John Stuart Mill
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2013
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Max Mosley nominates the philosopher and proponent of personal liberty, John Stuart Mill, as his great life. With presenter Matthew Parris and biographer Richard Reeves.
Max Mosley trained as a barrister and was an amateur racing driver before becoming involved in the professional sport, latterly as president of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile. The youngest son of Sir Oswald Mosley, former leader of the British Union of Fascists, and Diana Mitford, his family name made a career in politics impossible. His choice of Mill as a great life is a result of his recent experiences of suing the News of the World for invasion of privacy, and giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry. He says that both sides of the debate used Mill's work on liberty to justify their arguments.
Until summer 2012 Richard Reeves was Nick Clegg's Director of Strategy, and before that, head of the think-tank 'Demos'. His biography, 'John Stuart Mill - Victorian Firebrand', depicts Mill as a passionate man of action: a philosopher, radical MP and reformer who profoundly shaped Victorian society and continues to illuminate our own.
Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2013.
Transcript
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| 0:06.0 | What happens if the person you trust with your future isn't what you think they are? |
| 0:10.0 | I did feel the whole time he was watching me Yeti. I saw a footprint and that really gave me gusmas. |
| 0:16.4 | Or people who knew me. Emme, I remember every secret, every lie. I'm the only one who knows the truth. |
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| 0:29.0 | Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. |
| 0:32.0 | We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear. |
| 0:36.3 | A key belief in today's Great Life is that we have the right to be wrong or as he put it |
| 0:44.4 | truth gains more even by the errors of one who with due study and preparation thinks for himself |
| 0:52.0 | than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think. |
| 0:59.0 | The words of the Victorian philosopher, economist and don't forget advocate of women's rights, John |
| 1:05.4 | Stuart Mill. |
| 1:07.1 | I suspect it might also be a key belief of my guest today, the ex-formula one boss Max Mosley. |
| 1:15.0 | Max J.S. Mill was a great defender and celebrant of individuality. |
| 1:19.9 | Is that why you've chosen him? |
| 1:22.1 | Absolutely because I think his main contribution, I think, for ordinary people like me, |
| 1:27.6 | was recognizing that if you're not doing any harm to someone else, |
| 1:32.0 | then you should be allowed to do whatever it is you enjoy doing. |
| 1:35.8 | And I think that's, for me at least, a fundamental part of a civilized society that the |
| 1:40.5 | curtain twitches don't come and tell you what you can or cannot do in the privacy of your own home. |
| 1:46.0 | Max Mosley was born in 1940, the youngest son of Sir Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford, |
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