Mill and Women

These days it's all John Stuart Mill for me. I didn't develop any crush on him like I did on Hannah Arendt, and like I was born with on Alexis de Tocqueville. I mean who knows?, there's still time.

I am liking two things about JSM at the moment: First, he emphasizes marital friendship (it's questionable whether or not it's to the detriment of romance in marriage). Second, he has this sort of chastened complementarity (one of my professors described him as not particularly original, but a great unifier of other theories)--this isn't an essentialist notion of what a woman is and what a man is, but rather a praise of both reason and poetry or intuition, although not confining those things strictly to one sex/gender or the other.


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