ON LIBERTY

Author: John Stuart Mill
Year: 1975 (1859)
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co
Language:  English

Some social philosophers have had a particularly decisive impact on the way we have structured our society in the 20^th and 21^st centuries in various parts of Europe. Thomas Hobbes, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Karl Marx are but a few examples of intellectuals who became instrumental to our ongoing discourse on what sort of community we wish to be part of, what the meaning of state and government should be, how we distribute political power and economic wealth, and what rights and obligations are understood by citizenship.

One of the most influential voices for most of western European political theory was John Stuart Mill and in particular his short, but groundbreaking and immensely popular work, “On Liberty”. This was initially intended by Mill, and his wife and co-author Harriet Taylor, to be an article or pamphlet but over time expanded to the point where it became a proper book. In it, Mill elaborates on his main concern; what is individual freedom and what stands in its way?

He does this by breaking the question up in two parts. Primo, he discusses the relationship between liberty of thought and the liberty of action. Secundo, he proceeds to investigate individualism and the development of the individual, all the time matching against the collective, be it the state, society, or organised religion. In fact, Mill often equates state with society, which is quite useful for much of his argument and a reminder to the many among us who consider the state and government of a democratic society as something detached from the people who finance and elect them.

What is interesting about Mill’s argument about the freedom of thought and action is that he is not proposing them from the perspective of the privileges of the individual, but rather from the point of view of society itself and the benefits free-thinking individuals can have for the progress of a whole community. He submits that society is best served if all ideas are brought to the fore and tested against each other. If a new idea proves superior to an old idea, it will replace the old one and society will be better off. If the new idea proves inferior to an existing idea, the existing idea will have been strengthened and society will be better off knowing that it is in the right. Ideas that are not challenged, no matter how correct or accurate, will with time become old and weak.

His argument about the individualism is very much related to his argument about freedom of thought but seems less substantiated. Mill categorically argues for the individual agency as the antidote to pacification. In his view, all trades should be performed by private entrepreneurs regardless of their efficiency. His idea is that the mere fact that society is powered by the activity and initiative of private individuals fosters a culture of innovation and forward-thinking that benefits the whole community even where individual businesses or particular branches of the economy are not running optimally. His point is that the state may never repress human individualism at any time. “A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes – will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.”

Mill’s conclusions are that the state must have no jurisdiction in matters that involve only the agent himself. All actions should be permissible, that only affect the person who commits them or the person or persons who have made a conscious and free choice to accept the consequences of said action. Mill calls these actions “self-regarding”. Only if an individual’s actions threaten to harm society, does the state have a right to limit that individual’s liberty. For example, society has an obligation to punish and imprison a thief, not because of the individual crime, but because theft as such, if allowed to go unchecked, may hollow the foundation of the way we recognise and organise ownership and wealth, and therefore becomes a danger to society. Laws by their very nature are bound to limit the liberty of the individual and may therefore only be forged in order to defend society, not to control or pacify the individual.

The greatest enemy of individualism however, according to Mill, is not laws and regulations but the collective opinions of society. Many things that are not illegal are still not done because of the observing eyes of the general public. The “what will people say”-argument, as it were. In this part of the book, Mill discusses genius and eccentricity and decries the general public’s inability to understand genius. At best, the man on the Clapham omnibus considers it mildly entertaining and at worst outright threatening. But eccentrics should be revered and not scorned, says Mill. He who acts according to established social rules rather than his own convictions, does not act according to his free will and is, therefore, a prisoner.

There is a lot to unpack in Mill’s book and others have done it a lot better than I will ever be able to, especially in as short a text as this blog post, but I hope that whoever reads these words will endure my own primitive thoughts all the same.

A feeling that recurred to me while reading “On Liberty” was that I perceived it as somewhat naïve. Mill’s proposal that the right opinion will prevail if tested against wrong ones is not compatible with the state of things in the world today. In our era of post-truth, where personal opinion and proven fact are interchangeable, Mill’s ongoing debate between ideas becomes impossible to sustain. One of Mill’s fiercest critics, James Fitzjames Stephen writes that “The great defect of Mr Mill’s later writings seems to me to be that he has formed too favourable an estimate of human nature.” I tend to lean toward Stephen’s assessment. I think that Mill would agree with me when I say that he assumes that people who engage in a debate do so in a common pursuit of truth and an interest in facts and evidence. He writes “the source of everything respectable in a man, either as an intellectual or moral being, namely, that his errors are corrigible”.

Unfortunately, Mill failed to see, that the true purpose of most individuals is far less sophisticated. For most who engage in a public debate, the goal is to win the argument (or as it is better known “own” their adversary), not to get closer to the truth. He failed to recognise that it may be perfectly acceptable in some circles to manufacture evidence in support of an argument if no established facts support it.

As a consequence, despite his hardy defence of the liberty of every man and woman (he was a staunch feminist), Mill by necessity comes across as an elitist. He wants society to be an academic seminar where learned intellectuals weigh evidence against evidence without passion or prestige and he, therefore, must agree to exclude the portions of society that are unqualified to participate in such a discourse. Society after all, in Mill's own words, is nothing but "that miscellaneous collection of a few wise and many foolish individuals".