Mill’s ‘On Liberty’ Reconsidered

Among the more interesting revivals of recent years is the resuscitation of John Stuart Mill. Mr. St. John Packe’s life of Mill, Professor Hayek’s John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, and scholarly editions of the younger Mill’s works have aroused a great deal of critical interest. Still more significant, perhaps, is the role which Mill fills in the writings of Mr. David Riesman. Mr. Riesman, indeed, is very nearly John Stuart Mill preserved in amber: the model of the “inner-directed man” in The Lonely Crowd is Mill; and the ideas of “individualism” and “autonomy” which are discussed in that book and in Individualism Reconsidered are drawn, for the most part, from Mill’s writings. Yet the world of liberal optimism and progress which was Mill’s has been dissolving the whole of this century, and no philosopher seems more refuted by the great tendency of things than Mill. The French Revolution did not deal Kant’s theories so bitter a blow as the Russian Revolution, technological change, and the revival of theology have dealt to Mill’s theories. Mill’s Essay on Liberty is the key to his strength and his weakness.

Some books form the character of their age; others reflect it; and Mill’s Liberty is of the latter order. This is not to say that it was uninfluential, nor that it is quite irrelevant to our time. On Liberty has been kept in print ever since it was published in 1859, and is the most widely read of all liberal tracts. But the little book is a product of the tranquillity and optimism of Victorian England; quite literally, it is dated; written at the summit of what Bagehot calls the Age of Discussion, it is a voice from out the vanished past of nineteenth-century meliorism. The future, after all, was not to the school of Mill. Thus the essay 1acks the energetic and prophetic qualities of St. Augustine’s City of God, or Calvin’s Institutes, or Rousseau’s Social Contract, or Burke’s Reflections, or Marx’s Capital, each of which helped to shape the age that was dawning, and all of which probably contain greater meaning for us nowadays than John Stuart Mill’s work. As John Stuart Mill himself was the last of the distinguished line of British empiricists, so his Liberty, with its foreboding remarks on the despotism of the masses, was more an epilogue to middle-class liberalism than a rallying-cry.

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Russell Kirk

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Among the more interesting revivals of recent years is the resuscitation of John Stuart Mill. Mr. St. John Packe’s life of Mill, Professor Hayek’s John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, and scholarly editions of the younger Mill’s works have aroused a great deal of critical interest. Still more significant, perhaps, is the role which Mill fills in the writings of Mr. David Riesman. Mr. Riesman, indeed, is very nearly John Stuart Mill preserved in amber: the model of the “inner-directed man” in The Lonely Crowd is Mill; and the ideas of “individualism” and “autonomy” which are discussed in that book and in Individualism Reconsidered are drawn, for the most part, from Mill’s writings. Yet the world of liberal optimism and progress which was Mill’s has been dissolving the whole of this century, and no philosopher seems more refuted by the great tendency of things than Mill. The French Revolution did not deal Kant’s theories so bitter a blow as the Russian Revolution, technological change, and the revival of theology have dealt to Mill’s theories. Mill’s Essay on Liberty is the key to his strength and his weakness.

Some books form the character of their age; others reflect it; and Mill’s Liberty is of the latter order. This is not to say that it was uninfluential, nor that it is quite irrelevant to our time. On Liberty has been kept in print ever since it was published in 1859, and is the most widely read of all liberal tracts. But the little book is a product of the tranquillity and optimism of Victorian England; quite literally, it is dated; written at the summit of what Bagehot calls the Age of Discussion, it is a voice from out the vanished past of nineteenth-century meliorism. The future, after all, was not to the school of Mill. Thus the essay 1acks the energetic and prophetic qualities of St. Augustine’s City of God, or Calvin’s Institutes, or Rousseau’s Social Contract, or Burke’s Reflections, or Marx’s Capital, each of which helped to shape the age that was dawning, and all of which probably contain greater meaning for us nowadays than John Stuart Mill’s work. As John Stuart Mill himself was the last of the distinguished line of British empiricists, so his Liberty, with its foreboding remarks on the despotism of the masses, was more an epilogue to middle-class liberalism than a rallying-cry.