Graduate Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto (UTSG).
She received her PhD in Political Science in 2013 from Northwestern University in Chicago, IL, and has an MA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Philips applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Liberalism Trap: John Stuart Mill and Customs of Interpretation, and reported the following:
The 99th page of The Liberalism Trap: John Stuart Mill and Customs of Interpretation reads John Stuart Mill against the grain of his customary reception under the sign of ‘liberalism’. Focussing on Mill’s studies of class and inequality, it details how the practice of turning to Mill as the quintessential representative of liberalism has superseded attention to his politics. Though page 99 offers just a snapshot of what aspects of Mill’s politics have been obscured, the larger drama at the heart of The Liberalism Trap looms in the background. In an age where arguments about liberalism—its rise, decline, meaning, prospects and so on—dominate the focus of scholars and pundits alike, refusing to follow this now customary preoccupation is intentionally disruptive. The page illustrates through example the limits our interpretive customs impose on the way we practice—and imagine—politics.Visit Menaka Philips's website.
Page 99 comes mid-way through chapter five, which outlines how Mill’s political economy challenges conventional ideological boundaries (in this case, between ‘socialist’ and ‘liberal’). As such, it works specifically to upset long-standing efforts to dismiss or minimize Mill’s socialist leanings and to thereby secure his identification with market liberalism. Instead, as I argue, Mill clearly mediates between “his investments in, and criticism of, socialist arguments,” by looking for ways to balance socialist calls for distributive equality, with defenses of market competition. That negotiation leads him to support worker cooperatives to balance “the individualizing interests of the commercial spirit and the collective aims of democracy.”
Notably, the page also highlights the distinctive approach I take in the book, which is to examine Mill’s political writings comparatively. Where Mill scholarship has traditionally separated his work on issues of gender, class, and empire, the book locates critical points of connection between his proposals for each. There are parallels, for instance, between Mill’s view of the family and his approach to worker cooperatives as key sites of civic education. In his writings on gender equality, Mill notes that the family is the “first school of virtues within which citizens are raised,” making it imperative that the relations between wives and husbands are premised on equality, not subordination. Similarly, Mill hoped that the practices of collective discussion and management entailed in cooperative organizations would make them yet another “great school of that public spirit,” acting to check an “unbalanced influence of the commercial spirit.” In both cases, Mill hoped to ascertain better ways of living and working together, which could expand not only the privileges, but also the duties of democratic citizenship.
Overall, page 99 demonstrates one of the critical arguments I make in the book, that Mill eschews ideological certainties in favor of a politics of uncertainty. In this way, the selection offers a good example of how the book approaches Mill’s politics: it takes seriously his rejection of ideological complacency in favor of experimentation, negotiation, and a disposition towards uncertainty as a fundamental condition of political life. Mill, as the page concludes, is a cautionary radical: his proposals keep “the aims of equity and justice in mind, while remaining characteristically attuned to the different sides of debate over reform.”
The purpose of The Liberalism Trap is to situate these examples in a broader account of what we miss when we rely too heavily on ideological labels to do the work of ‘speaking for’ the texts, authors, or ideas marshalled under those nominalist markers. However convenient it might be to focus on a singular label—or the example of one page—Mill himself would caution us that neither can substitute for wading through the messy, and often borderless work, of political thought and practice.
--Marshal Zeringue
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