Sean Donaghue-Johnston

Penny gaffs were shows put on by and for the poor in the slums of London throughout the Victorian Age. They were raucous affairs, "where dancing and singing [took] place," along with the occasional brawl, and where bourgeois taboos were openly flaunted. Performers dressed provocatively, told dirty jokes, and acted in plays that seethed with innuendo, if not outright obscenity. Middle-class writers who attended the gaff generally adopted the style and tone of travel writers and ethnographers. They styled themselves as travellers in "the undiscovered country of the poor," as "Pilgrims, wanderers, gipsy-loiterers in the great world of London," and as explorers of "regions dark and dolorous." In this essay, I employ Foucault's archaeological method in order to demonstrate that middle-class writings about the gaff belonged to an "ethological" discourse. Ethology, in this context, is the science of the formation of character, as sketched out by John Stuart Mill in his 1843 work A System of Logic. Mill's claim was that human character was something knowable, something that could be isolated as an object of scientific observation. And the penny gaff was, for middle-class moralists, a sort of ethological observatory, a place where one might go to observe the moral character of the poor in the process of being formed. And for this same reason, it was also an educational apparatus: for it was generally believed that if the process of the formation of character could be understood, then it could also be taken in hand and controlled so that a more desirable, more virtuous, more appropriately bourgeois type of character might be produced among the poor.

In this essay, I explore John Stuart Mill’s theory of government and its application to the issue of health care reform. In particular, I ask whether Mill’s theory of government would justify or condemn the creation of a public health-insurance option. Although Mill’s deep distrust of governmental authority would seem to align him with Republicans, Tea Partiers, libertarians, and others, who cast the public option as a “government takeover” of “our” health care system, I argue that Mill offers good reasons for seriously considering some form of government-operated health insurance. For Mill theorizes government as having a positive as well as a negative role to play in people’s lives, and he explicitly endorses “public options” in different areas of life. According to his theory of government, a public health-insurance option would be just as long as it would meet the following two conditions: (1) it would not invade the “reserved territory” of individual liberty; and (2) “the case of expediency is strong.” I argue that a public option would in fact meet both of these conditions, and that Mill would have likely endorsed it as an effective solution to the current health care crisis in the United States.

According to John Rawls, the liberalism of John Stuart Mill is “comprehensive” and not “political” because it promotes the idea of individuality as a more or less universal conception of the good. Rawls’s political liberalism, in contrast, does not promote any one particular conception of the good over others. Instead, it aims to guarantee for citizens the capacity for a conception of the good. I argue, however, that Mill’s liberalism is “comprehensive” because power is ubiquitous, i.e., because there are social and “nonpolitical” forms of power that political liberalism is not equipped to deal with. It is impossible to guarantee the capacity fora conception of the good without providing a point of resistance to the social and nonpolitical deployment of power. Thus, if liberalism is going to be able to guarantee the capacity for a conception of the good, it must become “political” in aim but “comprehensive” in scope.