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John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty has been a consistent and prominent reference point in the ongoing debates about free speech. In this episode we discuss an elegant and powerful critique of Mill by the twentieth century political theorist Willmoore Kendall. His essay “The ‘Open Society’ and Its Fallacies” was published in the American Political Science Review in December of 1960. Our conversation covers various aspects of Kendall’s critique. Kendall claims that Mill’s argument for freedom rests on a false conception of the nature of society and human nature itself. We explore Kendall’s understanding of Mill’s thoroughgoing radicalism. “Mill,” Kendall writes, “is in full rebellion against both religion and philosophy, and so in full rebellion also against the traditional society that embodies them.” We also take up the phenomenon of what Kendall calls the “dispersal of opinion.” He contends that any society which guides itself according to Mill’s prescriptions will “descend ineluctably into ever deepening differences of opinion, into progressive breakdown of those common premises upon which alone a society can its affairs by discussion.” Our guest is James Stoner. Professor Stoner is the Hermann Moyse, Jr., Professor and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute in the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University, where he has taught since 1988. He is the author of Common-Law Liberty (Kansas, 2003) and Common Law and Liberal Theory (Kansas, 1992), and co-editor of Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity in Higher Education with Paul Carrese and Carol McNamara—just published in September of 2023. He also contributed a chapter to this volume called “Was John Stuart Mill Right About Free Speech?” which will be of interest to anyone who listens to our conversation here.
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