A utopian radical

Modern Age, Wntr-Spring, 2004 by Barry Alan Shain

John Stuart Mill On Liberty and Control, by Joseph Hamburger, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1999. xviii + 239 pp.

JOSEPH HAMBURGER, the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University at the time of his death in 1997, was one of America's most accomplished scholars of nineteenth-century British political thought. He had spent much of his long and productive scholarly life studying the intellectual world of James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and John Austin. (1) In his final book, John Stuart Mill On Liberty and Control, Hamburger has brought this lifetime of learning to an exploration of the sometimes opaque inner teachings of Mill's On Liberty. Situating Mill's argument in this seminal text among his other writings of the period, many published only after Mill's death, as well as in the context of a veritable treasure trove of letters (both to and from him, and among his intimate circle of friends), Hamburger makes sense of what at times seems to be contradictory impulses in On Liberty.

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Rather than ignoring, as almost all other scholars have done, (2) those elements of Mill's message that are troubling to contemporary sensibilities, Hamburger integrates the contrasting features of Mill's thought into a coherent whole. In so doing, what he discovers challenges Mill's status as an icon of contemporary liberalism. Indeed, for Hamburger, Mill's work is not only "far from being compatible with modern liberal thought," but rather "should be regarded as being implicitly critical of it." If Hamburger is right, much of contemporary Mill scholarship will have to be seriously reconsidered.

What is it that Hamburger believes he has uncovered in On Liberty that so many have missed or chosen to ignore? It is that Mill, in planning and writing this essay, wanted to "'point out what things society forbade that it ought not, and what things it left alone that it ought to control.'" As Mill indicates in this 1854 passage written to his friend George Grote, he hoped to make more distinct in On Liberty those areas of social life in which society could intervene, and what was appropriate when doing so.

All readers of On Liberty are familiar with Mill's powerful defense of an almost sacrosanct area of autonomy surrounding a mature individual into which society cannot legitimately enter. Almost equally well recognized is Mill's view that this protection against interference is limited by what might be called a "harm principle," such that when an individual's actions limit the freedom of another or, more particularly, harm others in some way, only at this point does one's freedom end. But far less well understood is that Mill also believed that society, or at least certain sectors of it, should exercise control over others concerning unacceptable, self-regarding behavior. It is this feature of Mill's thought, plainly visible in the beginning pages of Chapter Four and parts of Chapter Five of On Liberty, that most commentators ignore. Hamburger, however, emphasizes these pages. He spends most of this book making sense of them and explaining why they are critical to a correct understanding of Mill's political and social thought.

Mill's far-reaching social theories developed as a result of his reading of Continental thinkers, his relationship with Harriet Taylor, and his disappointment with the pace and effects of political changes in England. Mill concluded that what was needed was cultural rather than political change, and "the magnitude of change which Mill sought was such that it can be said without exaggeration that he wished to bring about a cultural revolution ... [largely] projected into the distant future." Mill came to believe that society was hopelessly corrupt and that what was demanded was a "'reconstruction of the human intellect ab imo.'" Indeed, with his wife Harriet, he had a vision of a future society "characterized by freedom, equality, and justice, in which selfishness would be abolished and altruism would prevail." Accordingly, Mill's political and cultural vision was strikingly ambitious but, in a manner not developed by Hamburger, very much of a piece with theories of other nineteenth-century radical thinkers--most particularly German ones, such as Marx, Strauss, Feuerbach, and Nietzsche. (3)

Like many of them, Mill envisioned a wholly new social structure coming into being in which there would be no alienation, that is, a society where the gulf between self-love and love of others, quite possibly the central tension in the history of Western political and religious thought, would be overcome. What made Mill stand out, however, was his proposed method for achieving his revolution--increased cultural, intellectual, and religious liberty. "By promoting free discussion and criticism of established ideas and customs in On Liberty," Mill set the stage for reconstruction and renovation of his world. As Hamburger demonstrates, Mill "hoped that in the future there would be a new generation of intellectual leaders that would be 'capable of taking up the thread of thought and continuing it.' This hope--or plan--allowed Mill to say, 'Books are a real magic, or rather necromancy--a person speaking from the dead, and speaking his most earnest feelings and gravest and most recondite thoughts.'" Most remarkably, Mill believed that by capturing the world of ideas, even long after his death and only among intellectual elites, he could effect a revolution in social and cultural relations of a dimension heretofore unknown. And it is the confusion of his method with his end that has both elevated Mill into the pantheon of liberal divinities and has freed him from the disapprobation attached by classical liberals to most radicals.

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A utopian radical

Modern Age, Wntr-Spring, 2004 by Barry Alan Shain

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