The Pursuit of Certainty: David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Beatrice Webb - Softcover

Letwin, Shirley Robin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865971951 ISBN 13: 9780865971950

Publisher: Liberty Fund, 1998

Synopsis

By examining the thought of four seminal thinkers, Shirley Robin Letwin in The Pursuit of Certainty provides a brilliant record of the gradual change in the English-speaking peoples’ understanding of “what sort of activity politics is.” As Letwin writes, “the distinctive political issue since the eighteenth century has been whether government should do more or less.” Nor, as many historians argue, did this issue arise because of the Industrial Revolution or “new social conditions [that] aggravated the problem of poverty” but, Letwin believes, because of the “profoundly personal reflection” of major thinkers, including Hume, Bentham, Mill, and Webb. David Hume, for example, believed that to “reach for perfection, to seek an ideal, is noble, but dangerous, and is therefore an activity that individuals or voluntary groups may pursue, but governments certainly should not.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, as Letwin observes, Beatrice Webb came to “equate the triumph of reason over passion with the rule of science over human life.” Thus did the “pursuit of certainty” displace the traditional English understanding of the limitations of human nature―hence the necessity of limits to governmental power and programs. Consequently, in our time, “Politics was no longer one of several human activities and at that not a very noble one; it encompassed all of human life” in quest of philosophical “certainty” and social perfection. The Liberty Fund edition is a reprint of the original work published by Oxford in 1965.

Shirley Robin Letwin (1924–1993) was a Professor of Political and Legal Philosophy at Harvard, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics.

About this title

About the Author

Born 1924, died 1993. A student of F. A Hayek, Shirley Robin Letwin taught at Chicago, Brandeis, Radcliffe, Cambridge and the LSE, but for most of her life was an independent scholar, and a major influence in the revival of Conservative doctrine 1960 1992.

Edition details

• Publisher: Liberty Fund
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865971951
• ISBN 13: 9780865971950
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 454