sara l. maurer author of the dispossessed state - I got this book through interlibrary loan
The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland
with the writings of major British political theorists—John Stuart Mill, Henry Sumner Maine,
You can really see how Noam Chomsky was influenced by John Stuart Mill who drew on Henry S. Maine - for a kind of "libertarian socialist" worldview. I didn't realize that John S. Mill actually was also socialist along with being libertarian, citing Wilhelm von Humboldt.
A good place to start is with John Stuart Mill’s classic “On Liberty.” Its epigraph formulates “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges: the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.” The words are quoted from Wilhelm von Humboldt, a founder of classical liberalism. It follows that institutions that constrain such development are illegitimate, unless they can somehow justify themselves....
These ideas lead very naturally to a vision of society based on workers’ control of productive institutions, as envisioned by 19th century thinkers, notably Karl Marx but also — less familiar — John Stuart Mill.
Mill wrote, “The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected to predominate, is . the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers electable and removable by themselves.”
So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who work in them — that’s freedom and democracy. We see the same ideas in the United States. Let’s say you go back to the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system.”
Henry Summer Maine published Ancient Law in 1861,
"Maine provided Mill with a convenient backstory to property that Maine argued had once been owned in common by primitive socieites who joined together in village communities... In reviewing Maine's subsequent work, Village Communities (1871) Mill shows himself emboldened by this conservative logic to imagine a more active role for the whole community in determing the rights of property....With the influence of Maine, Mill's thinking... ." (quoting Sara L. Mauer)
This is basically what I had argued in my environmental economics class. At University of Wisconsin-Madison I took agricultural economics, macroeconomics, comparative government, some kind of world economics class (forget the title) and I took macroeconomics at Hampshire College from a famous activist scholar. ...
So John S. Mill's big policy push was for uncultivated land to be redistributed by the state so that poor peasants could farm the land. This is what the CIA organized fascist coups against in Guatemala and Central America! You never hear this about John Stuart Mill's views.
Noam Chomsky critiquing John Stuart Mills - vid
That's John Stuart Mill's essay on humanitarian intervention [J.S. Mill, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” Fraser's Magazine, December 1859
https://chomsky.info/20060119/
Noam Chomsky reading John Stuart Mills
NC: Pannekoek is voicing the conventional understanding of socialism in its early years, before it was transmuted to efforts to soften the harsh edges of capitalist oppression and came to be associated with the monstrous perversion of socialism in Bolshevik Russia. A genuine left Marxist and leading figure in the council Communist movement, Pannekoek was one of the “infantile ultra-leftists” against whom Lenin inveighed. The idea that workers themselves should be masters of production is a natural inheritor of core ideals of classical liberalism from John Locke to Thomas Paine to Abraham Lincoln and John Stuart Mill, all of whom regarded wage labor as a form of servitude that should not exist in a free society. The underlying conception was graphically expressed by the great humanist Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the founders of classical liberalism: “Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.” When the laborer works under external control, “we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is,” which is a tool in the hands of others, not a free person.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/noam-chomsky-scott-casleton-chomsky/
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