James Fitzjames Stephen - Szabadság Egyenlőség Testvériség

Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894) was a British legal historian, judge, legal adviser and political thinker. His known works include A General View of the Criminal Law of England (1863), A History of the Criminal Law of England (1883). His best-known and most influential work is Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873), which contains Fitzjames Stephen's political philosophy, and was primarily published as a critique of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859).

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity made Stephen the most important conservative author of the Victorian era. Disraeli said of him in 1881: "It is a great pity that Judge Stephen should be the leader of the future Conservative Party." The source of Stephen's conservative assessment is his views expressed in connection with his criticism of Mill: these popular slogans in public life are not merely untenable, but the effort to implement them causes the specific problems of the modern age. Dogmatism in the field of political-moral action is characteristic of the moderns and Mill. In this way, they hope that the problem of ordered freedom can be solved based on a simple password or principle.
The cornerstone of the critique of utopian liberal or socialist hopes is the argument in favor of the necessity and ineradicability of coercion. A realistic understanding of governance and legislation means the prudent and moral use of coercion, and since there can be no life without power and coercion, there can be no life without politics either. In our time, his argument received a lot of emphasis in the Hart-Devlin debate, since according to him, the reason for moral restriction can not only be direct harm, but the will of the majority, who have the right to decide what kind of moral environment they want to live in.