J.S. Mill's On Liberty in Focus

John Gray, G. W. Smith, John Gray, G. W. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415010016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134984022
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This volume brings together J.S. Mills On Liberty and a selection of important essays by such eminent scholars as Isaiah Berlin, Alan Ryan, John Rees, C.L. Ten and Richard Wollheim. As well as providing authoritative commentary upon On Liberty, the essays reflect a broader debate about the philosophical foundations of Mill's liberalism, particularly the question of the connection betweenMill's professed utilitarianism and his commitment to individual liberty. Introduced and edited by John Gray and G.W. Smith, the book will be of interest to students of Mill, to ethical and political philosophers and to anyone interested in the contemporary status of liberalism.

CRITICAL
COMMENTARY

JOHN STUART MILL
AND THE ENDS OF LIFE¹

Isaiah Berlin

the importance, to man and society…of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions.

J.S.MILL, Autobiography

I must begin by thanking you for the honour that you have done me, in inviting me to address you on the subject to which the Robert Waley Cohen Memorial Lectures are dedicated—tolerance. In a world in which human rights were never trampled on, and men did not persecute each other for what they believed or what they were, this Council would have no reason for existence. This, however, is not our world. We are a good deal remoter from this desirable condition than some of our more civilized ancestors, and, in this respect, unfortunately conform only too well to the common pattern of human experience. The periods and societies in which civil liberties were respected, and variety of opinion and faith tolerated, have been very few and far between—oases in the desert of human uniformity, intolerance, and oppression. Among the great Victorian preachers, Carlyle and Marx have turned out to be better prophets than Macaulay and the Whigs, but not necessarily better friends to mankind; sceptical, to put it at its lowest, of the principles which this Council exists to promote. Their greatest champion, the man who formulated these principles most clearly and thereby founded modern liberalism, was, as everyone knows, the author of the Essay on Liberty, John Stuart Mill. This book—this great short book, as Sir Richard Livingstone has justly called it in his own lecture in this series—was published 100 years ago. The subject was then in the forefront of discussion. The year 1859 saw the death of the two best-known champions of individual liberty in 131 Europe, Macaulay and Tocqueville. It marked the centenary of the birth of Friedrich Schiller, who was acclaimed as the poet of the free and creative personality fighting against great odds. The individual was seen by some as the victim of, by others as rising to his apotheosis in, the new and triumphant forces of nationalism and industrialism which exalted the power and the glory of great disciplined human masses that were transforming the world in factories or battlefields or political assemblies. The predicament of the individual versus the state or the nation or the industrial organization or the social or political group was becoming an acute personal and public problem. In the same year there appeared Darwin's On the Origin of Species, probably the most influential work of science of its century, which at once did much to destroy the ancient accumulation of dogma and prejudice, and, in its misapplication to psychology, ethics, and politics, was used to justify violent imperialism and naked competition. Almost simultaneously with it there appeared an essay, written by an obscure economist expounding a doctrine which has had a decisive influence on mankind. The author was Karl Marx, the book was the Critique of Political Economy, the preface to which contained the clearest statement of the materialist interpretation of history—the heart of all that goes under the name of Marxism today. But the impact made upon political thought by Mill's treatise was more immediate, and perhaps no less permanent. It superseded earlier formulations of the case for individualism and toleration, from Milton and Locke to Montesquieu and Voltaire, and, despite its outdated psychology and lack of logical cogency, it remains the classic statement of the case for individual liberty. We are sometimes told that a man's behaviour is a more genuine expression of his beliefs than his words. In Mill's case there is no conflict. His life embodied his beliefs. His single-minded devotion to the cause of toleration and reason was unique even among the dedicated lives of the nineteenth century. The centenary of his profession of faith should not, therefore, be allowed to pass without a word before this Council.

I

Everyone knows the story of John Stuart Mill's extraordinary education. His father, James Mill, was the last of the great raisonneurs of the eighteenth century, and remained completely unaffected by the new romantic currents of the time in which he lived. Like his teacher Bentham and the French philosophical materialists, he saw man as a natural object and considered that a systematic study of the human species—conducted on lines similar to those of zoology or botany or physics—could and should be established on firm empirical foundations. He believed himself to have grasped the principles of the new science of man, and was firmly convinced that any man educated in the light of it, brought up as a rational being by other rational beings, would thereby be preserved from ignorance and weakness, the two great sources of unreason in thought and action, which were alone responsible for the miseries and vices of mankind. He brought up his son, John Stuart, in isolation from other—less rationally educated—children; his own brothers and sisters were virtually his only companions. The boy knew Greek by the age of five, algebra and Latin by the age of nine. He was fed on a carefully distilled intellectual diet, prepared by his father, compounded of natural science and the classical literatures. No religion, no metaphysics, little poetry—nothing that Bentham had stigmatized as the accumulation of human idiocy and error—were permitted to reach him. Music, perhaps because it was supposed that it could not easily misrepresent the real world, was the only art in which he could indulge himself freely. The experiment was, in a sense, an appalling success. John Mill, by the time he reached the age of twelve, possessed the learning of an exceptionally erudite man of thirty. In his own sober, clear, literal-minded, painfully honest account of himself, he says that his emotions were starved while his mind was violently over-developed. His father had no doubt of the value of his experiment. He had succeeded in producing an excellently informed and perfectly rational being. The truth of Bentham's views on education had been thoroughly vindicated.

The results of such treatment will astonish no one in our psychologically less na age. In his early manhood John Mill went through his first agonizing crisis. He felt lack of purpose, a paralysis of the will, and terrible despair. With his well trained and, indeed, ineradicable habit of reducing emotional dissatisfaction to a clearly formulated problem, he asked himself a simple question: supposing that the noble Benthamite ideal of universal happiness which he had been taught to believe, and to the best of his ability did believe, were realized, would this, in fact, fulfil all his desires? He admitted to himself, to his horror, that it would not. What, then, was the true end of life? He saw no purpose in existence: everything in his world now seemed dry and bleak. He tried to analyse his condition. Was he perhaps totally devoid of feeling—was he a monster with a large part of normal human nature atrophied? He felt that he had no motives for continuing to live, and wished for death. One day, as he was reading a pathetic story in the memoirs of the now almost forgotten French writer Marmontel, he was suddenly moved to tears. This convinced him that he was capable of emotion, and with this his recovery began. It took the form of a revolt, slow, concealed, reluctant, but profound and irresistible, against the view of life inculcated by his father and the Benthamites. He read the poetry of Wordsworth, he read and met Coleridge; his view of the nature of man, his history and his destiny, was transformed. John Mill was not by temperament rebellious. He loved and deeply admired his father, and was convinced of the validity of his main philosophical tenets. He stood with Bentham against dogmatism, transcendentalism, obscurantism, all that resisted the march of reason, analysis, and empirical science. To these beliefs he held firmly all his life. Nevertheless, his conception of man, and therefore of much else, suffered a great change. He became not so much an open heretic from the original utilitarian movement, as a disciple who quietly left the fold, preserving what he thought true or valuable, but feeling bound by none of the rules and principles of the movement. He continued to profess that happiness was the sole end of human existence, but his conception of what contributed to it changed into something very different from that of his mentors, for what he came to value most was neither rationality nor contentment, but diversity, versatility, fullness of life—the unaccountable leap of individual genius, the spontaneity and uniqueness of a man, a group, a civilization. What he hated and feared was narrowness, uniformity, the crippling effect of persecution, the crushing of individuals by the weight of authority or of custom or of public opinion; he set himself against the worship of order or tidiness, or even peace, if they were bought at the price of obliterating the variety and colour of untamed human beings with unextinguished passions and untrammelled imaginations. This was, perhaps, a natural enough compensation for his own drilled, emotionally shrivelled, warped, childhood and adolescence.

By the time he was seventeen he was mentally fully formed. John Mill's intellectual equipment was probably unique in that or any other age. He was clear-headed, candid, highly articulate, intensely serious, and without any trace of fear, vanity, or humour. During the next ten years he wrote articles and reviews, with all the weight of the official heir presumptive of the whole utilitarian movement upon his shoulders; and although his articles made him a great name, and he grew to be a formidable publicist and a source of pride to his mentors and allies, yet the note of his writings is not theirs. He praised what his father had praised—rationality, empirical method, democracy, equality, and he attacked what the utilitarians attacked—religion, belief in intuitive and undemonstrable truths and their dogmatic consequences, which, in their view and in his, led to the abandonment of reason, hierarchical societies, vested interests, intolerance of free criticism, prejudice, reaction, injustice, depotism, misery. Yet the emphasis had shifted. James Mill and Bentham had wanted literally nothing but pleasure obtained by whatever means were the most effective. If someone had offered them a medicine which could scientifically be shown to put those who took it into a state of permanent contentment, their premisses would have bound them to accept this as the panacea for all that they thought evil. Provided that the largest possible number of men receive lasting happiness, or even freedom from pain, it should not matter how this is achieved. Bentham and Mill believed in education and legislation as the roads to happiness. But, if a shorter way had been discovered, in the form of pills to swallow, techniques of subliminal suggestion, or other means of conditioning human beings in which our century has made such strides, then, being men of fanatical consistency, they might well have accepted this as a better, because more effective and perhaps less costly, alternative than the means that they had advocated. John Stuart Mill, as he made plain both by his life and by his writings, would have rejected with both hands any such solution. He would have condemned it as degrading the nature of man. For him man differs from animals primarily neither as the possessor of reason, nor as an inventor of tools and methods, but as a being capable of choice, one who is most himself in choosing and not being chosen for; the rider and not the horse; the seeker of ends, and not merely of means, ends that he pursues, each in his own fashion: with the corollary that the more various these fashions, the richer the lives of men become; the larger the field of interplay between individuals, the greater the opportunities of the new and the unexpected; the more numerous the possibilities for altering his own character in some fresh or unexplored direction, the more paths open before each individual, and the wider will be his freedom of action and thought.

In the last analysis, all appearances to the contrary, this is what Mill seems to me to have cared about most of all. He is officially committed to the exclusive pursuit of happiness. He believes deeply in justice, but his voice is most his own when he describes the glories of individual freedom, or denounces whatever seeks to curtail or extinguish it. Bentham, too, unlike his French predecessors who trusted in moral and scientific experts, had laid it down that each man is the best judge of his own happiness. Nevertheless, this principle would remain valid for Bentham even after every living man had swallowed the happiness-inducing pill and society was thereby lifted or reduced to a condition of unbroken and uniform bliss. For Bentham individualism is a psychological datum; for Mill it is an ideal. Mill likes dissent, independence, solitary thinkers, those who defy the establishment. In an article written at the age of seventeen (demanding toleration for a now almost forgotten atheist named Carlyle), he strikes a note which sounds and resounds in his writings throughout the rest of his life:

Christians, whose reformers perished in the dungeon or at the stake as heretics, as apostates, as blasphemers—Christians, whose religion breathes charity, liberty and mercy in every line…that they, having gained the power of which they were the victims, should employ it in the selfsame way …in vindictive persecution…is most monstrous.²

He remained the champion of heretics, apostates, and blasphemers, of liberty and mercy, for the rest of his life.

His acts were in harmony with his professions. The public policies with which Mill's name was associated as a journalist, a reformer, and a politician, were seldom connected with the typically utilitarian projects advocated by Bentham and successfully realized by many of his disciples: great industrial, financial, educational schemes, reforms of public health or the organization of labour or leisure. The issues to which Mill was dedicated, whether in his published views or his actions, were concerned with something different: the extension of individual freedom, especially freedom of speech: seldom with anything else. When Mill declared that war was better than oppression, or that a revolution that would kill all men with an income of more than £500 per annum might improve things greatly, or that the Emperor Napoleon III of France was the vilest man alive; when he expressed delight at Palmerston's fall over the Bill that sought to make conspiracy against foreign despots a criminal offence in England; when he denounced the Southern States in the American Civil War, or made himself violently unpopular by speaking in the House of Commons in defence of Fenian assassins (and thereby probably saving their lives), or for the rights of women, or of workers, or of colonial peoples, and thereby made himself the most passionate and best-known champion in England of the insulted and the oppressed, it is difficult to suppose that it was not liberty and justice (at whatever cost) but utility (which counts the cost) that were uppermost in his mind. His articles and his political support saved Durham and his Report, when both were in danger of being defeated by the combination of right and left-wing adversaries, and thereby did much to ensure self-government in the British Commonwealth. He helped to destroy the reputation of Governor Eyre who had perpetrated brutalities in Jamaica. He saved the right of public meeting and of free speech in Hyde Park, against a government that wished to destroy it. He wrote and spoke for proportional representation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• ROUTLEDGE PHILOSOPHERS IN FOCUS SERIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• ON LIBERTY
• CRITICAL COMMENTARY
• Index