Why Read Mill Today?

John Skorupski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134183920
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

John Stuart Mill is one of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century. But does he have anything to teach us today? His deep concern for freedom of the individual is thought by some to be outdated and inadequate to the cultural and religious complexities of twenty first century life.

In this succinct and shrewd book, John Skorupski argues that Mill is a profound and inspiring social and political thinker from whom we still have much to learn. He reflects on Mill's central arguments in his most famous works, including Utilitarianism and On Liberty, and traces their implications for democratic politics. With the use of topical and controversial examples, including privacy, religious intolerance, and freedom of speech, he makes Mill's concerns our own at a time when what liberalism means, and why it matters, is once again in dispute.

He concludes that Mill's place in the pantheon of 'great thinkers' rests not only on his specific political and social doctrines, but above all on his steadfastly generous and liberal vision of human beings, their relations to one another, and what makes life worth living.

1
Free Thought

Two basic questions of ethics and politics are: how should we live? And how should we live together? John Stuart Mill thought very hard about them. Still, if the questions themselves interest us, rather than the history of thought, why go back to someone who was born two hundred years ago and died in 1873? Why read him when the problems that worry us are those that face us now?

Mill provides a remarkably comprehensive liberal vision. It is complete in a way that no single thinker now could rival. There is a frankness and seriousness to it that help us to think about our own problems. Moreover, if Mill is (as I think) the wisest liberal, then not only liberals but also critics of liberalism should read him. If they are fair-minded, they should look for weaknesses in the strongest versions of liberal thought, not in weaker ones. This book is meant for both sides; it is a critical reflection, not an apologia.

Although Mill wrote about all the main questions of philosophy, this book will not discuss his philosophy as a whole. Some comprehensive studies are mentioned in the suggestions for Further Reading. Our specific concern here will be Mill’s treatment of the ethical and the political questions. For this purpose, however, we do need to notice some important and distinctive features of his epistemology, in other words, his account of how we can justify our beliefs. Mill has an objective view of value that makes a thorough-going difference to his ethics and politics, and strongly distinguishes him from many twentieth-century liberals. Also relevant are his extraordinary upbringing and intellectual pedigree. So in this introductory chapter I sketch in some of the personal and philosophical background behind Mill’s moral and political thought. The three chapters that follow are the main body of the book, laying out that thought. The last chapter reflects on its significance today.

1.1 Mill’s life and work

Mill received his education from some of the Enlightenment’s most tough-minded analysts of human nature and society. His father, James Mill, was a philosopher and historian of importance. Born on the east coast of Scotland to a poor family whose name was originally ‘Milne’, James progressed through Montrose Academy and then Divinity at Edinburgh University, financed by a local landowner, Sir John Stuart of Fettercairn, and his wife. He was licensed as a preacher but did not gain a living, so he moved to London and soon achieved modestly comfortable earnings in journalism. There, in 1805, he married an Englishwoman, Harriet Burrow; John Stuart Mill, his eldest son, born in 1806, was thus half-English and half-Scots. James Mill’s public reputation was made by his History of British India (1817). It led to employment by the East India Company, of which he became a high official, eventually followed in the same post by John.

No philosopher’s childhood is better known than John Stuart Mill’s. He describes it, to every reader’s wonder, in his Autobiography. He was taught by his father, beginning with Greek (at the age of 3) and arithmetic in the evenings. Before breakfast the two of them would walk out in the lanes around their home in Newington Green, then largely rural; John would report on the histories and biographies he had read the previous day. Meanwhile he studied science for his own amusement. He began on logic at the age of 12. Among James Mill’s close friends were Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo. John read Ricardo’s classical Principles of Political Economy two years after it appeared, when he was 13. He edited Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence – a monumental labour – when he was 18. He never went to university, but by the age of 20 he in effect had a postgraduate training in logic, political economy and jurisprudence.

In his twenties and thirties he came to know some of the most interesting younger figures in English politics and culture. His horizons broadened and his main themes were established. The System of Logic, the product of his thirties, published in 1843, made his reputation as a philosopher. The Principles of Political Economy, of 1848, was a synthesis of classical economics which defined liberal orthodoxy for at least a quarter of a century. His two best-known works of moral philosophy, On Liberty and Utilitarianism, appeared in 1859 and 1861.

A major event in his personal life was an intense – but apparently platonic – affair with a married woman, Harriet Taylor. Her intellectual and emotional influence on him has been debated by scholars ever since. She eventually became his wife in 1851, bringing them seven and a half years of great happiness before her death in 1858. In the 1860s Mill was briefly a Member of Parliament, and throughout his life was involved in many working-class and radical causes, always in a stubbornly independent way. Among them was his lifelong support for women’s rights – see his essay, The Subjection of Women of 1869. After his election to Parliament in 1865, he presented a petition for women’s suffrage in 1866, and in 1867 moved an amendment to the Reform Bill of that year, which would have extended the franchise irrespective of gender; ‘perhaps’, he said, ‘the only really important public service I performed in the capacity of a member of Parliament’ (I: 285).

Mill’s presence in nineteenth-century politics and culture is so powerful, his writings so diverse and detailed, that it can be hard to see his thought as a whole. Yet there is a very strong unifying theme: it is his lifelong effort to weave together the insights of the Enlightenment in which he had been reared, and the nineteenth-century reaction against it, a reaction sometimes romantic, sometimes historical and conservative, and often both. It was a dialectic that Mill experienced personally, for his childhood was an Enlightenment experiment in education, while the friends of his early manhood breathed German and Coleridgean Romanticism. An important turning point was the mental crisis and depression that afflicted him when he was 20. Its connection with his extraordinary education and claustrophobic relationship with his father is plain enough. Interesting for present purposes, though, is that it was a crisis of meaning. He asked himself whether he would be happy if all his objects in life, all the social reforms he was working for, were realised:

And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down . . . I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

(I: 139)

Now he saw the danger of too much analysis without a sufficiency of feeling; his recovery only came as feeling gradually returned. His outlook on life was very deeply affected. He retained the main structure of his Enlightenment convictions but sought to enlarge and energise it through the nineteenth-century’s insight into the mutability and emotional depth and diversity of human nature. ‘Many-sidedness’ became his motto.

There was also a lifelong French side to Mill, through which he received influences as great as the ones already mentioned. He spoke and wrote excellent French, made a point of keeping abreast of events and ideas in France, and indeed died in France. Among many Frenchmen with whom he maintained long and productive friendships, two great figures were particularly significant: Auguste Comte, positivist and sociologist, and Alexis de Tocqueville, analyst of democracy. Mill’s productive interactions with French liberalism and positivism are significant for the whole development of liberal thought. Overall, though, it is that Goe-thean word of power, many-sidedness, that best hints at what makes Mill a seminal late-modern thinker, and why fruitful comparisons can be made with Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. ‘Many-sidedness’ will be one of our main themes.

1.2 Liberalism as free thought

The word ‘liberal’ does not refer to one single thing. Despite strong competition it must be one of the most confusing words in the political and philosophical dictionary. Indeed, one rather good reason for reassessing Mill is to get some grip on the liberal tradition, and thereby a sense of what liberalism is.

It is, among other things, a set of doctrines centring on free competition and equal opportunity. (This is the European rather than the current American sense of the word, but it is the one that is more historical.) Mill, as one of the nineteenth century’s leading economists, wrote plenty on these subjects, giving liberalism in the economic sphere a definite and principled shape; at the same time he also had much to say about social justice, favouring strongly redistributive measures, and experiments with workers’ co-operatives. More fundamentally – and rather separately – liberalism is a moral doctrine limiting the authority of state and society over individuals. This is the most famous aspect of Mill’s liberalism; his essay On Liberty sets out a highly influential limiting doctrine of this kind. More fundamentally still, liberalism can be thought of as a vision of how to live, what human good is, and how our mutual relations should be regulated. Here Mill stands out as a talismanic, though controversial, liberal presence. The political philosopher John Rawls called this kind of overall vision ‘comprehensive liberalism’, citing Mill and Kant as its two great, though distinct, examples.

We can dig even deeper. We can go right back to the sources of liberalism in the modern West by considering the purely philosophical idea of free thought – libre pensée. Liberalism, at bottom, is simply free thought, and Kant and Mill are both liberals in this deepest way. For both of them the ideal of free thought is the most fundamental liberal ideal.

Free thought is thought ruled by its own principles and by nothing else; in other words, by principles of thinking that it discovers by reflecting on its own activity. It acknowledges no external constraints placed on it by doctrines of faith, revelation or received authority: it scrutinises such teachings in the light of its own principles. One can also say that free thought is thought ruled solely by natural reason, if ‘natural reason’ is just a name for all those principles that are internal to thinking and reflectively acknowledged by it as its own. The contrast is with apologetic thought, in the traditional and respectable sense of that word – thought which seeks to make intelligible, so far as possible, the ways of God to man, without claiming to know those ways by its own principles alone. The apologetic tradition is fideistic, in the sense that it holds that free thought alone cannot tell us what to believe. Natural reason must be a servant of faith, or at best a co-sovereign with it.

The liberal question of freedom and authority, of what I must determine for myself and what I must accept from other sources, begins right here. Free thought, and with it liberty of discussion, are fundamental to Mill’s philosophy.

But now we reach an important fork in the road. Down one route lies the idea of free thought as thought that is unconstrained by any authoritative source external to it. Down the other lies the idea of it as radically presuppositionless. It is basic to Mill’s stance in epistemology that he takes free thought to be necessarily the former but necessarily not the latter. There are, he emphasises, no constraints on free thought, but that does not mean it can start from nowhere.

Yet the idea that free thought must be presuppositionless is highly plausible. If it rests on some presupposition or assumption, how can it be free? Must it not freely question that assumption? That has been an enormously influential modern conception of what it is to think really freely. Call it the Cartesian idea, after the French philosopher, Rene Descartes, who expounded it in his Meditations. Descartes allows all our opinions to be questioned by the radical sceptic and then tries to find a refutation of the sceptic that relies on none of those opinions but only on itself – that is, on the mere fact of thinking. One can say without exaggeration that this project of defeating the sceptic on his own terms without any presupposition – together with its complete failure – is one of the main shapers of modernity. And this means that it has made a big difference to the fortunes of liberalism.

One way of spelling out its shaping influence would be to tell the story of German philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche. This tradition takes the Cartesian idea with utmost seriousness, and then seriously tries to free itself from its clutch. Kant responds to Descartes’ failure by a critique of free thought itself (the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’). Truly free thought, he says, must investigate the conditions of its own possibility. It turns out that those conditions take human beings out of the world: as free thinkers and agents they are not a part of nature, but have a noumenal aspect. The story continues with Hegel. He finds fault with Kant’s project because it imposes a basic cleavage of subject and object. So he tries to show how free thought itself literally generates everything: a kind of apotheosis of presuppositionless free thought. Nietzsche sees the failure of these high-wire heroics and diagnoses a crisis of Western values.

The deep and genuine difficulty is to see how free thought can be both self-authorising and truth-finding, in the way the modern outlook assumes. Nietzsche thinks it cannot be: we must give up on truth and recognise that we impose our own ‘values’. That Nietzschean idea, so liberating and counter-cultural in its day, went on to influence high modernism and eventually to become a popular dogma of our time. Epistemology has entered politics in a big way, in that sceptical or subjectivist attitudes have become basic to our ethical and political outlook – the very outlook about which Nietzsche was so scathing. It is an undercurrent that significantly distinguishes Mill’s and Nietzsche’s respective attitudes to democracy and equality (see Chapter 5).

1.3 Thinking from within

Mill belongs to the alternative tradition, according to which free thought does not start by refusing to make any assumptions at all, but instead maintains a continuing critical open-mindedness about everything we take ourselves to know, without any exemptions whatever. This ‘constructive empiricism’ also goes back to the seventeenth century. It is naturalistic, in that it takes us to be a part of the world that we scientifically study. It is holistic, in that it works from within our convictions as a whole. It takes the fal-libilist attitude that any of the things we think we know, however seemingly certain, could turn out to be wrong in the course of our continuing inquiry. That includes our initial assumptions – but it does not follow that we cannot start from them.

Mill’s constructive empiricism is one main way in which he maintains a firm footing in the Enlightenment. He is unimpressed by ‘the well-meant but impracticable precept of Descartes’ of ‘setting out from the supposition that nothing had been already ascertained’ (VII: 318–19). That way lies only nihilism, for nothing can come of nothing. Nor does he think that an a priori critique can show us that human beings as thinkers have some non-natural noumenal side. Thinking is itself a natural process:

Principles of Evidence and Theories of Method are not to be constructed a priori. The laws of our rational faculty, like those of every other natural agency, are only learnt by seeing the agent at work . . . we should never have known by what process truth is to be ascertained, if we had not previously ascertained many truths.

(VIII: 833)

It is in this way that free thought discovers truths about what we should believe, about what is good, about how we should act – truths that are normative for our thinking, feeling and doing. It does so by careful scrutiny of how we actually reason and reflective analysis of which principles in this practice of reasoning turn out to be treated by us as normatively basic: ‘seeing the agent at work’. This is the only ‘evidence’ that can be produced for the philosopher’s normative claims.

I will call this method ‘thinking from within’. (Hegel’s method, incidentally, could also be described as thinking from within: this is one of surprisingly many common points that can be found between the two very different thinkers, and it contributes a liberal aspect to Hegel’s thinking.) Thinking from within requires imaginative understanding of other people and other times; a lesson Mill drew from Coleridge. About other people’s ideas, Mill says, Bentham’s only question was, were they true? Coleridge, in contrast, patiently asked after their meaning. To pin down the fundamental norms of our thinking calls for careful psychological and historical inquiry into how people think, and also into how they think they should think – what kind of normative attitudes they display in their actions and their reflection. These must be engaged with to be understood. So thinking from within is inherently dialogical. And it always remains corrigible. Both points are significant in Mill’s argument for liberty of thought and discussion.

What gives this method a critical and systematic edge? It can examine whether some normative dispositions are reducible to other such dispositions. It can also consider whether some are explicable in a way that subverts their authority. Suppose I can explain your low opinion of your brother’s intelligence as the product solely of sheer envy and resentment. That will subvert this opinion: it may be true, but your grounds for thinking it is are not good ones. Or an example Mill wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• CHRONOLOGY OF MILL’S LIFE
• PREFACE
• NOTES ON THE TEXT
• 1 Free Thought
• 2 The Good for Human Beings
• 3 Liberty
• 4 Modernity
• 5 Reflection
• FURTHER READING
• INDEX