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I was shocked to see Mill on the list.

How could they miss the books by Ralph Nader? L. Ron Hubbard? Much worse than some of the picks.

Two Book's to be added.......(IMHO)

1) On the Origin of Species, -Charles Darwin
2) The Descent of Man, -Charles Darwin

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"Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men."

Its actually a pretty good quote.
the anti libertarian religiocons would disagree however.

With the current state of affairs, we appear to be headed towards a battle over who gets to bury liberty's corpse.

There are those who want to bury it in biblical interpretations from the first century. Just as others wish to do, in 7th century religous/cultural dogma.

Either way, liberty is toast... for our safety of course.

One could argue that it's the state that is out of control when 95 percent of a population are classified as sexual outlaws.

This is an EXCELLENT point.

Kinsey's report, said the conservative Washington Times last year, "stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95 percent of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws." One could argue that it's the state that is out of control when 95 percent of a population are classified as sexual outlaws.

DUH, the reason that is a 'most dangerous' book is because it is a pack of lies, written by a sexual deviant himself who studied criminals, including sex criminals as his 'population' and treated it as the 'normal population'.

It was bad science that led to bad cultural consequences. Very appropriate to be on the list.

Mill is more controversial. When this came up in a thread a few weeks ago, I postulated that Mill's embrace of utilitarianism, the predecessor to many totalitarian 'social engineering' type thinking, may be what got him on the list.

It was 13 years after the publication of "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" that Estelle Griswold, the wife of an Episcopal minister, and Dr. Lee Buxton, a licensed physician and a professor at the Yale Medical School, were dragged into court and convicted of providing medical information on contraception to married couples. It wasn't until four years later – on June 7, 1965 – that the Supreme Court reversed the conviction, maintaining that the outlawing of counseling about or the use of contraception was a violation of the constitutional right to privacy. Classic act of judicial activists legislating from the bench.

This is a quite ignorant point by the author. "Griswold" is the case he is citing and it is a classic Warren court decision, where the US Supreme Court decided the law wasnt progressive enough for them, so they (ie Justice Brennan) invented an excuse - "substantive due process" - to overturn it.

That excuse in Griswold led DIRECTLY to the WORST DECISION BY THE US SUPREME COURT IN 50 YEARS: Roe v Wade. Griswold was the most cited and direct precedence for Roe v Wade, and so this decision he lauds led to the holocaust of the unborn that we've suffered under since 1973.

Just because contraception "should" be legal doesnt mean (a) it's a constitutional issue, (b) USSC should butt into such policies.

This author is seriously out to lunch.

Liberty *is* dangerous, of course, though in a different way than slavery. Anything involving man is dangerous.

Mill's book definitely belongs on this list. His idiotic "harm principle" is used to undermine any legal support for maintaining the virtues necessary for a free people and checking the vices that undermine republicanism. Mill's kind of liberty makes the free forget how to rule themselves. His utilitarianism, which I don't remember being defended in On Liberty, makes all goverments no different than pirate ships writ large.

As for his free speech, let us recall that prominent men usually only argue for "all sides of the story to be heard" when their side is losing or indeed completely irrelevant. What's worse, his argument tends to treat any social pressure as intolerably coercive, even when it isn't backed by the force of law. This is a self-defeating argument in the long run because once his libertarian state is instituted, the inevitable social pressure against non-Liberal social pressures will make such arguments look like the grab for power they most likely are.

Does anybody know how the far left took over the universities? They made Mill's arguments about free speech and the inevitable success of truth from the process of disputation when they were a minority and their academic departments were dominated by New Deal liberals. This sentiment conveniently evaporated once they were in control.

There is a very good case that Mill himself intended his works to undermine Victorian-era Christianity and replace it with a positivistic "religion of science" out of Comte. Check out the book review The Authoritarian Secularism of John Stuart Mill. (Warning: PDF).

Mill's version of the free society is likely intended to be a transitional state. I am certain that such pleas for liberty in the mouths of many leftist ideologues are also intended to be such transitional states. Those who innocently and uncritically praise Mill are useful idiots in the ongoing destruction of civilization.

when conservatives abandoned their principles and pushed for a bigger and more intrusive state.

They ain't burning books folks! This is their Bible-thumping freedom of speach.

The rapsheet on Mill is that he opposed legal restraints on behavior for traditional or religious reasons, but was willing to tolerate restraints based on "scientific" attempts to restructure society or the desire to guarantee equal respect to oppressed groups. So Mill, in this view wasn't a consistent civil libertarian, but an architect of latter-day political correctness.

The idea of a list of "dangerous books" is a bad one. Liberals throw it back at conservatives as evidence that we are interested in book banning or book burning. And while books can be harmful, they're harmful in different ways. Degree matters. Nothing is gained by grouping Betty Friedan or Margaret Mead with Hitler.

Some authors like Freud or Darwin had so much influence on so much of later life and thought that it's pointless to pigeonhole them as "dangerous." Some books may have been useful and important in their time, but were turned into symbols and slogans by movements that found them useful. Muckrakers like Nader or Carson were wrong about many things, but raising an alarm may have been the right thing to do at the time.

And such a list undermines the intentions of the authors. If I give reasons why Kinsey's or Croly's book was harmful I may be able to prove my case and get someone to understand how such authors' ideas may have been dangerous. If I put such books on a "List of Dangerous Books Conservative Disapprove Of" it becomes a party line, "we're right and your wrong" thing that people are likely to ignore and justified in ignoring.

In controversy, it's best to aim at convincing the unconverted, and to prove your case on its merits. If you simply present a party line and say "read our books, not the other guys'," independent-minded people aren't going to be impressed.