ABSTRACT
John Stuart Mill's examination of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment was deep, and the effect of the latter on him sustained and profound. He discusses them in a pair of essays on Bentham and Coleridge: Bentham, the great figure of the radical Enlightenment, Coleridge, the eloquent spokesman of the counter Enlightenment. Mill's questions about history, humanity and human good were nineteenth-century, late-modern questions, shaped by the experience of revolution and Romanticism. The crucial new questions were how to reconcile the individual and society, how to maintain authoritative structures of knowledge and moral conduct, how to overcome the breakdown of community and the pervasive alienation of the modern world. Mill agrees that the dangers of modern politics will be those of conformism and loss of creativity, of individuals lost in the crowd and of centralising despotism: 'the only despotism of which in the modern world there is real danger.
