John Stuart Mill and voluntary slavery contracts

Mill's unwillingness to support the enforcement of voluntary slavery agreements is problematically related to his strong anti‐paternalism. Working on the assumption that it is too simple to charge him with inconsistency, this paper examines several interpretations of his remarks, and explores some of the deeper motivations that may have influenced his position. Several features of his argument are emphasized: the fact that his opposition is to slavery contracts and not self‐enslavement as such; the weight he allows to ‘the necessities of life’ in determining what freedom‐limiting contracts to enforce; the way in which enforceable slavery agreements would undermine the presumption in favour of liberty; the problematic character of carte blanche consent, and the possibility this raises that enforcement could make the law a party to criminable harm. Although Mill's argument is too cryptic to be persuasive, it is too suggestive to be given the off‐handed treatment often meted out by his commentators.     

Geographies of Hardy's Wessex

The novels of Thomas Hardy represent a number of different “geographies”—the means by which their various characters and narrators explore places and come to know them. The “geographies” of the characters and narrators in Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The return of the native are examined in this essay. It shows that the “primal” geography of the youthful Tess, and of those who live on Egdon Heath, is represented as circular, and is constructed by more senses than the visual, while that of the reader is linear and wholly visual in its preoccupations with geology, cartography and the picturesque; and it examines the destruction of the “primal” geography in Tess, as she becomes an itinerant labourer. The task of the narrators, in their attempt to mediate between the two geographies, is considered, and it is suggested that this attempt is bound to fail, because the division between them is founded in an idea of history, as of a moment of primal unity and its subsequent differentiation, which is not perceived as open to question.