Course: Social Theory - II (4670)

Semester: Spring, 2020

Assignment No. 1
Q.1 Critically analyze the characteristics of European culture in the light of Persian Letters written by
Montesquieu.
The Persian Letters is an epistolary novel consisting of letters sent to and from two fictional Persians, Usbek
and Rica, who set out for Europe in 1711 and remain there at least until 1720, when the novel ends. When
Montesquieu wrote the Persian Letters, travellers' accounts of their journeys to hitherto unknown parts of the
world, and of the peculiar customs they found there, were very popular in Europe. While Montesquieu was not
the first writer to try to imagine how European culture might look to travellers from non-European countries, he
used that device with particular brilliance.
Many of the letters are brief descriptions of scenes or characters. At first their humor derives mostly from the
fact that Usbek and Rica misinterpret what they see. Thus, for instance, Rica writes that the Pope is a magician
who can "make the king believe that three are only one, or else that the bread one eats is not bread, or that the
wine one drinks is not wine, and a thousand other things of the same kind" (Letter 24); when Rica goes to the
theater, he concludes that the spectators he sees in private boxes are actors enacting dramatic tableaux for the
entertainment of the audience. In later letters, Usbek and Rica no longer misinterpret what they see; however,
they find the actions of Europeans no less incomprehensible. They describe people who are so consumed by
vanity that they become ridiculous, scholars whose concern for the minutiae of texts blinds them to the world
around them, and a scientist who nearly freezes to death because lighting a fire in his room would interfere with
his attempt to obtain exact measurements of its temperature.
Interspersed among these descriptive letters are the Persians' reflections on what they see. Usbek is particularly
given to such musings, and he shares many of Montesquieu's own preoccupations: with the contrast between
European and non-European societies, the advantages and disadvantages of different systems of government,
the nature of political authority, and the proper role of law. He also seems to share many of Montesquieu's
views. The best government, he says, is that "which attains its purpose with the least trouble", and "controls
men in the manner best adapted to their inclinations and desires" (Letter 80). He notes that the French are
moved by a love of honor to obey their king, and quotes approvingly the claim that this "makes a Frenchman,
willingly and with pleasure, do things that your Sultan can only get out of his subjects by ceaseless exhortation
with rewards and punishments" (Letter 89). While he is vividly aware of the importance of just laws, he regards
legal reform as a dangerous task to be attempted "only in fear and trembling" (Letter 129). He favors religious
toleration, and regards attempts to compel religious belief as both unwise and inhumane. In these reflections
Usbek seems to be a thoughtful and enlightened observer with a deep commitment to justice.
However, one of the great themes of the Persian Letters is the virtual impossibility of self-knowledge, and
Usbek is its most fully realized illustration. Usbek has left behind a harem in Persia, in which his wives are kept
prisoner by eunuchs who are among his slaves. Both his wives and his slaves can be beaten, mutilated, or killed
at his command, as can any outsider unfortunate enough to lay eyes on them. Usbek is, in other words, a despot

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in his home. From the outset he is tortured by the thought of his wives' infidelity. It is not, he writes, that he
loves his wives, but that "from my very lack of feeling has come a secret jealousy which is devouring me"
(Letter 6). As time goes on problems develop in the seraglio: Usbek's wives feud with each other, and the
eunuchs find it increasingly difficult to keep order. Eventually discipline breaks down altogether; the Chief
Eunuch reports this to Usbek and then abruptly dies. His replacement is clearly obedient not to Usbek but to his
wives: he contrives not to receive any of Usbek's letters, and when a young man is found in the seraglio he
writes: "I got up, examined the matter, and found that it was a vision" (Letter 149). Usbek orders another
eunuch to restore order: "leave pity and tenderness behind. ... Make my seraglio what it was when I left it; but
begin by expiation: exterminate the criminals, and strike dread into those who contemplated becoming so. There
is nothing that you cannot hope to receive from your master for such an outstanding service" (Letter 153). His
orders are obeyed, and "horror, darkness, and dread rule the seraglio" (Letter 156). Finally, Roxana, Usbek's
favorite wife and the only one whose virtue he trusted, is found with another man; her lover is killed, and she
commits suicide after writing Usbek a scathing letter in which she asks: "How could you have thought me
credulous enough to imagine that I was in the world only in order to worship your caprices? that while you
allowed yourself everything, you had the right to thwart all my desires? No: I may have lived in servitude, but I
have always been free. I have amended your laws according to the laws of nature, and my mind has always
remained independent" (Letter 161). With this letter the novel ends.
The Persian Letters is both one of the funniest books written by a major philosopher, and one of the bleakest. It
presents both virtue and self-knowledge as almost unattainable. Almost all the Europeans in the Persian
Letters are ridiculous; most of those who are not appear only to serve as a mouthpiece for Montesquieu's own
views. Rica is amiable and good-natured, but this is largely due to the fact that, since he has no responsibilities,
his virtue has never been seriously tested. For all Usbek's apparent enlightenment and humanity, he turns out to
be a monster whose cruelty does not bring him happiness, as he himself recognizes even as he decides to inflict
it. His eunuchs, unable to hope for either freedom or happiness, learn to enjoy tormenting their charges, and his
wives, for the most part, profess love while plotting intrigues. The only admirable character in the novel is
Roxana, but the social institutions of Persia make her life intolerable: she is separated from the man she loves
and forced to live in slavery. Her suicide is presented as a noble act, but also as an indictment of the despotic
institutions that make it necessary.
Q.2 What is ‘a liberalism of fear’? Why the liberalism of Montesquieu had been dubbed as liberalism o
f fear? Explain with cogent argument.
Montesquieu is among the greatest philosophers of liberalism, but his is what Shklar has called "a liberalism of
fear" (Shklar, Montesquieu, p. 89). According to Montesquieu, political liberty is "a tranquillity of mind arising
from the opinion each person has of his safety" (SL 11.6). Liberty is not the freedom to do whatever we want: if
we have the freedom to harm others, for instance, others will also have the freedom to harm us, and we will
have no confidence in our own safety. Liberty involves living under laws that protect us from harm while

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leaving us free to do as much as possible, and that enable us to feel the greatest possible confidence that if we
obey those laws, the power of the state will not be directed against us.
If it is to provide its citizens with the greatest possible liberty, a government must have certain features. First,
since "constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it ... it is necessary from
the very nature of things that power should be a check to power" (SL 11.4). This is achieved through the
separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial powers of government. If different persons or bodies
exercise these powers, then each can check the others if they try to abuse their powers. But if one person or
body holds several or all of these powers, then nothing prevents that person or body from acting tyrannically;
and the people will have no confidence in their own security.
Certain arrangements make it easier for the three powers to check one another. Montesquieu argues that the
legislative power alone should have the power to tax, since it can then deprive the executive of funding if the
latter attempts to impose its will arbitrarily. Likewise, the executive power should have the right to veto acts of
the legislature, and the legislature should be composed of two houses, each of which can prevent acts of the
other from becoming law. The judiciary should be independent of both the legislature and the executive, and
should restrict itself to applying the laws to particular cases in a fixed and consistent manner, so that "the
judicial power, so terrible to mankind, … becomes, as it were, invisible", and people "fear the office, but not the
magistrate" (SL 11.6).
Liberty also requires that the laws concern only threats to public order and security, since such laws will protect
us from harm while leaving us free to do as many other things as possible. Thus, for instance, the laws should
not concern offenses against God, since He does not require their protection. They should not prohibit what they
do not need to prohibit: "all punishment which is not derived from necessity is tyrannical. The law is not a mere
act of power; things in their own nature indifferent are not within its province" (SL 19.14). The laws should be
constructed to make it as easy as possible for citizens to protect themselves from punishment by not committing
crimes. They should not be vague, since if they were, we might never be sure whether or not some particular
action was a crime. Nor should they prohibit things we might do inadvertently, like bumping into a statue of the
emperor, or involuntarily, like doubting the wisdom of one of his decrees; if such actions were crimes, no
amount of effort to abide by the laws of our country would justify confidence that we would succeed, and
therefore we could never feel safe from criminal prosecution. Finally, the laws should make it as easy as
possible for an innocent person to prove his or her innocence. They should concern outward conduct, not (for
instance) our thoughts and dreams, since while we can try to prove that we did not perform some action, we
cannot prove that we never had some thought. The laws should not criminalize conduct that is inherently hard to
prove, like witchcraft; and lawmakers should be cautious when dealing with crimes like sodomy, which are
typically not carried out in the presence of several witnesses, lest they "open a very wide door to calumny" (SL
12.6).

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Montesquieu's emphasis on the connection between liberty and the details of the criminal law were unusual
among his contemporaries, and inspired such later legal reformers as Cesare Beccaria.
Q.3 What is Associationism? Elaborate Associationism through the perspective of Mill’ works.
For our purposes, some dimensions matter more than others. Hedonism says that pleasure is the one and only
intrinsic good and that pain is the one and only intrinsic evil. All other things have only extrinsic or instrumental
value depending on whether and, if so, how much pleasure or pain they produce. Because the utilitarian asks us
to maximize value, he has to be able to make sense of quantities or magnitudes of value associated with
different options, where he assigns value to pleasure and disvalue to pain. Intensity, duration, and extent would
appear to be the most relevant variables here. Each option is associated with various pleasures and pains both
within a single life and across lives. For any given option we must find out how many pleasures and pains it
produces, whether those occur in a single life or in different lives. For every distinct pleasure and pain, we must
calculate its intensity and its duration. That would give us the total amount of (net) pleasure (or pain) associated
with each option. Then we must do that option with greatest total. If there are two (or more) options with the
greatest total, we are free to select any of these.
Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), for one, read Mill as a psychological egoist (The Methods of Ethics 42–44). This
is not just guilt by association. For it may appear that Mill endorses psychological egoism in his so-called
―proof‖ of the principle of utility in Chapter IV of Utilitarianism. There, Mill aims to show that happiness is the
one and only thing desirable in itself (U IV 2). To do this, he argues that happiness is desirable in itself (IV 3),
and a central premise in this argument is that everyone desires his own happiness (IV 3). Mill later argues that
only happiness is desirable (IV 4).
But the proof does not reveal Mill to be a psychological egoist. While Mill does say that each person has an
ultimate desire for her own happiness, he does not say that this is each person‘s only ultimate desire. Indeed, in
the second half of the proof he allows that some agents have a disinterested concern for virtue and that they care
about virtue for its own sake (IV 4–5). And what is true of virtue is no less true of less grand objects of desire,
such as money or power (IV 6). These too it is possible to desire for their own sakes. If psychological egoism
claims that one‘s own happiness is the only thing that is desired for its own sake, then this shows that Mill is not
a psychological egoist.
If we look outside of Utilitarianism we can find even clearer evidence of Mill‘s doubts about psychological
egoism and hedonism. In a note to his edition of James Mill‘s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human
Mind (1869) John Stuart Mill diagnoses a possible equivocation in his father‘s doctrine.
That the pleasures or pains of another person can only be pleasurable or painful to us through the association of
our own pleasures and pains with them, is true in one sense, which is probably that intended by the author, but
not true in another, against which he has not sufficiently guarded his mode of expression. It is evident, that the
only pleasures or pains of which we have direct experience … [are] those felt by ourselves … [and] that the
pleasure or pain with which we contemplate the pleasure or pain felt by someone else, is itself a pleasure or pain

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of our own. But if it be meant that in such cases the pleasure or pain is consciously referred to self, I take this to
be a mistake. (Notes II 217–18)
In his ―Remarks on Bentham‘s Philosophy‖ (1833) Mill urges a similar caution in understanding Bentham.
In laying down as a philosophical axiom that men‘s actions are always obedient to their interests, Mr. Bentham
did no more than dress up the very trivial proposition that all people do what they feel themselves most
disposed to do …. He by no means intended by this assertion to impute universal selfishness to mankind, for he
reckoned the motive of sympathy as an interest. (CW X: 13–14)
In both passages Mill makes what is now a familiar diagnosis of the troubles with psychological egoism. He
thinks that psychological egoism is ambiguous between a true but trivial thesis about the ownership of desire—
an agent necessarily acts on his own desires—and a substantive but wildly implausible thesis about
the content of desires—an agent‘s ultimate desire is always and necessarily to promote his own interests or
pleasure. If so, there is no thesis that is both substantive and plausible. The substantive thesis may seem
speciously attractive if we tacitly confuse it with the trivially true thesis. But it seems clear from Bentham‘s and
James Mill‘s worries about the conflict between ruler‘s interests and the interest of the ruled that they intend
something like the substantive psychological thesis. But if they do so because they conflate it with the trivial but
true thesis, then they commit the fallacy of equivocation.
So Mill rejects the substantive doctrines of psychological egoism and hedonism that Bentham and his father
sometimes defended or suggested. This is really part of a larger criticism of the conception of psychology and
human nature underlying Benthamite utilitarianism, which Mill elaborates in his essays on Bentham. Mill‘s
desire to distance himself from Benthamite assumptions about human nature and psychology are also reflected
in his conception of happiness and his doctrine of higher pleasures.
Despite this robust rationale for liberties of thought and action, it is also important to see that Mill is not treating
liberty as an intrinsic good or endorsing an unqualified right to liberty.
First, we should note that Mill does not defend liberty per se, but only certain basic liberties. His defense
focuses on three basic categories of liberty (I 12).
1. Liberties of conscience and expression
2. Liberties of tastes, pursuits, and life-plans
3. Liberties of association
Though these liberties evidently include quite a bit, there is no suggestion here that any and all liberty deserves
protection. Why not? Insofar as Mill defends individual liberties by appeal to deliberative values, he can
distinguish the importance of different liberties in terms of their role in practical deliberation. A central part of
practical deliberation is forming ideals and regulating one‘s actions and plans in accordance with these ideals.
But some liberties seem more central than others to the selection of personal ideals. For instance, it seems
plausible that liberties of speech, association, worship, and choice of profession are more important than
liberties to drive in either direction on streets designated as one-way, liberties not to wear seat belts, or liberties

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to dispose of one‘s gross income as one pleases, because restrictions on the former seem to interfere more than
restrictions on the latter with deliberations and choices about what sort of person to be.
Second, even the exercise of basic liberties is limited by the harm principle, which justifies restricting liberty to
prevent harm to others. Even expressive liberties can be restricted when their exercise poses a ―clear and present
danger‖ to others.
[E]ven opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to
constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn dealers are
starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through
the press, but may justifiably incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the
house of a corn dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard. (III 1)
There are interesting questions about the correct interpretation of the harm principle, which we will examine
later. But Mill‘s commitment to some version of the harm principle as a ground for restricting liberty is hard to
dispute.
Third, it is important to be clear about how Mill values basic liberties. To account for the robust character of his
perfectionist argument, it is tempting to suppose that Mill thinks these basic liberties are themselves important
intrinsic goods (see Berger 1984: 41, 50, 199, 231–32; Bogen and Farrell 1978: 325–28). But in Mill‘s
introductory remarks he insists that his liberal principles do not apply to individuals who do not have a suitably
developed normative competence (I 10). So, for instance, the prohibition on paternalism does not extend to
children with immature deliberative faculties or to adults with very limited normative competence, whether due
to congenital defects or social circumstance. Such restrictions on the scope of Mill‘s principles make little sense
if basic liberties are dominant intrinsic goods, for then it should always be valuable to accord people liberties—
a claim that Mill denies. Instead, Mill claims that these liberties have value only when various necessary
conditions for the exercise of deliberative capacities—in particular, sufficient rational development or
normative competence—are in place.
Q.4 Mill propounded that method of social sciences involved a two fold use of induction and deduction.
Make a critical analysis of this assertion of Mill through his principles of social sciences.
From childhood Mill had been fascinated by the human mind and the foundations and processes of knowledge.
Even in the depths of his mental crisis and subsequent attraction to Romantic thought, he seems never
substantially to have departed from the views—transmitted via his father from the inheritance of Thomas
Hobbes—that knowledge was rooted in material sensations, and that genuine scientific propositions were
deductive in character, rather than (as was claimed by Kantians, natural theologians, and the school
of Reid and Dugald Stewart) derived from a priori categories or from intuition and common sense. These views
were forged and sharpened not merely by his early reading in logic but by daily exposure to the economic
reasoning of his father and Ricardo, and by the austere legal positivism in which he had been trained
by Austin and Bentham.

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Nevertheless, there was more wavering in his opinions than Mill was later willing to admit; and the unravelling
of his views is complicated by the varying ways in which both he and his antagonists used terms like a
priori, deduction, and induction. Confusingly, both the sense-data school and the intuitionists claimed to be
supporters of induction, but disagreed about its place in the sequence of scientific thought. The former school
(usually, though not always) held that general deductive laws could be built up from evidence initially supplied
by induction, derived from 'observation of what passes in our own minds' and the 'general tendencies' of human
nature. The latter school (usually, though not always) saw induction as the process that retrospectively tested a
priori hypotheses generated within the mind itself. Mill's thinking in this area over many years indicated some
degree of uncertainty on a number of issues. In 1827 he was impressed by the argument of Richard
Whately's Logic that knowledge derived from induction could never 'be built up into a regular demonstrative
theory like that of the syllogism'. The major shock to his inherited views came, however, in 1829
from Macaulay's onslaught on James Mill's Essay on Government. It was Macaulay's dismissal of his father's
deductive approach to history—in combination with the historical theories of his Coleridgean and Saint-
Simonian friends—that encouraged John Mill to think for a time of exploring these problems by writing a
philosophical history of the French Revolution. In the early 1830s he collected many materials for this work,
but in the end was happy to pass them on to Carlyle, feeling that his own talents were essentially analytical—
and in particular that thinking about thought, 'the science of science itself', was his peculiar forte.
Mill initially pursued his enquiries in a deliberately open-minded, ‗non-sectarian‘ spirit, hoping to reach a
position in which the partial truths contained in rival schools might be resolved or synthesized. In the early
1830s he was already working on the theory of syllogisms that was to be propounded twelve years later in book
two of his System of Logic. The Autobiography recorded that he 'could make nothing satisfactory of Induction,
at this time'; but manuscript sources show him arguing, against Whately, that induction was 'as much entitled to
be called Reasoning, as the demonstrations in Euclid' (Collected Works, 1.191, 8.961). His 'Remarks on
Bentham's philosophy' in 1833, though more concerned with ethics than theories of knowledge, appeared to
make a number of concessions to the intuitionist and anti-deductivist schools—particularly his criticism
of Bentham's dismissal of character and conscience, and his rejection of Bentham's claim to have discovered a
universal spring of human action that operated regardless of specific variations in history and culture, time and
place. In this essay Mill also questioned the view that there was any necessary connection between a thinker's
philosophical views and his or her attitudes to practical politics (Collected Works, 10.17–18n). But a year later
his essay entitled 'On the definition of political economy' asserted the opposite view: 'systematic differences of
opinion' in any sphere could always be traced back to 'a difference in their conceptions of the philosophic
method' (ibid., 4.324).
Mill's views began to take shape more firmly, however, as certain leading members of the intuitionist school
went on the polemical offensive—and as philosophers of all schools in the 1830s and 1840s became
increasingly driven by the passionate quest for a holistic theory of knowledge. Mill was wrong in claiming in

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later years that intuitionism at this time had been all-powerful; but it was, none the less, strongly represented in
certain powerful institutions, most notably the University of Cambridge, where it was closely linked with
natural theology, the ethical teachings of Bishop Butler, and the promotion of induction as the practical
investigative handmaid of certain categorical assumptions about the noumenal, natural, and social worlds. In
1834 a lecture published by a leading proponent of this school, Adam Sedgwick, linked defence of induction to
a broader attack on both the 'selfish' morals of the utilitarians, and their abstract, deductionist
methodology. Sedgwick's lecture was mainly concerned with natural science, but it included the claim, in echo
of Macaulay, that the facts of history were the only valid basis for a general understanding of politics and
society—evoking from Mill the sharp retort that 'not only is history not the source of political philosophy, but
the profoundest political philosophy is requisite to explain history … History is not the foundation, but the
verification of the social science' (Collected Works, 10.44–5). His essay 'On the definition of political
economy' also firmly restated the superior status of deductive reasoning: mere inductive verification a
posteriori was 'no part of the business of science at all, but the application of science' (ibid., 4.325).
Mill continued to mull over these questions for more than a decade. In the late 1830s his ideas were further
crystallized, both positively and negatively, by the writings of Auguste Comte and William Whewell. From
1837 he was reading the first five volumes of Comte's Cours de philosophie positif, and his correspondence
with Comte in 1841–2 (when his own study was far advanced) shows him eagerly awaiting the sixth volume
and declaring himself Comte's disciple. The differences between them, he assured Comte, stemmed almost
entirely from the fact that public opinion in England was too immature to tolerate a wholly non-religious,
explicitly positivist philosophy. At the other extreme his ideas were powerfully influenced by two works from
the second great Cambridge intuitionist, Whewell, The History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) and The
Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840). These two monumental works, designed to expose the logical
fallacies of the tradition of Locke, aimed to hitch Baconian inductionism to the a priori reasoning of Immanuel
Kant. Like Kant, Whewell argued that there were certain necessary truths about the phenomenal universe—such
as the existence of space, time, causality, and geometric forms—that could only be assumed and not proven.
Such assumptions were essential to the formulation of general hypotheses, which could then be verified by
inductive observation and experiment. Much of practical science, Whewell implied, consisted simply of
inspired guesswork, followed up by meticulous case-by-case investigation. All systematic knowledge consisted
of an interaction between 'metaphysical ideas' and 'inductive movement'; without the former the latter was
pointless, since 'in no case can experience prove a proposition to be necessarily or universally true' (Whewell,
1.62). Whewell's examples were taken largely from mathematics and natural philosophy; but since the early
1820s he had been a recurrent critic of the deductive method of Ricardo and James Mill, and his books were
widely viewed, by Whewell himself as well as by others, as a further skirmish in the war against sensationalist
theories of mind and abstract political economy.

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Whewell's studies provided Mill with a mass of practical examples of scientific method, sifted for him
by Alexander Bain, who was later to be his first biographer and chief philosophic
disciple. Whewell's Philosophy in particular acted as a timely catalyst that helped him to weld together his own
still somewhat disparate thoughts on scientific reasoning. The result was A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and
Inductive, published after twelve years' gestation in 1843. Mill began his book with the assertion that he was not
concerned with the contested territory of epistemology, but only with the structure of logical argument. This
austere agenda proved, however, impossible to observe at every point, and the text frequently spilt over into
deep questions of human understanding. Throughout his work Mill concurred with Whewell that knowledge
was a unity, but he claimed much more explicitly than Whewell that social knowledge was comparable in kind,
if not necessarily in degree, with knowledge in the natural sciences. He agreed also about the importance of
induction, but disagreed fundamentally about the relation of inductive knowledge to general propositions in
either natural or social science. For Whewell, the very possibility of scientific enquiry was rooted in certain
inherently untestable a priori assumptions, armed with which it was possible to make sense of empirical data
and only thus to formulate general laws. For Mill general propositions (other than those that were purely
syllogistic) were deductions, themselves initially derived by inference from induction, without reference at any
stage to categorical ideas. The latter he portrayed as having throughout history seduced human minds into the
error of believing that there were universal ‗substances‘, over and above the sum of the specific cases which
such categories were supposed to represent. Substances were the sirens that lured unwary logicians to their
doom, down false trails such as animism, mysticism, the Platonic theory of forms, linguistic and mathematical
essentialism, the Christian doctrine of human nature, and—closer to Mill's own day—the common-sense
philosophy of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart and the idealism of Kant. In Mill's view the study of the
phenomenal world was a self-contained process of inference between induction and deduction, the latter being
the formulation of general laws out of conjunctions of the more particular ‗empirical‘ laws derived from the
former. The stage to which a particular science had developed and the general conditions under which it
operated determined whether inference from deduction or induction took priority. Such inference he claimed
was the basis of all scientific, as opposed to merely imaginative, thought about everything from mathematics
and celestial mechanics through to mankind living in society and the individual human mind. Even concepts
relating to objects imperceptible in nature, such as perfect circles and lines without breadth, could ultimately be
traced back, not to axiomatic truths, but to a mental process of neutralizing non-relevant sense-data (just as non-
wealth-producing motives and passions were excluded by economists from study of the pursuit of wealth).
Mill's account of geometry challenged the wellnigh universal view that mathematical theorems were
intrinsically axiomatic rather than inductive. But the most controversial parts of his thesis, as Mill himself
intended, were those that related to the deductive character of social and moral science; and much of book six of
the Logic was devoted to anticipating possible objections in this area. These objections related primarily to four
interrelated problems: free will, the nature of mind, sociological method, and the precise character of deductive

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reasoning in relation to such volatile and variable subject matter as the working of human society. In defending
the compatibility of social laws with free will, Mill was deeply concerned to dissociate himself from the
currently vociferous Owenite view that human character was the creature of social forces and that individuals
therefore had no choice and no responsibility for their own deeds. Instead he claimed that law-like regularities
in human behaviour in no way precluded the possibility of free will. 'The causes … on which action depends'
were 'never uncontrollable', and human beings could actively participate in the formation of their own
characters; they could choose whether or not they wished to follow the guidance of social laws (Collected
Works, 8.840–42). The study of mind was imperfectly developed, but was, he claimed, no different in principle
from the study of other complex phenomena. As with astronomy, however, the scope for induction and
experiment in the study of mind was limited; it could only advance by grafting elementary (inductive)
psychology onto the still embryonic (deductive) study of 'Ethology' or the science of character, which was
concerned with formulating 'general laws of human nature' (ibid., 8.861–74). Laws relating to individual
behaviour would also be the basis of the study of 'human beings united together in the social state', since 'human
beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the laws of the
nature of individual man' (ibid., 8.879).
Such an assertion sounded like an echo of the widely condemned reductionism of the Essay on Government;
but Mill went on to reject his father's ‗geometric‘ method as a model for social science, on the ground that
geometry took no account of 'conflicting forces'. He also rejected a ‗chemical‘ model for social science, arguing
that (unlike physical elements transformed into compounds) human beings were
simultaneously both participants in the social organism and irreducibly separate and autonomous entities. The
appropriate method for social enquiry was the 'Concrete Deductive Method … of which astronomy furnishes
the most perfect, natural philosophy a somewhat less perfect, example' (Collected Works, 8.894).
Here Mill admitted a provisional role for 'a system of deductions a priori', though he insisted that 'the ground of
confidence in any concrete deductive science is not the a priori reasoning itself, but the accordance between its
results and those of observation a posteriori' (ibid., 8.896–7), a caveat with which many of his opponents would
surely have agreed. Sociology's reliance on such retrospective induction meant that it could not be a 'science of
positive predictions' but only of general 'tendencies', the latter constantly liable to disruption by the fact that so
many countless threads of social causation were constantly mingled together. The main goal of the social
sciences should therefore be, not to assert universal causal laws, but the much more limited methodological
goal, of 'teach[ing] us how to frame the proper theorem for the circumstances of any given case' (ibid., 8.898–
900).
A further complication was that human societies did not merely differ within themselves, and from each other,
but also changed over time, thus producing a degree of complexity that 'could not possibly be computed by
human faculties from the elementary laws which produce it' (Collected Works, 8.913–15). The proper
procedure here, Mill suggested, was to supplement concrete deduction by the inverse deductive method

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proposed by Comte. Comte's Cours de philosophie positif had argued that historical laws were deductive
propositions or hypotheses derived from the ‗empirical laws of society‘. These empirical laws were of two
kinds: those which showed how societies were held together (‗social statics‘) and those which demonstrated
how societies underwent change (‗social dynamics‘). To illustrate the kind of laws comprised under the
former, Mill quoted the long passage in his own 'Essay on Coleridge', where he had identified the three
preconditions of social union in all known historical societies, among them a sense of transcendent origin or
purpose (Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, 120–24). On social dynamics he was somewhat more equivocal:
societies everywhere seemed to be demonstrating 'certain general tendencies', such as the shift from military to
industrial organization, the predominance of masses over individuals, and the ascendancy of minds over bodies;
but these tendencies had not yet advanced beyond the status of limited empirical laws. What was
needed, Mill conjectured, was an 'element in the complex existence of social man' that could both interpret the
sequence of social causation and itself be a prime agent of future social change. And, by a happy 'consilience', it
so happened that just such an element did in fact exist (Collected Works, 8.914–15)! The combined evidence of
history and human nature proved that 'the speculative faculties of mankind' were not merely the necessary
medium of social understanding, but, increasingly, were themselves 'predominant … almost paramount, among
the agents of social progression' (ibid., 7.924–30).
On its initial publication in 1843 A System of Logic attracted little public comment, a silence that betokened,
according to one contemporary, R. H. Hutton, not lack of interest but sheer terror among the book-reviewing
community at the thought of incurring the crossfire of Mill's dialectical powers. Within a very few years,
however, it was to become one of the most influential and controversial works of the mid-nineteenth century.
Despite Mill's earlier intention of reconciling rival positions, his correspondence with Comte suggests that by
the early 1840s he had come to see his book not just as a disinterested work on scientific method but as a
polemical attack on the very possibility of metaphysics and theology, at least as conceived by most practitioners
of those disciplines in the early Victorian era. Over the next three decades, however, its arguments were to be
assimilated in the most unlikely quarters. The book appeared in eight different editions over the course
of Mill's lifetime, that of 1851 being, under Harriet's tutelage, the most heavily revised. The edition of 1862
included an additional chapter on Buckle's History of Civilization in England (1857 and 1861), which
expounded more fully Mill's thesis that history was the product of dialectical interplay between psycho-social
conditions and men's 'own peculiar characters'. After the mid-1840s Mill gradually withdrew from his
correspondence with Comte, increasingly perturbed by his former mentor's anti-feminism, constant requests for
financial help, and (something Mill appears not to have noticed before) lack of interest in proof and induction.
But, despite excision of the first edition's flattering references to Comte, later editions were if anything
even more positivist in sentiment than that of 1843—incorporating long passages from Comte's predictions of
global convergence towards a heavily industrialized, politically collectivized, and culturally homogenized
society of the future. Mill himself clearly hoped that the development of a more precise social science would be

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a central theme of his own future work in systematic theory, and for some time after publication of the Logic, he
was exploring ideas for a projected work on ethology and the study of national character. But the project made
little progress, and in the mid-1840s he returned to his earlier studies of the one area of social science in which
deductive theory had already made significant headway—the study of political economy.
Q.5 What is the influence of climate on human character? Elaborate in the light of thoughts of Ibn
Khaldun as has been mentioned in the Muqaddimah.
Human activities contribute to climate change by causing changes in Earth‘s atmosphere in the amounts of
greenhouse gases, aerosols (small particles), and cloudiness. The largest known contribution comes from the
burning of fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide gas to the atmosphere.
Greenhouse gases and aerosols affect climate by altering incoming solar radiation and out-going infrared
(thermal) radiation that are part of Earth‘s energy balance. Changing the atmospheric abundance or properties of
these gases and particles can lead to a warming or cooling of the climate system.
Since the start of the industrial era (about 1750), the overall effect of human activities on climate has been a
warming influence. The human impact on climate during this era greatly exceeds that due to known changes in
natural processes, such as solar changes and volcanic eruptions.
People's personalities may be shaped by the temperatures of the places in which they grew up, a new study
suggests. This could mean that as climate change influences temperatures around the globe, shifts in personality
may follow.
The idea that someone's personality may be affected by where that person lives is not new: Previous research
has suggested that many aspects of human personality vary from one geographical region to another, according
to the new study. But the causes of these personality differences have remained unclear.
One potential explanation is temperature, according to senior author Lei Wang, a social and cultural
psychologist at Peking University in Beijing, and his colleagues. Because temperatures vary markedly across
the world, the study authors reasoned that this factor might shape personality by influencing people's habits. For
instance, temperature might have an impact on whether people like exploring their surroundings, interacting
with others, trying new activities or engaging in collective outdoor work such as farming.
But instead of simply looking at whether people grew up in hot or cold climates, the researchers took a more
nuanced approach, looking at whether people grew up in milder climates, where temperatures are closer to
about 71 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius), or if they lived in places with more extreme temperatures.
In the new paper, the researchers conducted two separate studies within two large, yet culturally distinct
countries — China and the United States. By looking at data from these two countries, the researchers hoped to
eliminate confounding effects from other factors — such as cultural or economic differences —that might also
have influenced the subjects' personality.

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The scientists analyzed data from more than 5,500 people from 59 Chinese cities and data from about 1.66
million people from about 12,500 ZIP codes in the United States. They examined data from personality
questionnaires as well as the average temperatures of places where those people grew up.
The scientists discovered that the people who grew up in climates with milder temperatures were generally
more agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, extroverted and open to new experiences. These findings
held true for people in both countries, despite gender, age and average income.
It's possible that mild temperatures can influence personality by encouraging social interactions and supporting
a wider range of activities, the researchers said.
These new findings do not suggest that climate was the sole factor that shaped a person's destiny, said Evert
Van de Vliert, a cross-cultural psychologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who was not
involved in the new study.
"I would caution … against thinking that our ancestors, and we ourselves of course, are passive products of
where we live," Van de Vliert told Live Science. "By intelligently and actively using property and money,
humans can and do create their own identity and destiny in harsher climates."
Indeed, the study found that despite living in climates that are similarly harsh, people in certain Chinese regions
differ, personality-wise, from people living in northern states in the U.S., suggesting that other factors aside
from temperature play a role, Van de Vliert said.
For example, in China, where people are relatively poor compared with those living in the United States, those
"who live in the harsher climates of Heilongjiang, Xinjiang and Shandong have a more collectivist personality
than their compatriots living in the more temperate climates of Sichuan, Guangdong and Fujian," Van de Vliert
said.
In contrast, in the United States, those "who live in the harsher climates of North and South Dakota, Montana
and Minnesota have a more individualist personality than their compatriots in the more temperate climates of
Hawaii, Louisiana, California and Florida," he said.
Van de Vliert noted that questions about potential links between personality and geographical regions have
often led to controversy. For example, by suggesting that climate essentially controls a person's destiny, some
researchers "have put forward self-serving claims about the intellectual superiority of some races and the
inferiority of others," he said. Such claims have led others to avoid "research into climatic influences on
people," he said.
The authors of the study said that more research is still needed to understand the potential effects of temperature
on personality. However, the researchers noted that "as climate change continues across the world, we may also
observe [associated] changes in human personality. Of course, questions about the size and extent of these
changes await future investigation."
Ibn Khaldūn was born in Tunis in 1332; the Khaldūniyyah quarter in Tunis still stands almost unchanged and,
in it, the house where he is believed to have been born.

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As Ibn Khaldūn relates in his autobiography (Al-taʿrīf bi Ibn Khaldūn), the family claimed descent from
Khaldūn, who was of South Arabian stock, and had come to Spain in the early years of the Arab conquest and
settled in Carmona. The family subsequently moved to Sevilla (Seville), played an important part in the civil
wars of the 9th century, and was long reckoned among the three leading houses of that city. In the course of the
next four centuries, the Ibn Khaldūns successively held high administrative and political posts under
the Umayyad, Almoravid, and Almohad dynasties; other members of the family served in the army, and several
were killed at the Battle of Al-Zallāqah (1086), which temporarily halted the Christian reconquest of Spain. But
the respite thus won proved short, and in 1248, just before the fall of Sevilla and Córdoba, the Ibn Khaldūns and
many of their countrymen judged it prudent to cross the Straits of Gibraltar and landed at Sabtah (now Ceuta, a
Spanish exclave), on the northern coast of Morocco.

In 1349, however, the Black Death struck Tunis and took away both his father and his mother.
Ibn Khaldūn gives a detailed account of his education, listing the main books he read and describing the life and
works of his teachers. He memorized the Qurʾān, studied its principal commentaries, gained a good grounding
in Muslim law, familiarized himself with the masterpieces of Arabic literature, and acquired a clear and forceful
style and a capacity for writing fluent verse that was to serve him well in later life when addressing eulogistic or
supplicatory poems to various rulers. Striking by their absence are books on philosophy, history, geography, or
other social sciences; this does not mean that he did not study these subjects—scholars know that he wrote
summaries of several books by the 12th-century Arab philosopher Averroës—but it is to be presumed that Ibn
Khaldūn acquired most of his very impressive knowledge in these fields after he had completed his formal
education.
This came at age 20, when he was given a post at the court of Tunis, followed three years later by a
secretaryship to the sultan of Morocco in Fez (Fès). By then he was married. After two years of service,
however, he was suspected of participation in a rebellion and was imprisoned. Released after nearly two years
and promoted by a new ruler, he again fell into disfavour, decided to leave Morocco, and crossed over
to Granada, for whose Muslim ruler he had done some service in Fez and whose prime minister, the brilliant
writer Ibn al-Khaṭīb, was a good friend. Ibn Khaldūn was then 32 years old.
The following year Ibn Khaldūn was sent to Sevilla to conclude a peace treaty with Pedro I of Castile. There he
saw ―the monuments of my ancestors.‖ Pedro ―treated me with the utmost generosity, expressed his satisfaction
at my presence and showed awareness of the preeminence of our ancestors in Sevilla.‖ Pedro even offered him
a post in his service, promising to restore his ancestral estates, but Ibn Khaldūn politely declined. He gladly
accepted the village that the sultan of Granada bestowed on him, however, and, feeling once more secure,
brought over his family, whom he had left in safety in Constantine. But, to quote him once more, ―enemies and
intriguers‖ turned the all-powerful prime minister, Ibn al-Khaṭīb, against him and raised suspicions regarding

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his loyalty; it can be conjectured that the task of these enemies must have been greatly facilitated by the
apparent jealousy between the two most brilliant Arab intellectuals of the age. Once more, Ibn Khaldūn found it
necessary to take his leave, and he returned to Africa. The following 10 years saw him change employers and
employment with disconcerting rapidity and move from Bejaïa (Bougie) to Tilimsān (Tlemcen), Biskra, Fez,
and once more to Granada, where he made an unsuccessful effort to save his old rival and friend, Ibn al-Khaṭīb,
from being killed by order of its ruler.
During this period Ibn Khaldūn served as prime minister and in several other administrative capacities, led a
punitive expedition, was robbed and stripped by nomads, and spent some time ―studying and teaching.‖ This
extreme mobility is partly explained by the instability of the times. The Almohad Empire, which had embraced
the whole of North Africa and Muslim Spain, had broken down in the middle of the 13th century, and the
convulsive process from which Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were subsequently to emerge was under way;
wars, rebellions, and intrigues were endemic, and no man‘s life or employment was secure. But in Ibn
Khaldūn‘s case two additional factors might be suspected—a certain restlessness and a capacity to make
enemies, which may account for his constant complaints about the ―intriguers‖ who turned his employers
against him.

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