Like Darwin’s great work, On Liberty bases its argument on a single elegant principle, the sort of all-illuminating idea that makes new readers wonder why they never thought of it themselves.
[…]Although he remains a revered figure among feminists and other reformers of many stripes, as well as one of the best known 19th-century philosophers, the argument that propels his most famous work remains as hotly debated today as it was in 1859.
[…]“The object of this essay,” he wrote near the beginning, “is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
[…]Why was this little manifesto neither left behind as a relic in the history of political thought nor embraced as received opinion?
[…]“The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society,” Mill insists, “is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”
[…]Like its author, On Liberty is harder to pin down ideologically than its reputation suggests. Although Mill has often been described as the patron saint of liberalism, his dictum hardly sounds liberal by today’s standards. It would rule out requiring people to save for retirement or do a great many other things that modern democratic governments routinely demand of their citizens. On the other hand, few conservatives feel quite comfortable with the notion that sovereign individuals can do whatever they want so long as they cause no harm (a slippery concept) to anyone else. Moreover, Mill explicitly excludes the operations of business from his principle on the grounds that business affects other people and can properly be regulated.
On Liberty could be called a libertarian book, but much of its argument runs contrary to what those who call themselves libertarians typically believe. Despite his ringing credo, Mill does not base his theory of liberty on the concept of innate, self-evident human rights that the Declaration of Independence immortalized and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights later called “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” Nor does he make much reference to the enacted laws, royal grants, and judicial opinions from which English liberties were built up piecemeal over many centuries. His starting point is utilitarianism—the doctrine that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the only rational foundation for morals and legislation. Modern utilitarianism had been largely formulated by the philosophical reformer Jeremy Bentham, of whom Mill’s father, James, was a disciple. The younger Mill was brought up as an adherent and remained one throughout his life, though with growing ambivalence.
As a theory of ethics and government, utilitarianism retains considerable influence, which becomes understandable when one tries to think of a better basis for moral action than increasing happiness or reducing misery. As a foundation for individual liberty, however, it shows some major cracks.
[…]Although Mill later published an essay called “Utilitarianism” in which he tried to reconcile its contradictions and his own, he never effectively answered such questions.
Mill defines liberty, or freedom (he uses the terms interchangeably), as the absence of coercion by law or public opinion, or even more simply as “doing what one desires.” […] One of Mill’s lifelong concerns was “the tyranny of the majority”—the phrase was borrowed from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–40)—which both men feared was a nearly inevitable consequence of democracy. It led, at best, to conformity, at worst, to a stifling of the originality and vigor a society needed to develop further—development of both the individual and his society being foremost among the advantages of freedom as Mill saw them.
[…]Although his deeply Romantic feelings about freedom sometimes overpowered his utilitarian reasoning, he could never quite have endorsed the dictum of another Victorian liberal, Lord Acton, that liberty is not a means to a higher political end but is itself the highest political end. On the contrary, Mill asserts that “liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.”
[…]…his impassioned claim that even the most far-fetched views must be freely stated in order that the truth may be better understood sounds like a desperate argument for free speech.
[…]If free speech has to be justified in hard cases by its social benefits, you have a situation very different from that in the United States, where even obnoxious expressions of opinion such as Irving’s are protected because the First Amendment was based on an Enlightenment notion of inalienable individual rights. It would be difficult to argue persuasively that advocating incendiary racial views advances the interests of society as a whole, and therefore, by Mill’s utilitarian criterion, easy to urge censorship.
[…]It seems not to be enough that if individuals are free to pursue happiness in whatever way they wish, happiness will be maximized one person at a time. Instead, Mill feels a need to show that society—the ghostly abstraction that in other parts of his argument presents the greatest obstacle to liberty—profits collectively from the myriad choices of its members because it thereby avoids stagnation. In this tortured line of reasoning, liberty itself becomes a form of utilitarian social engineering. If it could be proved that rigidly stable societies were happier than innovative ones, as many social theorists have argued, then Mill’s rationale for the freedom of individuals would collapse.
Mill would have been on firmer ground had he based his “simple principle” on an inherent human entitlement to live as one chooses, but even in the land of Thomas Jefferson he would have found the same conflict between liberty and other values. As Berlin wrote in revisiting the same issues a hundred years after Mill, “The extent of a man’s, or a people’s, liberty to choose to live as they desire must be weighed against the claims of many other values, of which equality, or justice, or happiness, or security, or public order are perhaps the most obvious examples. For this reason, it cannot be unlimited.”
[…]As Mill shrewdly pointed out, whenever an old prejudice dies, a new one takes its place, as though the amount of tolerance in human nature were fixed and constant.
[…]British union leader Hugh Scanlon… “Liberty in my view is conforming to majority opinion.” Lord Scanlon (as he became) was on the far left politically, but his point of view is equally common on the right, as well as among people who are unconscious of having any strong political views at all. It coexists in complete harmony with the contemporary American style of mass individualism, in which vast numbers of people defiantly express their uniqueness by dressing alike, aggressively voicing the same opinions derived from television or the Internet, and buying the same products as everyone else in their peer group.
Mill would undoubtedly have felt that something essential had gotten lost, that the security of conformity was now masquerading as liberty. He might also have noticed with some chagrin that all these individualists firmly believe that a tyrannical force called society was oppressing them, and that their resistance, however hard an observer might be pressed to find it, was courageous and even heroic.
[…]The theory of social rights, in effect an insistence that no one must ever behave in a way that offended others’ sensibilities, “acknowledges no right to any freedom whatever, except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them.” By uniting political power with the intimidating force of majority opinion, the growth of democracy encouraged just such threats to liberty.
[…]For most Americans, the car ranks with the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of personal autonomy. At first glance, nothing could be more liberating than the ability to drive wherever you choose, whenever you want. Yet few inventions have so increased government control over everyday life.
Governments build and own the roads, tax and regulate every machine that drives on them, bail the manufacturers out in hard times, license the drivers, install lights that peremptorily command us to stop or go, police the highways, and set mandatory standards for everything from speed to emissions to the age at which one can begin driving.
[…]Despite its apparent absoluteness, On Liberty refuses to fade away partly because its contradictions and confusions are much like our own. Is freedom really an end in itself, or a means to something else? What obligations does each individual have to all the other individuals who together make up a society?
Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Spring2009)
Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Philosophy, Politics & Public Policy
