Updating the Philosophy’s Longest Sentences competition

More on philosophers’ mind-numbingly long sentences. My initial post with my top candidates is here.

Kazuma Kitamura sends in a new contender — a 175 word plea from Chapter One of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women:

“If the authority of men over women, when first established, had been the result of a conscientious comparison between different modes of constituting the government of society; if, after trying various other modes of social organisation — the government of women over men, equality between the two, and such mixed and divided modes of government as might be invented — it had been decided, on the testimony of experience, that the mode in which women are wholly under the rule of men, having no share at all in public concerns, and each in private being under the legal obligation of obedience to the man with whom she has associated her destiny, was the arrangement most conducive to the happiness and well-being of both; its general adoption might then be fairly thought to be some evidence that, at the time when it was adopted, it was the best: though even then the considerations which recommended it may, like so many other primeval social facts of the greatest importance, have subsequently, in the course of ages, ceased to exist.”

Good find, Kazuma!

So updating our ongoing contest results: Kierkegaard is still in first place, followed by Aristotle and Locke, but Mill pushes Kant into sixth place and Bentham into seventh.

1. Kierkegaard: 330 words.
2. Locke: 309 words.
3. Aristotle: 188 words.
4. Mill 179 words. (Also: 161 words.)
5. Mill 175 words.
6. Kant: 174 words. (Also: 163 words.)
7. Bentham: 164 words.