Tha Is

I highly recommend the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, which is short and wonderful. I’m only half through, but what I’ve especially liked so far are:

–Mill’s home schooling–it’s absolutely laughably incredible, except that it’s true. And after describing the most extraordinarily extensive pre-adolescent education most of us have ever heard of, he says, in effect, “And I was just an ordinary kid–no great student or anything.”

–watching a brilliant mind formed by the reason-worshipping Enlightenment coming to grips with Romantic rehabilitation of feeling–and YOU ARE THERE!

–watching this brilliant mind infected by the great leveler depression;

–Mill as a link between Enlightenment reform movements and what seem the more modern reform movements of socialism/anarchism/communism. The French Revolution always seemed “back then” to me, whereas Marx and the nineteenth-century socialists always seemed on a tight continuum with our own time, no doubt because of Marxism’s huge role in the twentieth century, including my own half of it. (Mill thought socialism impractical, but it was an important branch of radical thought in his time.)