I have recently finished reading Charles Dickens’ 1840 novel, Barnaby Rudge. It is a novel of both romantic and political drama set in the period leading up to the famous London Gordon Riots of 1780. To offer a basic sketch of the story, it follows the lives of four families: the Haredales, the Willets, the Vardens, and the Rudges, between the years of 1775 and 1780, culminating in the riots of June, 1780. The drama essentially boils down to the tension between the personal affections that individuals in these families have for each other, and the rising hostilities and suspicions of their differing religions.
J.S. Mill’s famous essay On Liberty proposes a broadly Utilitarian principle to be applied for the purpose of the preservation of individual liberty against state coercion. This principle is known as the ‘harm principle’. Mill provides three vaguely distinct formulations of the principle, and in each one, the term ‘harm’ takes on a slightly different meaning. The first formulation implies a definition of harm as an act which would require either individual or collective ‘self-protection’ as a response. The second, more augmented formulation implies that a harm is an act of either commission or omission, that is hurtful to the ‘interests of others’. The final formulation of the principle implies that a harm is any act which impedes or deprives others’ pursuit of ‘their own good, in their own way’. This essay will first briefly summarize these three formulations, and then assess whether they function as bulwarks of liberty. At that point, I will pivot to examine how the harm principle is incorporated into Mill’s view of free speech in chapter two of the work, and briefly evaluate the strength of his defense against censorship in that context.
In Aeschylus’ play Oresteia, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter as an offering to the primitive (pre-classical) gods of nature and war, meant to insure sea passage and victory in an upcoming battle.
In doing so, he sets in motion a cascade of blood vengeance that echoes the historical practice of pre-classical Greek retaliatory clan justice. On Agamemnon’s return home, Clytemnestra cuts his throat in his bath. On the discovery of this horror, Orestes then, on prompting from his sister Elektra, murders his mother Clytemnestra. At this point, Orestes is chased through the rest of the play by the Erinyes (the furies), a symbol of ancient natural justice.
In his famous Paris Manuscripts of 1844, Marx argues that a society organized around the principle of private property and the commercial production of commodities forces man to stand in opposition to his own nature in order to subsist, and that this self-oppositional stance is best described as ‘alienated’ (or ‘estranged’) labor. To fully understand what Marx means by ‘alienated labor’, and under what circumstances labor becomes alienated, we must therefore first understand what Marx means by ‘human nature’. From there, we can understand what it means to be alienated from it, and the various ways in which this alienation is accomplished in a capitalist situation.
