On Liberty – John Stuart Mill, 1859 ★★★½

Pocket Revolution 

Free-thinking used to be a crime but is critical to any healthy civilization. This is one point explicated by English philosopher John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which also addresses the need for intellectual progress and where our right to do as we please begins and ends.

In five sprawling essays tied together by the theme of liberty but also the objectives and needful limitations of society, Mill lays out one of his most famous cases, for why people should be able to do pretty much whatever they want so long as they hurt no one doing it.

He also has at orthodoxy in many forms, which no doubt disquieted religious readers but clearly impressed a large part of England’s educated classes. On Liberty was a milestone in the development of civil liberties and democratic institutions around the world.

What I noticed right away is the lucidity of Mill’s conceptions. I may not always like where he’s coming from, but respect how he puts things:

Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

That’s from the opening section, the “Introductory,” which lays out some general principals the rest of the book explores in detail. Other sections comprise “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion,” “Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being,” “Of the Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual,” and finally “Applications.”

The histories of Rome and Greece figure prominently in On Liberty: "The struggle between liberty and authority is the most conspicious feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England," he writes.
Image from https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/15/story-cities-part-2-secret-ancient-rome

Happiness is often cited by Mill as a principal reason for living as well as the highest purpose of any functional society. “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it,” he writes.

That said, On Liberty is not a happy read. However aspirational his message, the tone is sharp and dour throughout. Not being a reader of philosophy generally, this may be common to these kinds of books. I can only recall college readings of Henry David Thoreau, who presented similar ideas of man and society but had a much more upbeat way of expressing them.

Unlike Thoreau, Mill doesn’t attempt to draw much from the wisdom of nature, at least not here. He starts with human history, both in the times of ancient Greece and Rome and in the modern era, where Mill sees the vice-like grip of religion slowly giving way.

The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefensible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale.

Most types of religion come in for criticism in On Liberty, though the sharpest is reserved for Calvinism, and its concept of predestination: "Many persons, no doubt, sincerely think that human beings thus cramped and dwarfed are as their Maker designed them to be, just as many have thought that trees are a much finer thing when clipped into pollards..."
Image from https://www.christianity.com/church/denominations/what-is-calvinism.html

It had been many decades, Mill notes, since an Englishman was executed for crimes of unbelief; by his own time being an atheist just got you excused from jury duty. Mill goes on to caveat this: “In the minds of almost all religious persons, even in the most tolerant countries, the duty of toleration is admitted with tacit reserves.”

Mill also disagreements with non-religious people, specifically the circle from which he sprang, the “utilitarians” led by Mill’s mentor, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham was so antireligious that he disliked references to such concepts as “natural rights.” Mill was not so rigid. He accepted religious observance as a practice which gave pleasure and meaning to many, so long as it wasn’t made mandatory.

Mill seems in On Liberty to not only recognize the existence of higher truth, but calls it out as a kind a civilizing purpose:

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.

Christianity lost something of its power when it went from heresy to orthodoxy, no longer required to defend their creed, Mill claims: "From this time may usually be dated the decline in the living power of the doctrine."
Painting Martyr In The Circus Arena by Fyodor Bronnikov from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_ad_bestias

This leads into another core idea, that free thought and speech matter not only to the individual but to society, too. As Mill explains it, they help weed out bad ideas and promote positive ones, creating a natural give-and-take: “But on every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends on a balance to be struck between two sets of conflicting reasons.”

In the third chapter of the book, focused on society as relentless inhibitor of humanity, Mill’s waspish voice comes through most clearly. He sees in established social norms of democratic nations like his own an obvious tendency to what he describes as “mediocrity,” which connects to a downgrading of intellectual aspiration:

People think genius a fine thing if it enables a man to write an exciting poem or paint a picture. But in its true sense, that of originality in thought and action, though no one says that it is not a thing to be admired, nearly all, at heart, think that they can do very well without it.

You can’t help feel in passages like this that Mill was an open elitist, something that must have come naturally to him growing up a child prodigy. He often notes an inherent problem of democracy is a reduction in the mean of collective thought toward the unlettered masses.

Harriet Taylor Mill, who died November 3, 1858, shortly before On Liberty was published. "Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave..." he sighs in his opening Dedicatory. Some claim her as an equal partner in the book's creation.
Painting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Taylor_Mill

Mill dedicated On Liberty to his late wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, whom he credits in the dedication as the originator of every good idea in the book. The couple worked and reworked the text many times over before her sudden death just months before On Liberty’s publication.

Mill was noted in his own time as a feminist, something On Liberty only touches upon. Modern readers will possibly be taken aback by his references to collective “man” and “he,” but of course that was the convention of the time. On Liberty is written in a very conventional 19^th century style. What wasn’t conventional were the ideas expressed.

For most of the book, Mill dials into the concept of the rights of the individual being paramount, as long as that individual does no active harm to others. In the fourth chapter, he clarifies this when addressing self-harm, like indolence or alcoholic excess:

I fully admit that the mischief which a person does to himself may seriously affect, both through their sympathies and their interests, those nearly connected with him and, in a minor degree, society at large. When, by conduct of this sort, a person is led to violate a distinct and assignable obligation to any other person or persons, the case is taken out of the self-regarding class and becomes amenable to moral disappropriation in the proper sense of the term.

However indolent Mill found people, he was wary of overcorrection: "But the strongest of all the arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct is that, when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly and in the wrong place."
William Hogarth painting from https://www.countryandtownhouse.com/culture/review-hogarth-and-europe-tate-britain/

Mill accepts the principle of the time that individuals unable to provide for families shouldn’t be allowed to have children. How exactly he would restrict this is left unsaid. There are many concepts in On Liberty left vague like that; it is a treatise, not a formula.

In the fifth and final chapter, “Applications,” Mill is open about this open-endedness:

Fornication, for example must be tolerated, and so must gambling; but should a person be free to be a pimp, or to keep a gambling house? The case is one of those which lie on the exact boundary line between two principles, and it is not at once apparent to which of those two it properly belongs. There are arguments on both sides.

Though very much a liberal, indeed the founder of modern liberalism, Mill was also a laissez faire kind of guy. He was negative on the idea of public education, for example (“An education established and controlled by the state should only exist, if it exists at all, as one among many competing experiments…”) and preferred only moderate “sumptuary laws” for sharing wealth.

Colonialism, the pulsating lifeblood of England at the time, gets something of a pass here. While pushing for unrestricted freedom, Mill adds “we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage.”

A first edition of On Liberty. Initially conceived in 1854 as an essay, it gradually expanded into a book that, on publication, found immediate success with upper-class readers. Today it maintains a high position with liberal and libertarian thinkers alike.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty

Mill’s writing style can be rambling; in places he scores his points and then goes back to make them over again. In other places he jumps from idea to idea with little in the way of connective tissue.

He often writes run-on sentences, yet with a deep thoroughness that gives them gem-like appeal: 

[T]here is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it, no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse and the desire of the right owner to keep it.

Philosophy is not my favorite kind of reading material, and this sampling of Mill isn’t going to change that. His prose is too cold and stiff, his intended audience too exclusive and distant. He writes on happiness and beauty as if they were mathematical principles.

But his passion comes through on every page, and a quality of unblinking, withering intellect commands respect. It may be outdated in many ways, yet On Liberty still carries the shock of revolution.