John Stuart Mill & Harriet Taylor Mill – Part One – Liberalism's original power couple

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, History

4.8 • 655 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2024

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a joint writing team who produced the most seminal books about freedom in the modern era. But while he was worshipped by those who came afterwards, she was mocked, lambasted and then erased from history. In part one, Ian explains Mill's devastating childhood, Taylor's cutting social commentary, their love affairs which rocked Victorian London, the evidence for her co-authorship of several key liberal books, and how they delivered some of the earliest works of British feminism. • See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here. • Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. • Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too. • Support Origin Story on Patreon Reading list Ian Dunt - How to be a Liberal (2020) (Has anyone heard of this book? Is it any good?) Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed) - The Complete Works of Harriet taylor Mill (1998) John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) - On Liberty (1859) John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) - The Subjection of Women (1869) John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham - Utilitarianism and Other Essays (1987) Richard Reeves - John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (2007) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to origin story. In each episode, we take a word, idea or figure from history,
0:13.7	explain its origins and talk about how it influences political discourse today. I'm Doreen
0:18.7	Linsky, author of the Ministry of Truth, and Everything was Go. And my name is Ian Dunn. I am a columnist for The Eye newspaper, and I'm the author of
0:24.4	how Westminster works and why it doesn't. Now, last time we did my specialist subject, George Orwell,
0:30.4	this time we are doing one of Ian's. John Stuart Mill is the name on the banner. But Ian,
0:37.0	you talk about Harriet Taylor, his lover and often co-writer as well.
0:43.1	My impression was that this was a relatively new thing and that historians previously in
0:50.4	biographers tended to give her pretty short shrift.
0:53.5	There's a real overlap here with what we were talking about last week, right, with
0:58.0	George Orwell's wife.
0:59.0	But actually, it's slightly distinct in that we have a lot of documentary evidence that we always had,
1:07.0	but had previously been ignored, showing how their writing process worked.
1:11.9	But it is ultimately something quite profound that's being discovered about the two of them,
1:16.2	which is that for a long time, John Stuart Mill was the father of liberalism.
1:21.0	And what's really becoming clear now is that liberalism had a mother, Harriet Taylor,
1:26.7	and she was purposefully and very aggressively
1:30.0	erased from the history.
1:31.3	Do you have an emotional connection to these two?
1:34.8	Yes.
1:35.8	Like I do with Orwell.
1:36.3	Yes, I do.
1:37.3	I remember doing a live, and like your inability to read quotes that you really like without
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