Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism

Download or read book Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism written by D. Malachuk and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-08-19 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book recovers and recommends the core conviction of Victorian liberal theory that human beings, with the help of the state, can achieve an objective moral perfection. The first half of the book considers the diverse modern biases that have blinded us to the merit of this core conviction and weaves together disparate new scholarship (primarily in political theory and Victorian Studies) to set the stage for a reconsideration of that conviction. The second half of the book is that reconsideration outlining the various policies the Victorian liberals (John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, primarily, with a half dozen other nineteenth-century British and American authors) recommended the state employ in the perfection of human beings.