The Online Library of Liberty A Project Of Liberty Fund, Inc. James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (LF ed.) [1874] The Online Library Of Liberty This E-Book (PDF format) is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a private, non-profit, educational foundation established in 1960 to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. 2010 was the 50th anniversary year of the founding of Liberty Fund. It is part of the Online Library of Liberty web site http://oll.libertyfund.org, which was established in 2004 in order to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. To find out more about the author or title, to use the site's powerful search engine, to see other titles in other formats (HTML, facsimile PDF), or to make use of the hundreds of essays, educational aids, and study guides, please visit the OLL web site. This title is also part of the Portable Library of Liberty DVD which contains over 1,000 books and quotes about liberty and power, and is available free of charge upon request. The cuneiform inscription that appears in the logo and serves as a design element in all Liberty Fund books and web sites is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash, in present day Iraq. To find out more about Liberty Fund, Inc., or the Online Library of Liberty Project, please contact the Director at [email protected]. LIBERTY FUND, INC. 8335 Allison Pointe Trail, Suite 300 Indianapolis, Indiana 46250-1684 Online Library of Liberty: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (LF ed.) Edition Used: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ed. Stuart D. Warner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 1993). Author: James Fitzjames Stephen Editor: Stuart D. Warner About This Title: The Liberty Fund edition of this work. Impugning John Stuart Mill’s famous treatise, On Liberty, Stephen criticized Mill for turning abstract doctrines of the French Revolution into “the creed of a religion.” Only the constraints of morality and law make liberty possible, warned Stephen, and attempts to impose unlimited freedom, material equality, and an indiscriminate love of humanity will lead inevitably to coercion and tyranny. PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 2 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/572 Online Library of Liberty: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (LF ed.) About Liberty Fund: Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. Copyright Information: The copyright to this edition, in both print and electronic forms, is held by Liberty Fund, Inc. Fair Use Statement: This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Unless otherwise stated in the Copyright Information section above, this material may be used freely for educational and academic purposes. It may not be used in any way for profit. PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 3 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/572 Online Library of Liberty: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (LF ed.) Table Of Contents Foreword Editor’s Note Preface to the First Edition Chapter One: the Doctrine of Liberty In General Chapter Two: On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion Chapter Three: On the Distinction Between the Temporal and Spiritual Power Chapter Four: the Doctrine of Liberty In Its Application to Morals Chapter Five: Equality Chapter Six: Fraternity Chapter Seven: Conclusion Note On Utilitarianism Preface to the Second Edition ?δύ τι θαραλέαιξ τ?ν μακρ?ν τείνειν βίον έλπίσι, φαγα??ξ θνμ?ν ?λδαίνονσαν εύφροσύναιξ φρίσσω δέ σε δερκομέγ’α μνρίοιξ& μόθοιξ& διακναιόμενον. Ζε?να γ?ρ ού& τρομέων ένίδία γνώμη σέβει θνατο?ξ ?γαν, Προμηθε? Prom. Vinct. 535–542 Sweet is the life that lengthens, While joyous hope still strengthens, And glad, bright thought sustain; But shuddering I behold thee, The sorrows that enfold thee And all thine endless pain. For Zeus thou has despised; Thy fearless heart misprized All that his vengeance can, The wayward will obeying, Excess of honour paying, Prometheus, unto man. Prometheus Bound (translated by G. M. Cookson) PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 4 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/572 Online Library of Liberty: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (LF ed.) [Back to Table of Contents] FOREWORD James Fitzjames Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity figured prominently in the mid- to late nineteenth century Victorian debates on two concepts at the heart of politics in the modern world—liberty and equality. Understanding himself to be a defender of an older English Liberalism that he thought to be under assault and weakening at an ever-quickening pace, Stephen attempted in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity to offer a corrective to what he believed were the mistaken views of liberty, equality, and fraternity that were leading the charge. He found these views most fully and powerfully expressed in three of John Stuart Mill’s works: On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, and Utilitarianism. Stephen thus subjected Mill’s political philosophy to intense criticism in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Yet Stephen was no mere polemicist, and throughout Liberty, Equality, Fraternity we find Stephen’s own understanding of liberty—as ordered liberty—equality—as equality under law—and fraternity—as a value incompatible with a free society—braided around his critique of Mill. And it is this understanding that is the most important feature of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and is eminently worthy of the attention of anyone concerned with the character of a free society. We will be aided in our pursuit of Stephen’s understanding of liberty, equality, and fraternity by first surveying certain features of his life and times and the influences upon his thought. James Fitzjames Stephen was born in London on March 3, 1829. His father, Sir James Stephen, was for a time Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, a position later held by Lord Acton. Stephen’s father drafted the legislation abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire, and his grandfather too, James Stephen, labored to abolish slavery.1 Stephen’s education took him to Eton, Kings College (London), and Trinity College (Cambridge) where he was a student of Sir Henry Sumner Maine. After further study at the Inner Temple, he was called to the Bar in 1854. Stephen’s pursuit of a career in law carried him to India in 1869 to serve for some two and a half years as Legal Member of the Viceroy’s Council (succeeding Maine) and ultimately to a Judgeship on the Queen’s Bench. Stephen’s legal career would surely have failed to provide sufficient support for his immediate family, so he took up a second career as a journalist. Stephen wrote often and on a wide range of intellectual matters. Many of his best pieces appeared in four periodicals in particular: Cornhill Magazine, Fraser’s Magazine, Pall Mall Gazette, and Saturday Review. Eventually, 55 of the articles that Stephen published in Saturday Review, ones that he himself admired, were collected and published in three volumes in 1892, two years before his death, as Horae Sabbaticae.2 Many of these have the outward appearance of book reviews and canvass in some detail the works of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, and Alexis de Tocqueville, among others. And although the intellectual influences upon Stephen were many, his understanding of things moral, social, and political perhaps owes most to Bentham and Hobbes. PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 5 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/572 Online Library of Liberty: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (LF ed.) Through Bentham, Stephen came to favor utilitarianism. Yet Stephen’s utilitarianism was not the technical, philosophical doctrine that one finds represented in Bentham or presented in Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics. Rather, it was a certain disposition of mind that expressed itself by privileging observation and facts over abstract reason. Stephen’s utilitarianism is most profoundly marked by a recognition that a calm and intelligent appraisal of moral and political life requires an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of pursuing one course of conduct rather than another. Our starting point for appraising our moral and political lives demands that we begin from where we are—our time, place, and circumstances—for the question we are addressing is what to do next, and that can only be answered by first discovering where we are. Stephen’s utilitarianism, therefore, aims at the reform of current practices, not their elimination, and it is certainly not a morality and politics of uniformity. Hobbes’s influence on Stephen is more diffuse and perhaps for that reason greater. Stephen’s admiration for Hobbes—“the greatest of English philosophers”3 —is profound. Of Leviathan, Stephen writes, “Hardly any magnum opus of the speculative kind has been so maturely weighed, so completely thought out, and so deliberately fashioned to express in every point the whole mind of its author.”4 Stephen was particularly attracted to the idea that informs the whole of Leviathan, namely, that political philosophy rests upon a conception of human nature. It is not surprising, then, that Stephen’s own conception of human nature animates Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, which should lead us to understand Stephen’s work as a meditation upon human nature as applied to the practical world of political association. Although it is the spirit of Hobbes more than any particular one of his theories that seems most to have affected Stephen, there are two distinct features of Hobbes’s thought that penetrated deeply into Stephen’s work. The first of these is the view that the interests of human beings conflict, and that this is an irremediable feature of the human condition; and insofar as the interests of individuals conflict, they may arrive at different conceptions of the good.