Passage (John Stuart Mill, *On Liberty*, 1859, Ch. II, continued): "For while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable. Absolute princes, or others who are accustomed to unlimited deference, usually feel this complete confidence in their own opinions on nearly all subjects. People more happily situated, who sometimes hear their opinions disputed, and are not wholly unused to be set right when they are wrong, place the same unbounded reliance only on such of their opinions as are shared by all who surround them, or to whom they habitually defer: for in proportion to a man's want of confidence in his own solitary judgment, does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibility of 'the world' in general. And the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of society." When Mill writes that 'the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of society,' he is most likely:
Adefending the wisdom of these specific social groupings.
Bdescribing the social structure of Victorian England as a matter of historical fact.
Cexposing the narrowness of what most people in fact mean by 'the world,' undermining the supposed authority of that 'world's' opinions.
Drecommending that people expand their circles of acquaintance.
Answer & Solution
Correct answer: C. exposing the narrowness of what most people in fact mean by 'the world,' undermining the supposed authority of that 'world's' opinions.
The list — *party, sect, church, class of society* — is deliberately **narrow** compared to the grand abstraction *the world*. Mill is showing that when people defer to *the world's* opinions, they are actually deferring to a tiny subset — their immediate social environment.
The rhetorical move undercuts the *authority* of *the world* by exposing how local *the world* really is.
- **A** defends what Mill is attacking.
- **C** is a prescription Mill does not make here.
- **D** treats the sentence as descriptive history rather than philosophical critique.
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