Their socialism may have been laid to rest, but the extension of state power continues unabated. The presses thunder out ever more laws, filling prisons with those who break them. Each day a growing tide of buff falls through every letterbox. The Stuart Mills of today say nothing. Philosophers should hold up their tapers in this gloom.
Nothing is discussed.
Families are said to underpin social morality, supplanting religion in this respect. Appeals to kinship have caused social conflict from the Tribes of Israel through the Wars of the Roses to the ethnic upheavals of today. Some have sought to engage these arguments. But they seem like aliens beating on the locked door of Babel. When John Prescott took power last year to imprison Britons for freeing budgerigars into the wild or building steps to their front doors, I realised that the debate over the rights of individuals versus the State had not advanced since Plato's day.