In an interview on Toleration

Let’s talk about Mill and On Liberty.

Mill’s argument is very different in its setting from Locke’s. It’s about what happens when imperatives to religious conformity and uniformity of belief have dribbled away, when hanging and burning are off the agenda. Mill thinks that the space that was occupied by a more or less successfully imposed religious monoculture will be occupied now, if we’re not careful, by a tyranny of majority opinion. His worry is that the everyday prejudices and opinions of ordinary people would become a kind of monolithic structure which gradually pulls everyone into its ambit, such that everyone starts to act and believe and think in the same way.

So is Mill’s idea to guard against some kind of mob rule? Perhaps the kind of outpouring of public opinion that you get when there’s something slightly distasteful?

That’s right up to a point. Mill doesn’t worry overmuch about the mob ruling through politics (most of the mob didn’t have the vote, after all). He takes for granted that the kind of institutional settlement that followed the English revolution of 1688, in which you’ve got the slow development of a constitutional monarchy, will stick – it’s OK, we don’t need to worry about absolute rulers imposing their will on the people, and we need not really fear ‘the people’ imposing their will on everyone else by seizing political power directly for itself, but we do have to worry very much about a mass of people imposing their will on everyone else through society. And it’s that really – the idea that you need to have the liberty of thought and discussion in order to improve society, and to save it from the stultifying effects of uneducated opinion. He thinks that individuality is a good thing in itself, in a romantic way, but also seems to think that by allowing the liberty of thought and discussion, including the liberty to make mistakes, that that has a positive effect overall.

In an interview on Traditional and Liberal Conservatism

Let’s start with John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. You’d think it’s obvious but no one else has suggested it. Why On Liberty? 

I don’t know that it’s obvious since it’s a classic text of liberalism, not conservatism.

Explain that to me.

I think liberals, of both a libertarian, classical, liberal stripe and a more modern egalitarian stripe, see John Stuart Mill as a common ancestor, but he’s not really in the conservative pantheon. Indeed it was Mill who said, ‘While not all conservatives are stupid, all stupid people are generally conservative.’ So he was not only a liberal political theorist but a liberal Member of Parliament, and definitely not a Tory.

Liberal in the European sense, ie libertarian?

He strays from the contemporary libertarian line in a number of respects. But the reason I selected him is that there is a brief passage in On Liberty (in the second chapter on defending liberty of thought and discussion) where he lays forth what I think is the best concise explanation for why there is a left and a right – and why there always will be. Why, even though he wasn’t a conservative and didn’t think much of conservatives, he thought conservatism was a necessary and wholesome part of political life. Let me quote a sentence or two: ‘In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life; until the one or the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away. Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.’

I think the typical view of politics from inside a partisan mindset is to see politics as a battle of the good guys versus the bad guys. Maybe the good guys are on the left, maybe the good guys are on the right, but it’s this Manichean struggle and the way to get progress is for the good side to win and impose their will. Mill sees through that and sees that, in fact, politics is a dialectical process. At any given time truth is partly on one side and partly on the other. It’s more a battle of half-truths and incomplete truths than of good versus bad. The excesses of each side ultimately create opportunities for the other to come in and correct those excesses. Liberalism, in Mill’s view and in mine, provides the basic motive force of political change and progress. It will go astray, it will have excesses, it will make terrible mistakes – and a conservatism that is focused on preserving good things that exist now will be a necessary counterweight to that liberalism.

Most Americans today think of liberalism in the European sense or libertarianism, as we call it, as part of the conservative movement. Most Tea Party-ers, for instance, would certainly agree with that. Do you see it as sharply distinct from the conservative movement? Are they, in fact, on opposite sides of Mill’s dichotomy?

When I’m talking about liberalism versus conservatism, I’m also talking about modern egalitarian liberalism and not just libertarianism. You can approach it, as I did in my book The Age of Abundance, by looking at contemporary liberalism and its great triumphs in the 60s and 70s – pushing for civil rights and backing the feminist movement. Those triumphs also had excesses and mistakes mixed in with them. We had problems with growing welfare dependency and the crime explosion, problems with runaway divorce rates and family breakdown, all of which summoned up a conservative movement to respond to those wrong turns. So we see the conservative revival of the 70s and 80s basically making the world safe for the liberal social revolutions of the 60s and 70s. Putting aside where libertarianism fits in, you can see the interplay of left and right correcting each other, fixing each other’s excesses and deficiencies in a way that neither side ever intended but works out better than either side ever would have done for itself.

In an interview on Freedom of Speech

Your first choice, On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, is very much the bedrock of some of these ideas.

This is a fantastically important book even today, written by one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers around. To me, it seems to enshrine the Enlightenment notion attributed to Voltaire that “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. What is rich about this work is that it doesn’t just assert the importance of free speech for the speaker without going into why it is important. One thing that very strongly impressed me over the years is its argument that we can all improve. Our arguments can only be improved by airing them in the public sphere.

We have to hone them, and people have to listen to and dissect them.

Indeed. Also, we always have to be prepared that possibly we are wrong. It is only by having those debates that you can improve your own arguments, but also possibly reconsider your position. John Stuart Mill says, “Truth gains more even by 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.” I think it is better to have people try out ideas in the public sphere, even if they are wrong, than to simply parrot the right answer. That is what I think Mill is saying there. One of the important things about On Liberty is this idea that we shouldn’t just adopt certain positions or say certain things because it is fashionable to do so.

Why do you think that John Stuart Mill is still relevant today?

Because he encapsulates why tolerance and freedom have to be actively fought for and actively asserted.

In an interview on Being Good

That’s a good segue to John Stuart Mill’s famous work On Liberty, in which he discusses precisely these issues of the individual’s moral freedom from constraint.

On Liberty is a very important document, and one which, because of the clarity with which one can read it and its brevity, is slightly passed over. First-year students are asked to read it, but then it’s thought not to have very great philosophical substance. And sometimes it’s criticised on the grounds that Mill commits himself to saying that reading Aeschylus is of much higher value than going to the pub for a pint of beer. Whereas going to the pub for a pint of beer is sometimes a very pleasant thing, and much more pleasant than reading Aeschylus.

Especially for a first-year student.

Indeed. So people miss a really significant point that he makes, that allowing people the opportunity and space to experiment in quest of the good – and to do so in a way that frees them from the worst kind of tyranny, which is the tyranny of public opinion and oppressive attitudes – is of the very essence in human progress, and that you only get human progress if you will allow a thousand flowers to bloom in that respect. So he’s asking for something very big, because it’s right across all sorts of boundaries. It’s not just a question of education, it’s also a question of sexual morality, and it’s a question of allowing people to arrange relationships with others.

[Mill] would have found it, I think, very acceptable indeed that we in our own time have come to be accepting of people who are gay. He would have regarded that as paradigmatic of how we should be open to allowing different sorts of experiment in human relationships to flourish – and he would have spread that across the board. So I applaud that. I think that’s a very significant moment, and a very prescient and a brave one, given that it was a high Victorian period in which it was written.

No constraints on liberty… unless they cause harm to other people.

He says that we should be free under the government of the Harm Principle, which is that you shouldn’t do harm to others.

Central to Mill is also the idea of achieving well-being through individuality, through self-realisation and self-knowledge. He writes, “The free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being.”

That’s right. This again is the point about self-realisation, self-development, the fulfilling of the promise that you find in yourself. Self-knowledge is of course key to that. Indeed, the whole process is premised on having a good understanding of what your capacities are, and to some extent what your limitations are. And perhaps people should be encouraged not to take their limitations too seriously – they should push hard at themselves. This harks way back to the Delphic oracle: “Know thyself”. When you do have some sense of yourself, and some sense of the things that you might be good at and are interested in, then you should go for them.

I’m very fond of quoting what Solon said to King Croesus, about a human life being only a thousand months long. And 300 of those months you sleep, 300 you do banal things. So you have relatively short time to make those self-discoveries and take a grasp of the opportunities that they present to you to do this thing that all these people – Aristotle and Spinoza and Mill – in their different ways are saying makes for the good life, makes for the life that’s worth living.