There is a difference between being a philosopher and mastering the technical aspects of philosophy. The technician is at home with axioms and abstract problems. Although the philosopher can weave his way through apparently pathless conundra, the conundra are not the philosopher’s home; his home is reality: the τὸ τί ἐστι (being of things) that tend toward ὁ ἀγαθός (the good) and ἡ ἀλήθεια (the truth). When Boethius was unjustly condemned to death, he was a blind man when it came to reality: despite his technical prowess, he was stumped by the problem of evil. The Consolatio is an account of the ascent of the mind of a technician imprisoned by the painful experience of injustice to the mind of the philosopher who can see Providence at work in creation.

The introductory chapter presents the aims and outline of the book’s argument. It then situates the book within the broader ideological landscape by explaining the relationship between its argument, the anarchist movement, and some of the defended position’s philosophical rivals. Specifically, it considers, first, the question of what it means for a moral position to be an anarchist position and, next, whether the position defended by the book can be reasonably characterized as “social anarchism.” The introduction then discusses the central aims of the book in a bit more detail, with the primary two being (1) showing that social anarchism is coherent (in a sense to be described below) and (2) showing that the position is independently plausible. Finally, the introduction concludes by arguing that social anarchism will be attractive (in at least some respect) to partisans of a number of rival philosophical positions.

James Mill’s dogmatic rhetoric in his essay ‘On Government’ (1820) and his rejection in the History of British India (1817) of ocular and narrowly empirical methods, when seen against the febrile political backdrop of the early 1830s, was a gift to utilitarianism’s Whig, Tory, and Romantic opponents. However, his defence in A Fragment on Mackintosh (1835) of Bentham’s jurisprudence and moral philosophy, when placed in the context of his other late writings, suggests a different intention. In both his historical and political writings, James Mill pursued the ‘real business of philosophy’ in which general principles illuminated social phenomena and laid bare the emptiness of Whig empiricism. Only the ‘speculative man’ could appreciate the past’s distinctness by separating general from special causes, and Mill’s indebtedness to Francis Bacon and David Hume is evident in this respect. His attractions to Benthamite utilitarianism and Scottish philosophical history were variously deepened and underpinned by his readings of Bacon and Hume, and those readings, Barrell suggests, may have been encouraged by Dugald Stewart at Edinburgh.

Theorising relationships between crime and the physical environments in which it occurs has a long history. Environmental theory goes beyond the broken windows and hot-spot approaches, however. Theorists and practitioners can be grouped into two broad schools. The first is concerned with practice in fields such as urban planning and architectural design and maintenance, and has attracted the label CPTED. The second concentrates on more focused interventions in SCP. This chapter covers SCP, CPTED, CPTED theorists and concepts, CPTED in practice, and SCP and CPTED as part of inclusive crime prevention.