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J.S.MILL on LIBERTY in Focus J.S.MILL ON LIBERTY in focus This volume brings together in a convenient form J.S.Mill’s On Liberty and a selection of important essays by a number of eminent Mill scholars, including Isaiah Berlin, Alan Ryan, John Rees, C.L.Ten and Richard Wollheim. As well as providing authoritative commentary upon On Liberty, the essays also reflect a broader debate about the philosophical foundations of Mill’s liberalism, particularly the question of the connection between Mill’s professed utilitarianism and his commitment to individual liberty. In a substantial introduction the editors survey the debate and conclude that the outcome has profound and disturbing implications, both for our understanding of Mill’s classic defence of individual freedom and more generally for the style of liberal argument with which Mill is typically identified. The book will be of interest to students of Mill, to ethical and political philosophers and to anyone interested in the contemporary status of liberalism. John Gray is a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford G.W.Smith is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Lancaster ROUTLEDGE PHILOSOPHERS IN FOCUS SERIES Series editor: Stanley Tweyman York University, Toronto GODEL’S THEOREM IN FOCUS Edited by S.G.Shanker DAVID HUME: DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION IN FOCUS Edited by Stanley Tweyman CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE IN FOCUS Edited by Hugo Adam Bedau JOHN LOCKE: LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION IN FOCUS Edited by John Horton and Susan Mendus J.S.MILL ON LIBERTY in focus Edited by John Gray and G.W.Smith London and New York First published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Collection as a whole © 1991 Routledge; individual chapters © 1991 respective contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Mill, John Stuart 1806–1873 J.S.Mill’s ‘On liberty’ in focus.—(Routledge philosophers in focus series). 1. Liberty. Mill, John Stuart, 1806–1873. On liberty I. Title II. Gray, John III. Smith, G.W. 323.44 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data J.S.Mill’s On liberty in focus edited by John Gray and G.W.Smith. p. cm.—(Routledge philosophers in focus series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Mill, John Stuart, 1806–1873. On Liberty. 2. Liberty. I. Gray, John. II. Smith, G.W. III. Series. JC585.M75 1991 323.44–dc20 91–40793 CIP ISBN 0-203-40228-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-71052-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 415 01000 4 (Print Edition) ISBN 0 415 01001 2 pbk CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii INTRODUCTION John Gray and G.W.Smith 1 ON LIBERTY John Stuart Mill 1 Introductory 23 2 Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion 36 3 Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being 72 4 Of the Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual 90 5 Applications 108 CRITICAL COMMENTARY JOHN STUART MILL AND THE ENDS OF LIFE Isaiah Berlin 131 JOHN STUART MILL’S ART OF LIVING Alan Ryan 162 A RE-READING OF MILL ON LIBERTY J.C.Rees 169 MILL’S CONCEPTION OF HAPPINESS AND THE THEORY OF INDIVIDUALITY John Gray 190 v CONTENTS MILL’S DEFENCE OF LIBERTY C.L.Ten 212 SOCIAL LIBERTY AND FREE AGENCY: SOME AMBIGUITIES IN MILL’S CONCEPTION OF FREEDOM G.W.Smith 239 JOHN STUART MILL AND ISAIAH BERLIN: THE ENDS OF LIFE AND THE PRELIMINARIES OF MORALITY Richard Wollheim 260 Index 278 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The editors and the publishers would like to thank the following copyright holders for permission to reprint material: Oxford University Press for John Stuart Mill and the ends of life’ by Sir Isaiah Berlin from his Four Essays on Liberty (1969); Richard Wollheim for ‘John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin: the ends of life and the preliminaries of morality’; The Listener for ‘John Stuart Mill’s art of living’ by Alan Ryan (74:1965); Basil Blackwell for ‘A re-reading of Mill on liberty’ by John Rees (Political Studies 1960); Athlone Press for extracts from ‘J.S.Mill on freedom’ by G.W. Smith, originally published in Zbigniew Pelczynski and John Gray, eds, Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy (1984). vii INTRODUCTION John Gray and G.W.Smith In recent years, much interpretation and criticism of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty has focused on the dialogue between traditional and revisionary schools of Mill scholarship.1 The traditional school of interpretation has a distinguished pedigree in the received version of nineteenth-century British intellectual history. According to this view, there is to be found in the works of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill a systematic moral doctrine which animates the practical politics and reformist projects of the Philosophic Radicals. It is widely agreed that the Philosophic Radicals had a significant impact on policy and government in Britain in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, altering, often for the better, much in central and local government and in the law.2 These reformist projects were inspired by the doctrines of classical utilitarianism, encapsulated in the principle that only pleasure has intrinsic value and right conduct is that which maximizes pleasure, or best promotes general welfare, where this is conceived as the sum of all pleasures. Classical utilitarianism, expounded by Bentham and his disciple James Mill, is thus a theory at once hedonistic and consequentialist, affirming that only pleasure is good and that rightness consists in the production of those consequences that are best in terms of the pleasure they contain. It is this simple doctrine, crude perhaps, but coherent enough, which the classical utilitarians propagated, and which informed their reformist activities. According to the traditional school of Mill interpretation and criticism, John Stuart Mill was brought to recognize the limitations of classical utilitarianism but was nevertheless unable entirely to emancipate himself from the influence of his father and Bentham, with the result that he remained an inconsistent and merely eclectic 1 JOHN GRAY AND G.W.SMITH thinker in whose work no coherent doctrine can be found.Undoubtedly, the most eloquent and influential exponent of this view is Isaiah Berlin. Berlin presents his reading of Mill in the seminal paper which constitutes the first critical contribution appended to Mill’s celebrated essay in this volume. But it is perhaps worth remarking that Berlin is by no means alone amongst contemporary scholars in taking the line first struck by Mill’s great Victorian critic, James Fitzjames Stephen.3 Indeed, apart from Fitzjames Stephen’s vigorous broadside, arguably the most radical and uncompromising traditionalist attack is that mounted by Gertrude Himmelfarb.4 It may be useful briefly to consider Himmelfarb’s interpretation of Mill as a point of fairly acute contrast with that of Berlin. Himmelfarb maintains that it is quite pointless for us to seek for a logical connection between the philosophy of utilitarianism and On Liberty because Mill manifestly simply gave up on attempting any systematic link between freedom and utility. True, he describes the essay as a ‘kind of philosophic textbook of a single truth’.5 But the ‘truth’ in question is not the Principle of Utility, that is to say, the precept which directs us to pursue the greatest happiness of the greatest number; it is rather the celebrated ‘one very simple principle’ of the first chapter of On Liberty, according to which ‘the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection’ (p. 30). Mill’s ‘single truth’ is thus the celebrated Principle of Liberty (or Harm Principle), which he presents as being ‘entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion’ (p. 30). Himmelfarb contends that Mill invokes the Principle of Liberty as an ‘absolute’ defence of individual freedom against utility-based considerations, and that he does so precisely because he perceives the tendency of the latter to justify social encroachments upon individual liberty in the name of maximizing the general happiness.6 In an arresting corollary she maintains that this stance in no way involves Mill in abandoning utilitarianism as such. It is not that Mill changes his mind over a period of years in the course of extricating himself from Benthamism, finally to reveal himself in On Liberty as a thoroughly reconstructed liberal. It is rather that Mill’s mind remains in a profound tension between strictly incompatible principles, a tension exhibited inter alia in the fact that although On 2 INTRODUCTION Liberty and Utilitarianism were prepared forpress pretty well contemporaneously by Mill he proceeds in each upon quite distinct and incommensurable premises—freedom in the one book, utility in the other.7 The traditional interpretation could scarcely be put in a sharper fashion. Himmelfarb’s reading, however, rests heavily upon a question- able interpretation of what Mill means by the Principle of Liberty’s governing social interference with individual freedom ‘absolutely’. She maintains that Mill means by this that the Principle is primary and underived and thus in conflict with a logically independent Principle of Utility.
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