Liberalisms (Routledge Revivals)

Essays in Political Philosophy

John Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135229825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

Liberalisms, a work first published in 1989, provides a coherent and comprehensive analytical guide to liberal thinking over the past century and considers the dominance of liberal thought in Anglo-American political philosophy over the past 20 years. John Gray assesses the work of all the major liberal political philosophers including J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Karl Popper, F. A Hayek, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and explores their mutual connections and differences.

Chapter one

J.S. Mill and the future of liberalism

If there is a consensus on the value of Mill's political writings, it is that we may turn to them for the sort of moral uplift that sustains the liberal hope, but we shall be disappointed if we expect to find in them much enlightenment about the urgent issues we face today. There are some, claiming access to new and greater truths, who do not hesitate to announce the obsolescence of that impassioned and reasonable liberalism which is the inspiration of all Mill's political writings. There are many others who will express their confidence that most of the causes for which Mill fought have now been safely won, and who accordingly deny to Mill's writing that contemporary relevance they undoubtedly possessed for their original readers. Most significantly, perhaps, there is a widespread impression in progressive circles that Mill's tentative and humane liberalism has little to say to the perplexed citizens of societies whose manifold crises demand bold and drastic measures. Whether the news is greeted with regret, complacency or acclamation, there are not many who doubt the accuracy of the report that Mill's liberalism is as dead as any tradition of political thought can be.¹

Obituaries of this kind may be premature, however, and their currency should be a matter of concern for all liberals. Mill's liberalism has a relevance which transcends the conditions of the age in which he wrote, and it meets needs which are enduring and widely felt. Mill's writings contain an argument for an open society which has not yet been decisively refuted, and of which every generation needs reminding: they are especially relevant to those sceptical of the claims of collectivist and totalitarian systems, who remain dissatisfied with any kind of purely defensive conservatism and seek a form of radicalism which is not afraid to contemplate the necessity of massive changes in current policies and institutions but which keeps a clear head about the dangers of all such large-scale social engineering. Those who are looking for an open-minded radicalism of this kind will find that Mill addresses himself to some of the most pressing problems that we face today. It is hard to believe that contemporary debate has not suffered through neglect of Mill's distinctive contribution to the liberal tradition.

Mill's argument in On Liberty

The vital centre of Mill's liberalism, as he expounds it in On Liberty, is not to be found in any of the consequential arguments he adduces there in support of liberal freedoms of thought, expression, and association, but rather in a conception of human nature and self-development. The central argument of On Liberty is the claim that a liberal society is the only kind of society in which men confident of their own manifold possibilities but critical of their own powers and of each other, men who aspire to the status of autonomous agents and who cherish their own individuality, will consent to live. His conception of man as a progressive being suggests to Mill the necessity of defining the sphere of legitimate social control in such a way as to promote the development of men as autonomous agents and he does this by proposing the famous principle of liberty. In fact this principle assumes various forms at different stages in Mill's argument, but its main force is contained in the injunction that the liberty of the individual should be restricted by society or by the state only if his actions are (or may be) injurious to the interests of others.

It is important that present-day readers of On Liberty take note of two points about Mill's principle of liberty. First, though Mill carefully stresses that it states a necessary and not a sufficient condition of justified limitation of liberty (since costs of enforcement may make it wrong to limit liberty even where the interests of others are clearly damaged by a given kind of action), Mill also insists that the principle of liberty is violated in modern societies whenever individuals enjoy a traditional freedom to act in ways injurious to others. The example of a traditional right unjustifiable by the principle of liberty which Mill cites most frequently is that of unrestricted procreation, which is injurious both to the interests of the offspring of irresponsible parents and to the interests of all who compete with them for scarce jobs and resources. Mill would have had no objection in liberal principle to proposals for the institution of ‘child licences’ (though he might well have had doubts about their practicability), and he would certainly have been sympathetic to those who advocate population control — including even coercive measures — as part of a freedom-preserving policy for an already overcrowded world.²

Second, it is a clear implication of Mill's principle that, in laying down a necessary condition of legitimate limitation of liberty, it disallows an indefinitely large range of interferences with personal freedom, and Mill is at pains to draw his readers’ attention to two classes of intervention which his principle prohibits. These are: restrictions of liberty designed to prevent individuals from causing harm to themselves; and restrictions designed to bring an individual into conformity with the received moral ideas of his community.

Importantly, Mill goes much further than most contemporary liberals in ruling out such paternalist restrictions on liberty as are involved in legal prohibitions of the sale of ‘hard’ drugs. Equally, there can be little doubt that Mill would adopt an uncompromising libertarian stand on questions of censorship and pornography, and would reject all legislation on sexual behaviour which has a moralistic rather than a straightforwardly harm-preventing rationale. Nor can it be doubted, finally, that Mill would have extended his support to the campaigns of those, like Dr Thomas Szasz, who wish to see the practice of the confinement and involuntary treatment of those judged mentally disordered discontinued or at least subject to far more stringent legal controls.³ Whether or not contemporary liberals follow Mill in his intransigent opposition to State paternalism and legal moralism, they would be well-advised if they were to consider carefully his objections to such policies.⁴

Mill's radicalism

Though fashionable progressive opinion will find Mill's stand on the question of drug use and censorship congenial, it is worth noting that his no less sensible views on the proper organization of national education find little favour in such circles. Mill's view that ‘an education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence’,⁵ despite the fact that it flows directly from his concern with the promotion of diversity and variety in all spheres of life, finds few echoes in contemporary political life outside the right wing of the Conservative Party and the far-left disciples of Ivan Illich, though for many years liberals have continued unnoticed to advocate voucher schemes as an alternative or a supplement to State education.⁶ It is paradoxical that radicals who bemoan the fate of such schools as Risinghill have not grasped the simple truth that bold experiments are unlikely to flourish in a monopolistic State education system dominated by conservative bureaucracies and politically vulnerable local authorities. Mill's views on education reveal an important difference between his anti-collectivist radicalism, which sought always to assist the disadvantaged by widening their opportunity for free choice and self-reliance, and the Fabian paternalism by which it was supplanted, whose goal apparently is to make the poor dependent on an expansionist apparatus of social workers and benevolent planners.

This overall contrast between Mill's radicalism and that of twentieth-century political parties (to which I shall return shortly in another context) is worth remarking on in that it discloses one of the most important tendencies of Mill's political thought, which is expressed in his constant search for methods which alleviate distress and strike at the roots of social injustice while restricting personal liberty to the minimum practicable extent. The relevance of Mill's anti-collectivist approach has increased rather than diminished in the century and more since his death, for we know now that vast nationalized social services not only involve considerable loss of liberty, but often facilitate a net redistribution of income and resources from the poorer to the better-off sections of the community. Indeed, those who give up the most freedom under such schemes are the poor who get least in return.

Mill's whole approach to the social injustices of industrial society involves a critique of orthodox socialism which can be deeply instructive to radical reformers well over a century later. Presciently identifying the fate of revolutionary socialism, Mill warned that catastrophist strategies to socialism, since they presuppose the collapse into chaos of the existing social order, are bound to generate (not the benign classless anarchy of which their proponents dream) but rather a dictatorship, in all probability far more oppressive than the old regime, in which there will be little or no room left for individuality of any kind. He was no less perceptive about the dangers of reformist socialism of the Statist or Fabian variety. If it is plainly mistaken to count Mill among the precursors of Fabianism, it is probably equally inaccurate, however, to suggest that he would be at home in the Selsdon Group;⁷ for Mill developed a series of proposals for the alleviation of the central injustices of the industrial society that was emerging around him which have the most radical implications today.

It should be a commonplace by now that Mill was no inflexible adherent of laissez-faire — for that matter, none of the classical economists subscribed to laissez-faire principles without making important exceptions and qualifications to them — and he acknowledged the propriety of a wide range of governmental activities, many of the kind which have become taken for granted in the liberal democracies of the twentieth-century western European and English-speaking world. It is important to recognize, however, that Mill's proposals for tackling the social problems of an industrial civilization go far beyond anything that merely suggests the kind of activities undertaken by the post-war Welfare State.

The major targets of Mill's criticism of the arrangements of the emergent industrial society of his day were the maldistribution of property and the oppressive system of industrial organization. In the posthumous ‘Chapters on Socialism’, published in the Fortnightly Review in 1879, Mill declared that, in existing society, ‘reward, instead of being proportional to the labour and abstinence of the individuals, is almost in an inverse ratio to it’. One of the primary causes of this inequitable distribution of rewards, according to Mill, was the concentration of fortunes facilitated through their uninterrupted accumulation across the generations, and his remedy for this, though much discussed in subsequent economic writings, seems as Utopian today as it did when he proposed it in the first edition (in 1848) of his Principles of Political Economy. Mill advocated the institution, not of an estates duty, but of what we would nowadays call an accessions duty or an inheritance tax, to be levied on the recipient and not on the donor of the capital.

The merit of such a tax is that, unlike other arrangements, it need not transfer wealth from private individuals to the State, since it is eminently avoidable through the desirable expedient of dispersing one's wealth widely. Mill's support for a reform of inheritance taxation which would promote the diffusion of wealth, when taken in conjunction with his opposition to the progressive taxation of income, distinguishes his radical sense of social injustice sharply from that which animates most socialists. Though it prompted him to favour a redistribution of property and so of incomes in the context of the industrial society of his day, Mill's radical conception of social justice has no specifically egalitarian orientation, condemning the inheritance of large fortunes rather on the grounds of its undeservedness and because huge concentrations of wealth may ultimately become inimical to liberty — whether they are held in governmental or in private hands. Equally, however, Mill's conception of social justice separates him from all those conservatives who are, at bottom, concerned with nothing more than the preservation of entrenched privilege. In the first edition of Principles of Political Economy, Mill's advocacy of what amounts to a guaranteed annual income or social dividend for all, confirms this contrast with conservative thought, and shows how close is his position to that of contemporary radicals in the same tradition.⁸

An inequitable distribution of property is, of course, closely related to that mode of capitalist industrial organization in which enterprises are owned and managed by owners of capital who stand in an authoritarian relationship with wage-earners. Throughout his life Mill was opposed to such a system of industrial organization. He opposed it because, in the first place, it institutionalized a permanent conflict of interests between owners of capital and wage-earners, and no system of productive association which rested on such a contradictory basis could be expected to be either stable or efficient. In the second place, the separation between wage-earners on the one hand and owners and manager on the other, deprived workers of any real opportunity for personal initiative. In so doing, it stultified their growth and prevented them becoming anything like the responsible, autonomous individuals that Mill had theorized about in On Liberty. Mill's fundamental objection to the capitalist system of his day led him to take a life-long interest in schemes for profit-sharing, industrial partnership, and producers’ co-operation; but his boldest vision goes far beyond such proposals, and can best be described as a form of non-revolutionary, competitive syndicalism. As Mill put it:

The form of association … which, if mankind continues to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.⁹

Mill's post-capitalist society

A number of points need making at once about the syndicalist or non-State socialist vision which is expressed in this passage. Crucially, Mill's vision of a post-capitalist society, unlike that of virtually all socialists, does not include the elimination of competition. Indeed, as far as Mill was concerned, no changes in the existing system of industrial organization would bring about a tolerable society which sought to suppress competition between enterprises and individuals, or which resulted in competition becoming less effective. If Mill is in any sense a socialist — and he certainly envisaged a social order which was no longer recognizably that of nineteenth-century England, and which differs at least as much from our own capitalist society — then his was decidedly a ‘market socialism’. Unlike market socialism of the Yugoslav variety, however, Mill's vision of a post-capitalist society is not one in which the institution of private property in the means of production has been abrogated: there is no suggestion that the workers’ shares in their enterprises will not be marketable, and there is every reason to think that Mill wanted to see an improvement in the capital market, with an entrepreneurial class of industrial pioneers having an acknowledged place even in the fully realized syndicalist society. Again, it should be noted that, despite his unorthodox sympathies with trade unionism, Mill envisaged no real place for trade unions in the society of the future; he looked forward to a time when the harmony of interests between all partners in production, facilitated by workers’ ownership and self-management, would allow ‘the true euthanasia of trade unionism’. In other words, Mill's proposals for workers’ participation in management were at the furthest removed from those contemplated by western socialist theorists, which apparently envisage no more than the inclusi...