Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek: Volume 16, Hayek on Mill: The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings, edited by Sandra J. Peart (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2015).
John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006).
Volume I: Autobiography and Literary Essays, edited by John M. Robson & Jack Stillinger (From Autobiography: "Generally society, as now carried on in England, is so insipid an affair, even to the persons who make it what is, that it is kept up for any reason rather than the pleasure it affords. All serious discussion on matters on which opinions differ, being considered ill bred, and the national deficiency in liveliness and sociability have prevented the cultivation of the art of talking agreeably on trifles, in which the French of the last century so much excelled, the sole attraction of what is called society to those who are not at the top of the tree, is the hope of being aided to climb a little higher in it; while to those who are already at the top, it is chiefly a compliance with custom, and with the supposed requirements of their station. To a person of any but a common order in thought or feeling, such society, unless he has personal objects to serve by it, must be supremely unattractive: and most people, in the present day, of any really high class intellect, make their contact with it so slight, and at such long intervals, as to be almost considered as retiring from it altogether. Those persons of any mental superiority who do otherwise, are, almost without exception, greatly deteriorated by it. Not to mention loss of time, the tone of their feelings is lowered: they become less earnest about those of their opinions respecting which they must remain silent in the society they frequent: they come to look upon their most elevated objects as unpractical, or, at least, too remote from realization to be more than a vision, or a theory; and if, more fortunate than most, they retain their higher principles unimpaired, yet with respect to the persons and affairs of their own day they insensibly adopt the modes of feeling and judgment in which they can hope for sympathy from the company they keep. A person of high intellect should never go unintellectual society unless he can enter it as an apostle; yet he is the only person with high objects, who can safely enter it at all. Persons even of intellectual aspirations had much better, if they can, make their habitual associates of at least their equals, and as far as possible, their superiors, in knowledge, intellect, and elevation of sentiment. Moreover, if the character is formed, and the mind made up, on the few cardinal points of human opinion, agreement of conviction and feeling on these, has been felt in all times to be an essential requisite of anything worthy the name of friendship, in a really earnest mind,. All these circumstances united, made the number very small of those whose society, and still more whose intimacy, I now voluntarily sought." Id. at 1, 235-237. From "Writings of Alfred de Vigny": "It may be worth while to employ a moment in considering what are the general features which, in an age of revolutions, may be expected to distinguish a Royalist or Conservative from a Liberal or Radical poet or imaginative writer. [] There is room in the world for poets of both these kinds; and the greatest all always partake of the nature of both. A comprehensive and catholic mind and heart will doubtless feel and exhibit all these different sympathies, each in its due proportion and degree; but what that due proportion may happen to be, is part of the larger question which every one has to ask himself at such periods, viz., whether it were for the good of humanity at the particular era, that Conservative or Radical feeling should most predominate? For there is a perpetual antagonism between these two; and until human affairs are much better ordered than they are likely to be for some time to come, each will require to be, in a greater or lesser degree, tempered by the other: nor until the ordinance of law and of opinion are so framed as to give full scope to all individuality not positively noxious, and to restrain all that is noxious, will the two classes of sympathies ever be entirely reconciled." Id. at 465, 467-469.).
Volume II: Principles of Political Economywith Some of heir Applications to Social Philosophy, Books I-II, introduction by V. W. Bladen, textual editor J. M. Robson ("But to make the comparison applicable, we must compare Communism at its best, with the regime of individual property, not as it is, but as it might be. The principle of private property has never yet had a fair trial in any country; and less so, perhaps, in this country than in some others. The social arrangements of modern Europe commenced from a distribution of property which was the result, not of just partition, or acquisition by industry, but of conquest and violence: and notwithstanding what industry has been doing for many centuries to modify the work of force, the system still retains many and large traces of its origin. The laws of property have never yet conformed to the principles on which the justification of private property rests. They have made property of things which never ought to be property, and absolute property where only a qualified property ought to exist. They have not held the balance fairly between human beings, but have heaped impediments upon some, to give advantage to others; they have purposely fostered inequalities, and prevented all from starting fair in the race. That all should indeed start on perfectly equal terms, is inconsistent with any law of private property; but if as much pains as has been taken to aggravate the inequality of chances arising from the natural working of the principle, had been taken to temper that inequality by every means not subversive of the principle itself; if the tendency of legislation had been to favour the diffusion, instead of the concentration of wealth--to encourage the subdivision of the large masses, instead of striving to keep them together; the principle of individual property would have been found to have no necessary connexion with the physical and social evils which almost all Socialist writers assume to be inseparable from it." Id. at 207-208.).
Volume III: Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, Books III-V, Appendices, introduction by V. W. Bladen, textual editor J. M. Robson.
Volume IV: Essays on Economics and Society 1824-1845, introduction by Lord Robbins, textual editor J. M. Robson (From "Corporation and Church Property": "Subject to the restrictions which we shall hereafter suggest, the control of the founder, over the disposition of the property, should, in point of degree, be absolute. But to what extent should it reach in point of time? For how long should this unlimited power of the founder continue?" "To this question the answer is in principle obvious, that it is not easy to conceive how it can ever have been missed by any unsophisticated and earnest inquirer. The sacredness of the founder's assignment should continue during his own life, and for such longer period as the foresight of a prudent man may be presumed to reach, and no further. We do not pretend to fix the exact term of years; perhaps there is no necessity for its being accurately fixed; but it evidently should be only a moderate one. For such a period, it conduces to the ends for which foundations ought to exists, and for which alone they can ever rationally have been intended, that they should remain undisturbed." "All beyond this is to make the dead, judges of the exigencies of the living; to erect, not merely the ends, but the means, not merely the speculative opinions, but the practical expedients, of a gone-by age, into an irrevocable law for the present. The wisdom of our ancestors was mostly a poor wisdom enough, but this is not even following the wisdom of our ancestors; for our ancestors did not bind themselves never to alter what they had once established. Under the guise of fulfilling a bequest, this is making a dead man's intentions for a single day, a rule for subsequent centuries, when we know not whether he himself would have made it a rule, even for the morrow." [fn. "It is as if one who was an infant when his mother died, should dress himself all his life in a frock and petticoats, because his mother clothed hi in them when he was a baby."] "There is no fact in history which posterity will find it more difficult to understand, than that the idea of perpetuity, and that of any of the contrivances of man, should have been coupled together in any sane mind: that it has been believed, nay, clung to as 'sacred' truth, and has formed part of the creed of whole nations, that s signification of the will of a man, ages ago, could impose upon all mankind now and for ever an obligation of obeying him:--that, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was not permitted to question this doctrine without opprobrium; though for hundreds of years before a solemn condemnation of this very absurdity had been incorporated in the laws, and familiar to every judge by whom, during all that period, they have been administered." Id. at 193, 198-199.).
Volume V: Essays on Economics and Society 1850-1879, introduction by Lord Robbins, & textual editor J. M. Robson.
Volume VII: A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Books I-III, editor of the text J. M. Robson, & introduction by R. F. McRae.
Volume VIII: A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Books IV-VI, Appendices, editor of the text J. M. Robson, & introduction by R. F. McRae.
Volume X: Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, editor of text J. M. Robson, introduction by F. E. L. Priestley, & 'Essay on Mill's Utilitarianism' by D. P. Dryer (From Three Essays on Religion (1874), "Nature": "In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives; and in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures. If, by an arbitrary reservation, we refuse to account anything murder but what abridges a certain term supposed to be allotted to human life, nature also does this to all but a small percentage of lives, and does it in all the modes, violent or insidious, in which the worst human beings take the lives of one another. Nature impales men, breaks them as if on a wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first christian martyr starves then with hunger, freezes then with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. All this, Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and the noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst; upon those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts; and it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them. She mows down those on whose existence hangs the well-being of a whole people, perhaps the prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence. Such are Nature's dealings with life. Even when she does not intend to kill, she inflicts the same tortures in apparent wantonness. In the clumsy provision which she has made for that perpetual renewal of animal life, rendered necessary by the prompt termination she puts to it in every individual instance, no human being ever comes into the world but another human being is literally stretched on the rack for hours or days, not unfrequently issuing in death. Next to taking life (equal to it according to a high authority) is taking the means by which we live; and nature does this too on the highest scale and with the most callous indifference. A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts, or an inundation, desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root, starves a million people. The waves of the sea, like banditti seize and appropriate the wealth of the rich and the little all of the poor with the same accompaniments of stripping, wounding, and killing as their human antitypes. Everything in short, which the worst men commit either against life of property is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents. Nature has Noyades more fatal than those of Carrier; her explosions of fire damp are as destructive as human artillery; her plague and cholera far surpass the poison cups of the Borgias. Even the love of 'order' which is thought to be a following of the ways of nature, is in fact a contradiction of them. All which people are accustomed to deprecate as 'disorder' and its consequences, is precisely a counterpart of nature's ways. Anarchy and the Reign of Terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin, and death, by a hurricane and a pestilence." Id. at 369, 372, 385-386.).
