face of civilized society - morals reformed, health preserved, industry reinvigorated, instruction diffused, public burthens lightened, economy seated as it were upon a rock.'
Bentham's pantopticon was never constructed, unfortunately for the future of mankind. who had to wait over a century and a half for television.”
― Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought
Bentham's pantopticon was never constructed, unfortunately for the future of mankind. who had to wait over a century and a half for television.”
― Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought
“What we have found out by consulting Mill's Autobiography is that Mill is equipped for the uphill race with the same moral and educational criteria with which he had initially become sensitive to the weight of the incubus on his soul menacing his own liberty. To this extent democracy in America is the same kind of authoritarian moral threat as the education which had been imposed on Mill by his father. The soul of the American is threatened with enslavement because it too receives the impress of opinions which it can only reproduce; the American can no longer address questions directly to himself as an individual.”
― Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought
― Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought
“Nevertheless, we can face the deeper problem, which Mill formulates as follows: 'What really are the intellectual characteristics of this age; whether our mental light - let us account for the fact as we may - has not lost in its intensity, at least a part of what it has gained in diffusion?' Mill is formulating the problem as a question. But the article to which he is responding was a plea 'for the moderns against those who placed the ancients above them,' so that Mill's signature would seem to imply an answer to his question which would place the ancients above the moderns. The phrasing of the question is, in any case, an endorsement of a reflexive criterion that Mill's father would repudiate: 'The intense was with him a bye-word of scornful disapprobation.' In fact Mill is pitting the Romantic and poetic criterion of inner 'intensity' against his father's utilitarian and journalistic criterion of public diffusion.''' That Mill has lost his youthful confidence in the progress attendant upon the diffusion of knowledge is even more evident form his next question: 'Whether our 'march of intellect' be not rather a march towards doing without intellect and supplying our deficiency of giants by the united efforts of a constantly increasing multitude of dwarfs?”
― Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought
― Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought
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