Abstract

This essay compares the state of Anglophone and Continental philosophy at the time Mill wrote and the so‐called Analytic/Continental divide as it exists now. How did Mill regard the divide as it was then, and how would he fit it now? Mill's Schillerian idea of self‐realisation, together with the criticism of society and culture that he based on it, effectively put him in what he called the “German‐Coleridgean” camp; but he rejected the metaphysics of German idealism. I suggest that a similar critical stance towards contemporary society, based on a similar philosophical standpoint, would still have distinctive force.