HAYEK (Friedrich August von)., Preface. &
PACKE (Michael St. John).
The Life of John Stuart Mill. With a Preface by F. A. Hayek.
William Foyle’s copy.
HAYEK (Friedrich August von)., Preface. &
PACKE (Michael St. John).
The Life of John Stuart Mill. With a Preface by F. A. Hayek.
With a preface by F. A. von Hayek, who had published the letters between Mill and his wife Harriet in 1951; Hayek declares that “there may still be details to be filled in here and there; but on the whole I feel that Mr. Packe has given us the definitive biography of Mill for which we have so long been waiting”. Hayek was fascinated by Mill, who was undeniably a forerunner of his own brand of liberalism, and yet who he felt had wrongly departed from the principles of Adam Smith.
‘The statement that Mill was Britain’s most important philosopher in the nineteenth century looks like a bold assertion, but in fact it should not be even mildly controversial. The Victorians themselves might have thought that someone else, such as Herbert Spencer, better merited this title, but from our perspective Mill has no serious rivals. Indeed, only Charles Darwin could possibly rival Mill’s claim to having been nineteenth-century Britain’s most important intellectual figure’ (Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers, Thoemmes Press, 2002).
Provenance: morocco bookplate of the bookseller William Foyle, from his celebrated library at Beeleigh Abbey, near Maldon in Essex.
