You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The nineteenth century saw the beginning of the social struggles which started sporadically in Europe and were soon to become intensified, forcing the governments, which had a tendency to be conservative, to give in to the demands of workers, and then of women. The ‘workers’ issue’ and later the ‘feminist issue’ have for a long time divided opinion, slowing down the natural movement of emancipation in the sluggish civilising process towards the equal rights of all citizens. I will assume that the young Freud, contributing to the diffusion of these modern ideas by translating the last volume of Mill's works, was in turn affected by Mill and in particular by his essay The Enfranchisement of Women. I will also speculate that all translation would in some way influence Freud.
Less frequently read by the gentlemen, the philosophers and the political experts, today Mill, the human scientist whose essay on the emancipation of women had for a long time been absent from the publishers’ catalogues at least in France, retains nonetheless in the eyes of economists all his importance. The knowledge I had of his work was largely incomplete, except for his voluminous text On Liberty and for his doctrine put forward in Utilitarianism. It is to the cordial invitation of the organisers of the Congress of Ghent (Belgium)1 that I owe the re-reading of his works and, in particular, of the essay the interpretation of which was always postponed, despite (or because of) its links to Freud: The Enfranchisement of Women (1851), rather than another longer (200 pages) and later (1867) version, The Subjugation of Women.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) set up the Utilitarianist Society in 1823, working first in the East India Company (1823-1856) before becoming Editor of the London and Westminster Review (where in 1851 he published the article in question) and then, finally, becoming a Member of Parliament. A champion of liberty, he advocated various forms of democratic government, concerning himself