A utopian radical

1. See his James Mill and the Art of Rhetoric (1963), Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (1965), and Macaulay and the Whig Tradition (1976). 2. The sole exception is Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism (1963). 3. Of course, both Mill and Hamburger make much of the influence on Mill of Saint-Simone, Comte, Coleridge, and von Humboldt. But almost no attention is paid to the great similarities uncovered by Hamburger between Mill's utopianism and that of a broad slice of contemporary and somewhat later nineteenth-century German thinkers, most importantly Marx and Nietzsche. The theme of "being too early" and serving as a mid-wife to those who will follow are particularly stunning in their common resonance in Mill and Nietzsche. 4. As Henry Reeve noted in his Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, 121, Mill "knew nothing of the world, and very little of the play and elasticity of human nature. It would have been of incalculable value to his philosophy if he had condescended to touch the earth, and to live with men and women as they are; but that was a lesson he had never learned, a book he had never opened."

BARRY ALAN SHAIN is Professor of Political Science at Colgate University.

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