AUTHOR: JOHN STUART MILL
DATE: 1859
John Stuart Mill, one of the nineteenth century’s great liberal thinkers, examined the relationship between the individual and authority in his masterpiece, On Liberty. He passionately advocated the defence of the rights of the individual under all circumstances, save when those rights impinge on the rights of another. ‘That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others,’ wrote Mill. ‘His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant … Over himself, over his body and mind, the individual is sovereign.’ A treatise that continues to spark heated debate, its central argument has been warmly embraced by disparate audiences, from orthodox liberals to civil rights activists to libertarians.
Born in London in 1806, Mill grew up immersed in philosophy as his father, James, was himself a celebrated philosopher. Mill Jr was a precocious talent, beginning to study Greek when he was just three years old. Around the same time, his father was striking up a friendship with Jeremy Bentham, establishing an intellectual alliance based on their shared belief in, among other things, freedom of speech, religious toleration, and electoral and legal reform. John Stuart Mill thus grew up with the ideas of Bentham swirling around him (as a teenager he even lived in France for a year at the home of Bentham’s brother) and it was perhaps inevitable that he would adopt Bentham’s central philosophical innovation, utilitarianism – ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’.
Mill began working for the East India Company when he was sixteen, remaining in its employment for some thirty years. But philosophy remained his true passion, and he was a prodigious writer, advocating personal liberty and utilitarian ideals. In 1851 he married the proto-feminist philosopher Harriet Taylor Mill, and she proved a significant influence upon his philosophical thinking.
Mill would publish a number of major works, among them A System of Logic (1843), Principles of Political Economy (1848), Utilitarianism (1863) and The Subjection of Women (1869). But nothing was more impactful than On Liberty. The underpinning aim of the work was to lay out a scheme by which humanity might achieve a ‘higher mode of existence’. How far, he asked, ought society to impose its power to limit the freedom of the individual? A logical reading of the doctrine of utilitarianism seemingly privileges the many over the few, but Mill made the case that it is actually by protecting the freedoms of the individual that the greatest good is achieved for society as a whole. A competent individual ought to be free to do as he wishes up to the point that they do harm to anyone else. He outlined what he considered were the three key liberties: freedom of thought and emotion (and its expression); freedom to pursue tastes, even those considered ‘immoral’; and freedom to associate with other like-minded people for a common purpose. In each case the right is protected up to the point that it does harm to others.
Mill acknowledged this so-called ‘harm principle’ came with a good degree of complexity. Some ‘harm’ for example, may be accepted if it is seen to benefit the community. A new business might harm its commercial rivals by cutting into their profits or even driving them out of business, but by doing so the efficiency of the market increases to the benefit of the greater number. He also recognized that there may be unacceptable harms of omission (causing harm by not doing something, such as refusing to assist a casualty on the road) and acceptable acts of commission (an action that may cause harm, but which is excusable if all parties involved are made honestly aware of the risks – for example, paying a fireman to risk his life in the event of an inferno). By explicitly confronting these ‘exceptions’, Mill sought to prove the general truth of his position.
LIVE FOREVER
On his death in 1832 aged eighty-four, Jeremy Bentham – long-time friend of Mill’s father – left his body to science and it was publicly dissected. But his will included some rather stranger conditions. He made arrangements that his corpse should be turned into what he called an ‘auto-icon’. This involved a process of mummification, after which his body was to be dressed and posed as he specified and put on public display in a case. His body may still be seen at University College London, although because of an unsatisfactory preserving process, it has long sported a waxwork head. The real head, meanwhile, has been the subject of a series of thefts by high-spirited students.
He considered the defence of freedom of expression to be vital to continuing progress in both the intellectual and social spheres. It was his contention that censorship denied the potential expression of truth, while it was only by allowing all opinions to be heard that one might confront and undermine those that are untruthful or hurtful. The proclivity to impose the will of the many on the few should always be resisted, he said – a tendency he observed that was strong even in supposedly free democratic societies.
In Principles of Political Economy, he would apply the central thesis of On Liberty to the world of economics. While recognizing a role for limited government intervention – for example, minting coinage, providing a narrow range of public goods and services, extracting taxation and protecting property rights – he believed, like Adam Smith before him, that the free market ought to dictate all other economic outcomes apart from in exceptional circumstances. To attempt to shackle principles of laissez-faire, he said, ‘unless required by some great good, is a certain evil’.
In 1858, Mill lost his job as the East India Company was dismantled and in the same year he was widowed. In the years that followed, he variously served as rector of St Andrew’s University and as a Member of Parliament for the Liberal Party. In such public roles, he was able to put his theories into practice and won a reputation as a radical for his support of, for example, women’s rights, Irish land reform and universal education. He died in 1873, an icon of international liberalism.
His own words from On Liberty serve as a fitting monument to him:
The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; 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; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.