Abstract
Abstract This chapter treats one of the great confrontations in the history of British public moralism between cynical provocation and a more ‘responsible’ approach to freedom of expression: Thomas Carlyle’s deliberate offences against progressive sentiment in his ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (1849) and John Stuart Mill’s swift and uncharacteristically angry response. Nietzsche (in pursuit of higher values and still freer speech) thought that Carlyle did not go nearly deep enough in the challenges he posed to conventional political morality—but the ‘Occasional Discourse’ went far enough to make Carlyle’s own name a byword, still, for moral and political provocateurship. The chapter argues that his cynicisms and Mill’s astringent reply provide a helpful historical basis from which to consider similar challenges today to normative views of public argument and styles of expression.
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