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It's particularly galling to hear the fans of liberal empire, who are certain they know how to govern all countries on earth, quoting J.S. Mill. His book "On Representative Government" concludes with explanation for why the English are incapable of governing India.
Mill says that the English will never invest the energies needed to try to understand what is actually in the interest of the Hindus. And that even if they were to try, they would only end up being manipulated by certain groups or sectors in India at the expense of others.
Mill is an empiricist. He's trying to build a theory by observing how human politics actually works, and to draw sensible conclusions from it. His book is an attack on rationalists, who think they can begin with an abstract rights theory and deduce universal truths from there.
Absurd, then, that the universities use Mill's "On Liberty" as a canonical text, but have virtually no interest in what he has to say about the cohesion of nations and the impossibility of maintaining a multi-national state without tyranny.
The whole diversity agenda would be on the ropes if the universities were to lend half an ear to Mill's attempt to have an empirically-based discussion about nations and national cohesion.
