The Liberty is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written. Autobiography ch 7
John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty was published in 1859. It is dedicated to his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, who died the previous year. A radical thinker and philosopher in her own right, Harriet Taylor Mill has some claim to be considered the co-author of On Liberty: in Mill’s own words, ‘it belongs as much to her as to me’. The essay was met with both acclaim and criticism, and it has since become a cornerstone of modern liberal thought.
Born in 1806, John Stuart Mill grew up in a rarefied intellectual atmosphere: his father James was an economist and philosopher, and chief disciple of the founder of English utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham and Mill took the opportunity to raise John Stuart as the complete utilitarian, and his early accomplishments are well-known – reading Greek at the age of three, covering classical literature and history by the time he was eight, and mastering philosophy and economics by the age of twelve. After a mental breakdown at the age of twenty, his own utilitarian thinking took on a very different hue from Bentham’s. He worked with his father at the East India Company for much of his life, and in later years became Member of Parliament for City and Westminster, defending women’s right to vote and other social reforms. He died in 1873.
On Liberty addresses a particular concern. In an increasingly democratic society, and with the rise of a respectable working or lower middle class, Mill detected a corresponding increase in social conformity. Mill was afraid that this tyranny of the majority would restrict and eventually suppress originality. He vigorously opposed such conformity and his defence of liberty is the defence of ‘a single truth’:
... the importance, to man and society, of a large variety in types of character, and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions. Autobiography ch 7
Although Mill was writing 150 years ago, these concerns are no less relevant today and On Liberty still plays a role in helping to decide political questions of individual freedom. As Gertrude Himmelfarb puts it in her introduction to the Penguin edition:
The use and abuse of drugs, crime and punishment, pornography and obscenity, industrial and economic controls, racial and sexual equality, national security and defence, ecology, technology, bureaucracy, education, religion, the family, sex – all come up against the ultimate test: the liberty of the individual. p7
The relation between an individual and the government can be construed along a spectrum of possibilities. At one extreme, the individual can be subordinated entirely to the authority of the state which, in the view of Thomas Hobbes for example, is absolute. At the other extreme, the anarchist claims that the state has no grounds for authority and the individual submits to no government at all. The absolute liberty of the individual to regulate his or her own life in every way, attractive as it may seem at first glance, is not Mill’s solution to the problem (nor, it goes without saying, is tyranny). In fact, the role of government is essential to Mill’s broader project.
All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. 1.6
Unrestricted liberty will lead only to conflict and abuse. The role of the state is to protect the individual from such abuse and to create the optimal conditions for development. This therefore requires a more sophisticated understanding of freedom which On Liberty is intended to provide.
The type of freedom that interested Mill is political freedom – the freedom of the individual within society. Or, as he puts it:
Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. 1.1
In his 1958 essay Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin identified two different (and rival) conceptions of freedom. The first, negative liberty, is the type of liberty championed by Mill and most liberals, and can be defined as freedom from external interference. Understood in this way, liberty demands strong limitations on the authority and activity of the state. The second is positive liberty, which may be defined as the freedom to actively and materially determine one’s own life. Positive liberty requires the presence of something (resources, education, self-mastery) which enables the agent to control their own destiny. Negative liberty demands merely the absence of external constraints.
No one, it seems, is against freedom: but these two different notions can lead to radically different political systems and may come into direct conflict. There is in practice a considerable difference between what is required for negative freedom, and what is required for individuals to be free in a positive sense. Even if an individual is free from state interference and thus enjoys negative liberty, they may not enjoy positive freedom: they may lack resources, or education, or a moral compass, or the will to live a ‘good life’. They may not be ‘free’ to make meaningful and effective choices about their lives – but with intervention from the state, they can become more free as their capacity to choose wisely develops. Intervention from the state, of course, means a lessening of negative freedom – and may sound a sinister note to modern ears. As Berlin remarks:
This renders it easy for me to conceive of myself as coercing others for their own sake, in their, not my, interest. I am then claiming that I know what they truly need better than they know it themselves.
Mill was not directly concerned with how people choose to act, or their particular conception of the good life, but only with establishing a protected sphere of activity within which they are free to act as they see fit. Nevertheless, many criticisms of Mill’s notion of liberty come from those who believe that the state can and should intervene to promote the positive liberty of its citizens (eg Rousseau, Hegel and Marx).
Berlin also draws attention to another aspect of negative freedom:
Liberty in this sense is principally concerned with the area of control, not with its source... there is no necessary connection between individual liberty and democratic rule.
It is important to recognise that On Liberty is a work of utilitarian thinking: Mill advocates a broad negative liberty because that is the best means to his ultimate goal. Such liberty may be most often found in liberal democracies, but Berlin rightly notes that it is not incompatible with a benign autocracy:
The despot who leaves his subjects a wide area of liberty... meets with Mill’s specification.
For Mill (in fact, for all utilitarians) freedom is an instrumental good. Its value lies in its utility: liberty is a means to an end, and that end is happiness – although by ‘happiness’ he means something broader than Bentham’s hedonic identification of happiness with pleasure.
I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. 1.11
It is one of the most enduring questions of political philosophy whether those interests are in fact, as Mill claims, best served by negative freedom and non-interference by the state.
Immediately upon publication, On Liberty was subject to a number of criticisms. Many objected to Mill’s pessimism about creeping social conformity and instead celebrated an innovation and originality more widespread than ever before. Others argued that social uniformity was a good thing as it enabled positive freedom and self-determination.
The most serious attack came from James Fitzjames Stephen a few months before Mill’s death. In a full-length critique of Mill’s thinking, Stephen argued from utilitarian principles that the best outcome for society would be ensured by a degree of moral coercion and legal intervention. Mill’s negative freedom could not guarantee a morally upright society: intervening to ensure a sober nation would produce less variety but more happiness than one in which half the citizens are drunkards. Stephen claimed that Mill had elevated liberty to an absolute, rather than a merely instrumental good, and there are certainly passages in On Liberty that seem to support his claim.
Another of Mill’s arguments in On Liberty is that the state has no right to regulate an individual’s behaviour for moralistic reasons, that is to assert or defend a moral preference. This claim was challenged a century later by Lord Devlin in his commentary on the Wolfenden Report recommending the legalisation of homosexuality.
It is wrong to talk of private morality or of the law not being concerned with immorality as such or to try to set rigid bounds to the part which the law may play in the suppression of vice... I think there can be no theoretical limits to legislation against immorality. Morals and the Criminal Law 184
All of these objections deserve close scrutiny, and some have been restated by modern thinkers. In the 150 years since its publication, On Liberty has continued to inspire and provoke discussion about freedom, individualism and diversity. Even today a copy is presented to the president of the Liberal Democrats as a symbol of office.