The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin
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The Pursuit of Certainty
This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.
© 1998 by Liberty Fund, Inc. Originally published in 1965 by Cambridge University Press.
Cover images courtesy of Corbis-Bettmann.
This eBook edition published in 2013.
eBook ISBNs:
978-1-61487-103-3
978-1-61487-221-4
Contents
David Hume: Pagan Virtues and Profane Politics
3 The Combat of Reason and Passion
5 Virtue in a Bundle of Perceptions
6 The Philosophical Enthusiasm Renounced
9 The Proper Political Disposition
10 The End of Profane Politics
Jeremy Bentham: Liberty and Logic
12 Utilitarianism—A System of Tolerance
13 A Perfect System of Legislation
John Stuart Mill: From Puritanism to Sociology
18 The Failure of Utilitarianism
25 Liberty and the Ideal Individual
Beatrice Webb: Science and the Apotheosis of Politics
I would like to thank the William Volker Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation for grants during the early stages of my work. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study and its director, Miss Constance Smith, for enabling me to complete the book under circumstances most unusually encouraging and agreeable.
I am grateful to the Passfield trustees for permission to read and quote from the unpublished diaries of Beatrice Webb, and to Mr. C. G. Allen of the library at the London School of Economics for his kind assistance.
Although nothing inspires dispute more easily than matters of politics, there is wonderful agreement about the questions at issue. Not only is the nature of political controversy in the distant past supposed to be clear. What has more recently agitated men seems equally certain. And hardly anyone denies that the distinctive political issue since the eighteenth century has been whether government should do more or less.
The agreement extends to accounts of how this came to be such an important question in England. Toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, the historians all tell us, new social conditions aggravated