The Routledge Guidebook to Mill's On Liberty

Jonathan Riley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317543350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is widely regarded as one of the most influential and stirring pieces of political philosophy ever written. Ever relevant in our increasingly surveillance dominated culture, the essay argues strongly in favour of the moral rights of individuality, including rights of privacy and of freedom of expression. The Routledge Guidebook to Mill's On Liberty introduces the major themes in Mill's great book and aids the reader in understanding this key work, covering:

• the context of Mill's work and the background to his writing
• each separate part of the text in relation to its goals, meanings and impact
• the reception the book received when first seen by the world
• the relevance of Mill's work to modern philosophy.

With further reading included for each chapter, this text is essential reading for all students of philosophy and political theory, and all those wishing to get to grips with this classic work of political philosophy.

Part I

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

1

MILL AND THE LIBERTY

MILL’S LIFE AND WORK

Mill lived for much of the nineteenth century, a period of remarkable social change in which, among much else, traditional religious beliefs continued to erode, without new faiths (whether religious or secular) taking their place as a general source of ideas and maxims of morality and politics. In his Autobiography, he describes the period as a ‘critical’ one, in the sense of the Saint-Simonians and Comte, meaning a ‘period … of criticism and negation, in which mankind lose their old convictions without acquiring any new ones, of a general or authoritative character, except the conviction that the old are false’. Such transitional periods alternate throughout history with more settled ‘organic’ ones, in which, for the most part, ‘mankind accept with firm conviction some positive creed, claiming jurisdiction over all their actions’ (1873, 171).¹ The critical period in which he lived ‘began with the Reformation’, he thought, ‘has lasted ever since, still lasts, and cannot altogether cease until a new organic period has been inaugurated by the triumph of a yet more advanced creed’ (ibid.).

The more advanced creed, which he hoped might eventually replace fading Christian dogma, was what he called the ‘Religion of Humanity’ (1874), a comprehensive liberal utilitarian system of belief, in which the collective good or happiness is maximized by conjoining extensive liberty of the individual with a limited social code of morality, including general rules of justice that distribute and sanction equal rights and duties, designed to prevent or punish actions that are reasonably judged to cause wrongful harms to other persons. As he recalls, by the time he was about twenty-four, he ‘looked forward, through the present age of loud disputes but generally weak convictions [surely reminiscent of our own age], to a future which shall unite the best qualities of the critical with the best qualities of the organic periods’:

unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of individual action in all modes not hurtful to others; but also, convictions as to what is right and wrong, useful and pernicious, deeply engraven on the feelings by early education and general unanimity of sentiment, and so firmly grounded in reason and in the true exigencies of life, that they shall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, and political, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others.

(1873, 173)

His great essay, On Liberty (1859), dedicated to his beloved wife, is an impassioned defence of that ‘unchecked liberty of thought’ and ‘unbounded freedom of individual action in all modes not hurtful to others’, which are the ‘best qualities’ of critical periods.

Although he had grand hopes for mankind amidst the ‘loud disputes’ and social upheaval of the age, his own life was ‘uneventful’ (1873, 5). Born in London on 20 May 1806, he was the eldest of nine children of James and Harriet Mill. His father, after moving to London from Scotland to pursue a career in journalism, developed a strong friendship with Jeremy Bentham and became a leader of the reform-minded (or ‘radical’) intellectuals who banded together under Bentham’s standard of utility. The elder Mill was a charismatic man, whose wit, upstanding character and love of discussion attracted such notable figures as David Ricardo, John Austin and George Grote to the Benthamite utilitarian school. James put his son through an extraordinary early education in history, logic and political economy, and these notable men as well as Bentham himself took an interest and contributed to that education. Although James was apparently a cold taskmaster who displayed virtually no affection for his son, the younger Mill expressed gratitude for his education, proclaimed it a success, and estimated that by age fifteen it gave him an advantage of some twenty-five years over his contemporaries in the development of his intellectual capacities to think for himself. In 1823, James, who had found employment at the East India Company shortly after the publication of his The History of British India (1817), arranged for his son’s employment at the company. John worked there for thirty-five years (in the same office as his father until the latter’s death in 1836) and retired only when the Company itself was terminated in 1858. As of 1856, he had risen to the same senior position that his father had achieved, namely, Examiner of India Correspondence, and thus was second in the chain of command, next to the Secretary.

Although raised as a Benthamite radical, he reacted against the Benthamite school of thought, as a young man of only twenty, when he suffered a severe depression for some six months upon recognizing that he would not personally feel happy even if the social and political reforms advocated by the Benthamites were fully implemented so that the general happiness could be maximized. In short, he feared that egoistic hedonism clashed irreconcilably with utilitarianism: he did not expect to feel much personal pleasure even though he knew that he ought to feel it if the institutions and actions recommended by the Benthamites were in operation. Indeed, he feared that he lacked any capacity for strong feelings at all because his Benthamite upbringing had focused exclusively on the cultivation of his intellect to the neglect of his imagination and sentiments.

He gradually emerged from his mental crisis during the spring of 1827, once he learned that he still had natural feelings that were awakened, and could be strengthened, by poetry and the fine arts. He seems to have studied the great German poets Goethe, Schiller and their Romantic followers, including Novalis and the Schlegel brothers, as well as their British counterparts such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle and Sterling, all of whom were vehement critics of Benthamite utilitarianism. He absorbed their ideas about willpower and the creative imagination, the need to strive endlessly for an aesthetic ideal of perfection that could never actually be realized, beauty as a symbol of moral good, the peculiar kind of aesthetic pleasure associated with the ideal of a duly balanced human character whose intellectual powers were in harmony with its feelings of motivation and habits of action, and so forth. No doubt he also became aware that these artists were deeply influenced by idealist philosophers such as Kant, Fichte and Hegel, which is not to say that he ever endorsed idealism. Nevertheless, many of these ideas, suitably modified, eventually found their way into the extraordinary version of hedonistic utilitarianism that he had grasped in outline by about 1830 and began to elaborate in detail after his father’s death.

In 1830, he met his future wife Harriet Taylor (née Hardy), who was married at the time to her first husband, John Taylor. Harriet was best friends with Eliza Flower, who along with her sister Sarah was a ward of the Reverend William J. Fox, a Unitarian preacher and journalist about twenty years older than Mill. Fox, his wards and Harriet were devoted to poetry, literature and music and had unconventional ideas with respect to marriage and divorce. Indeed, as Mineka (1944) discusses, Fox was almost forced to resign as a leader of his church in 1834 when his wife revealed to members of his congregation his love for Eliza. But the congregation generally supported him after he denied any sexual relationship. He and Mill grew friendly as Mill’s relationship with Harriet blossomed into a passionate attachment. In 1832, he first reached out to Mill and invited him to write for the Monthly Repository, the Unitarian magazine which Fox purchased in 1831 (after editing it as of 1828) and transformed into a secular journal of liberal opinion until he sold it in 1836. This gave Mill an opportunity to publish some views on poetry and aesthetic feeling, no doubt with the encouragement of Harriet and Eliza, and allowed him to interact with a wider circle of artists such as Robert Browning whose sympathies lay with the Romantics as opposed to the Benthamites. Mill and Fox became close confidants in the fall of 1833. As his letters to Fox make clear, Mill and Harriet became convinced that they were made for one another when they spent a fortnight together in Paris during October–November of that year. Nevertheless, despite their passion for one another, they decided not to live together because of the opposition of her first husband, for whom she retained much affection as opposed to passionate love. Instead, they chose to see each other frequently in London and take trips together while she otherwise lived with her husband, an unusual arrangement that pained all three parties and provoked considerable gossip as well as slights from family, friends and acquaintances, including some of the Benthamites. Moreover, just as Fox denied any sexual intimacy with Eliza while he was married to another, Mill denied any sexual relationship with Harriet before the death of her first husband in 1849. After waiting another two years, they finally married, with Mill expressing his contempt for the prevailing laws of patriarchy by making a public declaration that he rejected any suggestion that he should be entitled as a husband to take ownership of all property that Harriet brought to the marriage.

Harriet died just over seven years later, in 1858, only a few months after his retirement from the East India Company, while they were travelling to Montpellier. She was the love of his life and his enduring passion for her seems to have helped him to develop a due balance between reason and sentiment in his character and saved him from suffering any further severe depressions. Moreover, he insisted that she was joint author of the key moral and political works first drafted (but not published) during their marriage, including On Liberty, Utilitarianism (1861), The Subjection of Women (1869) and Three Essays on Religion (1874). After she died, he bought a cottage near her grave site in Avignon, and spent a good part of each of his remaining years there, usually accompanied by his stepdaughter, Helen Taylor.

During those fifteen remaining years, his writings were his main occupation. He continued to prepare new editions of his major treatises A System of Logic (1843) and Principles of Political Economy (1848), for instance, and he revised and published most of the works initially drafted with Harriet during their marriage, although On Liberty was never revised and the Three Essays on Religion together with his Autobiography and fragmentary Chapters on Socialism (1879) were published posthumously by Helen. He also wrote and published major new works in political theory and philosophy, including Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), and An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865)—this last being his unduly neglected demolition of a leading version of rationalist intuitionism whose author was much influenced by the great metaphysical current of German idealism. Moreover, he clarified several aspects of his sophisticated version of hedonistic psychology in the notes he contributed to the new edition of his father’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1869), which he edited with additional notes contributed by Alexander Bain, Andrew Findlater and George Grote. And, as a leading public intellectual, he published numerous articles in newspapers and journals on the issues of the day.

During 1865–68, he also served as a Liberal Member of Parliament for Westminster. His political career gives an indication of his character. He was elected despite giving public notice to the voters of his district that he would not run a campaign, or bear any of the costs of his election or be instructed by them. As an MP, he also refused to curry popular favour. Rather, he made parliamentary speeches proposing radical liberal reforms, which he knew lacked support yet believed might get a hearing, leading to a more enlightened public opinion. His proposals included extension of the franchise to women, as well as the introduction of Thomas Hare’s system of proportional representation, neither measure finding its way into the Reform Act of 1867. He also spoke out against various manifest injustices which most voters and their parliamentary representatives continued to neglect, including the extensive pattern of violence against women by their husbands, the ongoing oppression of Irish peasants by absentee British landlords who kept their tenants at bare subsistence by increasing land rents as high as the market would bear instead of fixing the rents at a reasonable customary level, and the suppression of unpopular speech as exemplified by the Crown’s prosecution of Charles Bradlaugh for blasphemy and sedition in his weekly paper the National Reformer.

It is an interesting question why Mill was not re-elected. Many believed that it was the result of his strong public support for Bradlaugh just before the election. Bradlaugh was an avowed atheist (strictly speaking, an agnostic), fierce opponent of monarchy and hereditary privilege, and advocate of self-reliance and birth control who was eventually elected to Parliament himself in 1880, although a majority of the House of Commons refused to allow him to take his seat for six years (despite his repeated re-elections) by denying him the right to affirm or swear the oath of allegiance, because of his atheism. However, Mill was embroiled in other public controversies that may also have been important factors. Perhaps his most controversial activity was his chairmanship of the extra-parliamentary Jamaica Committee, which for two years sought in vain to persuade the government to prosecute Governor Eyre and his principal subordinates for unjustified military violence against Jamaican blacks in the fall of 1865. Mill believed that Eyre deserved capital punishment for authorizing the execution of more than 400 Jamaicans in response to minor disturbances that lasted a week, but conservatives, including such notable artists as Dickens, Ruskin and Carlyle as well as many Westminster voters, were disturbed by his relentless campaign to enforce the basic rights of blacks against this figure of British authority. In any case, Mill lost his seat to W. H. Smith, a Conservative, the son of the founder of the newsagents.

Mill died, apparently of erysipelas, at Avignon on 7 May 1873, and is buried there with Harriet.

Evidently, his story is unlikely to be confused with the tales of Pericles or Napoleon. Even so, he expects that anyone capable of rational persuasion will be interested to learn more about his ‘unusual and remarkable’ education (1873, 5). Although many have been interested, he might well have been surprised by the frequency with which the reaction is one of alarm and hostility. Typical is Carlyle’s well-known jibe that the Autobiography reads like the story of a deeply troubled ‘logical steam engine’. When he goes on to depict Mill’s record of self-development as ‘a mournful psychical curiosity’, however, the latter-day Diogenes would be more persuasive if he were talking about himself.

By all accounts, Mill was a man of prodigious intellect and learning, whose moral and political opinions were not only far too progressive for the reactionary Carlyle but also far in advance of much contemporary liberal opinion. His various articles and treatises, emerging over a period of more than fifty years, span an incredibly broad range of topics in philosophy, politics and economics. Long regarded as a muddle-headed synthesizer of other people’s ideas, he is seen in recent scholarship as a cogent and imaginative philosopher of liberal democracy, whose writings are of permanent importance.

To provide insight into the process of his education, he divides his life into three major periods. The first includes the period of his early education, lasting until he was about fourteen. During this time, his father was his ‘schoolmaster’ and directed his studies with a view to making him a fellow Benthamite reasoner. Then, after a year in France, he very gradually took control of his own education, by cultivating his intellectual and emotional capacities as he desired and thought best.

Initially, he merely carried on with the programme of his early education. During this first phase of his self-development or individuality, he threw himself into the path of intellectual enlightenment which his schoolmaster had laid out for him and accustomed him to pursue. After about five years, however, when he was still not yet twenty-one, he lost interest in that path and, by the spring of 1827, found that he wanted to take a more varied journey, one that embraced the cultivation of his sympathetic capacities as well as his reasoning powers. He thereby moved into a second period (also his...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor's Preface
• Preface to the first edition
• Preface to this edition
• Part I: General introduction
• Part II: The Argument of On Liberty
• Part III: Mill's doctrine in outline
• Part IV: General issues
• Bibliography
• Index