“It is an axiom of criticismism that the extent of our disillusionment is a reliable index of our wisdom: the idea that somehow the less we believe the more enlightened we are.”

Thanks for that. It has always amused me how very much philosophers who believe there is nothing to say have to say about it. Why does it even occur to someone who “discovers” that there is no meaning to write a big book to prove it and to spend the rest of life talking, in words yet, about it? How many people have made an academic career of asserting, day after day, that nothing can be asserted? And what – other than “I am so profound as to peer into an abyss lesser minds dare not contemplate” – is the point?

With respect to the “tension in Mill’s work—between Mill the libertarian and Mill the moralistic utilitarian,” Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote an excellent essay on “The Two Mills,” in Commentary or perhaps in your own New Criterion, but I couldn’t find a link to it.