David Miller

David Miller is Official Fellow in Social and Political Theory at Nuffield College, Oxford. On Nationality came out in 1995.

Letter

Strike

2 November 2023

It’s true, as Ewan Gibbs points out, that a thorough and unsentimental account of the inner workings of mining communities during the 1984-85 strike, as distinct from a ‘high political’ analysis, is overdue (LRB, 2 November). To that end, I’d like to add a couple of notes. The first relates to the Yorkshire ‘super pit’, Kellingley colliery. As Gibbs makes clear, it was part of the NUM’s...

My body is my own

David Miller, 31 October 1996

At the heart of 19th-century socialism lay a vision of a moral world in which men and women would co-operate freely with one another to meet their common needs, a world in which, therefore, neither vulgar material inducements nor orders from on high were needed to get the work of society done. In Fourier’s Phalanxes an elaborate system of co-operative production was to allow each Harmonian to take on seven or eight different types of attractive work in a single day; similarly, in Marx’s vision of communism, people moved freely between hunting, fishing and raising cattle, and served one another according to the principle, ‘to each according to his needs’; in William Morris’s land of Nowhere, Dick the boatman is puzzled when the narrator attempts to pay for his ride and explains that ‘this ferrying and giving people casts about the water is my business, which I would do for anybody.’

Every ​Olympics since Sydney 2000 has promised to be the ‘greenest games ever’, but the record has been dismal. Beijing’s already toxic air was no better after the 2008 games than before. The...

Read more reviews

The kind of dog he likes: Realistic Utopias

W.G. Runciman, 18 December 2014

Why ‘earthlings’​? David Miller isn’t drawing a contrast with justice for creatures from outer space. Nor is he taking issue directly with Ronald Dworkin’s...

Read more reviews

Blite and Whack

Paul Seabright, 19 January 1984

A year or two ago my eye was caught by the cover of a magazine on an American news-stand. It was a magazine for the working woman, and its title, in the best traditions of the me-generation, was

Read more reviews

States’ Rights

C.H. Sisson, 15 April 1982

It would be an exaggeration to say that when David Hume, at the age of 26, came back to London after his retreat at La Flèche, he had already thought all the thoughts he was going to think....

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences