The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

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       The Pursuit of Certainty

      This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.

      The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.

      © 1998 by Liberty Fund, Inc. Originally published in 1965 by Cambridge University Press.

      Cover images courtesy of Corbis-Bettmann.

      This eBook edition published in 2013.

      eBook ISBNs:

       978-1-61487-103-3

       978-1-61487-221-4

       www.libertyfund.org

       Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART I

David Hume: Pagan Virtues and Profane Politics

1 A Man of Moderation

2 The Kirk

3 The Combat of Reason and Passion

4 A New Scene of Thought

5 Virtue in a Bundle of Perceptions

6 The Philosophical Enthusiasm Renounced

7 A Matter of Degree

8 The Science of Politics

9 The Proper Political Disposition

       10 The End of Profane Politics

       PART II

       Jeremy Bentham: Liberty and Logic

       11 Blackstone’s Challenger

       12 Utilitarianism—A System of Tolerance

       13 A Perfect System of Legislation

       14 Gadgets for Happiness

       15 A Modest Utopian

       PART III

       John Stuart Mill: From Puritanism to Sociology

       16 James Mill

       17 The Young Disciple

       18 The Failure of Utilitarianism

       19 Intimations of a New Creed

       20 Many-Sidedness

       21 The Creed of Progress

       22 Radicals in Politics

       23 Sociology

       24 Sociology Applied

       25 Liberty and the Ideal Individual

       26 The Liberal Gentleman

       PART IV

       Beatrice Webb: Science and the Apotheosis of Politics

       27 A New Climate of Opinion

       28 The Making of a Socialist

       29 The Apotheosis of Politics

       Index

Acknowledgements

      I would like to thank the William Volker Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation for grants during the early stages of my work. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study and its director, Miss Constance Smith, for enabling me to complete the book under circumstances most unusually encouraging and agreeable.

      I am grateful to the Passfield trustees for permission to read and quote from the unpublished diaries of Beatrice Webb, and to Mr. C. G. Allen of the library at the London School of Economics for his kind assistance.

Introduction

      Although nothing inspires dispute more easily than matters of politics, there is wonderful agreement about the questions at issue. Not only is the nature of political controversy in the distant past supposed to be clear. What has more recently agitated men seems equally certain. And hardly anyone denies that the distinctive political issue since the eighteenth century has been whether government should do more or less.

      The agreement extends to accounts of how this came to be such an important question in England. Toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, the historians all tell us, new social conditions aggravated