ABSTRACT
The firmness with which John Stuart Mill condemned reformers who invoked the aid of tyranny and socialists who wedded their cause to terror, and his ability to recognize barbarism dressed in the slogans of liberation, made him seem the perfect antidote to the sleazy opportunism and selective morality of late-sixties progressivism. In Arnold’s view Mill was wholly blind to one indispensable dimension of human experience—religion. In 1828 Mill made the French Revolution the subject of his final and most ambitious article for the original Westminster, a detailed rebuttal of that part of Scott’s Life of Napoleon that gave a history of the revolution. This elaborate defense of the early revolutionists against Scott’s Tory calumnies was for Mill both “a labour of love” and the natural reaction of one who intended writing the history of the revolution against the premature effort of a biased and ignorant interloper.
