ABSTRACT
Most knew of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen’s greatest work only through secondary sources, most especially Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Kirk, in his history of conservative ideas, explicates and summarizes Stephen’s vigorous defense of ordered liberty and the rule of law against what he as the humanitarian and collectivist utopian views of John Stuart Mill. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity offers a cogent analysis of Mill, especially of Mill’s ideas as developed in On Liberty. The title of this work was taken, of course, from the slogan shouted by the Jacobins during the French Revolution. Stephen believed that the beliefs suggested by this popular slogan amounted to a dangerous new religious creed that threatened to sweep away the ancient moral foundations of Western civilization. The Mill/Stephen debate is instructive because it goes to the heart of the issues dividing Left and Right. Although the particulars of their quarrels may change, the fundamental philosophical positions at stake have remained constant.
