Charles Dupont-White: An idiosyncratic nineteenth-century theorist on speech, state, and John Stuart Mill

Although he is little read today, especially by Anglophone academics, Charles Dupont-White (1807–78) deserves the attention of historians of political thought for two reasons. First, he was an original and powerful theorist of a more statist brand of liberalism that in several ways proved a harbinger of later liberal and social-democratic ideas. Second, he was responsible for the original translations into French of two of John Stuart Mill’s most important works, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government. Unlike most author-translator relationships, however, Dupont-White was anything but an uncritical admirer. This essay reconstructs Dupont-White’s general political-social theory as well as examines his specific differences from and criticisms of Mill, including his attempt to construct an alternative defense of freedom of speech. It also examines Mill’s response to Dupont-White and considers why Mill judged his translator to have espoused a philosophy ‘opposite’ to his own.