Mill, Mazarin, and Hypocrisy in Politics

Yesterday, in addition to reading People magazine, OK magazine, and the New Scientist, I read a biography of John Stuart Mill by Richard Reeves, a biography of Cardinal Mazarin by Pierre Goubert, and Ruth Grant's Hypocrisy and Integrity. Stuart Mill's biography was interesting, I had no idea what his life was like, and while I wasn't sure that he was as much the archetype of the public intellectual as the author argued, I learned a great deal nonetheless. Poor him, who was educated as an experiment to make him the arch-liberal. And then, like Prince Charles, falls in love with a married woman and has to wait forever to marry her in his turn. Mazarin was another biography that doesn't tell us that much about the subject: there was little insight, and the book was stuffed with essays on France's economy, society, politics, and major political events beyond what Mazarin would have had to do with them. Grant's book on hypocrisy and integrity, which is mostly a discussion of Rousseau, was interested for a number of reasons: first, she convinced me that hypocrisy is inevitable in any society where there are public ideals and where reality diverges from a similarly perfect application of those ideals. So we must judge hypocrisy in terms of what is acceptable for something inevitable. Second, she doesn't distinguish between Rousseau's life and his philosophy: she discusses his public statements about morality and contrasts it with his decision to abandon in turn his five children to the orphanages, as was the social custom at the time for someone in his station. That's a precedent I may use in my current work.