Shelf Life: The Old Mill Stream

National Review, March 24, 2003 by Michael Potemra

John Stuart Mill is part of the air we breathe. Millions who have never heard his name quote him unawares, and give thanks that they live in a society that reflects, in significant measure, his classical-liberal principles. His treatise On Liberty has just been reissued (Yale, 249 pp., $10.95) in a new edition by David Bromwich and George Kateb, and deserves attention. Some intellectuals bemoan the influence of Mill's ideas -- but they are not rushing conspicuously to live in societies (Iran, say, or Communist China) where those ideas have failed to take hold. To succeed in the West, a political philosophy must come to terms with the ideas, and the effect, of Mill's 1859 classic. Besides the text, this edition includes thoughtful essays by a distinguished array of commentators. In one of these, Judge Richard Posner calls On Liberty "the most powerful, eloquent, and imaginative defense known to me of the libertarian principle" -- high praise indeed, from such a discerning source. But in another passage, Posner outlines a rather puzzling taxonomy of today's political thought on the right:

One version of modern conservatism is social conservatism, a term that includes both the religious conservatism of a William Buckley and the neoconservatism of an Irving Kristol or a Norman Podhoretz. The other version is libertarianism -- and On Liberty remains its bible.

To see what's amiss in this characterization, one need go no further than the subtitle of Buckley's 1993 book, Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist. WFB is, to be sure, a religious believer and an advocate of morality -- but this does not prevent him from advocating such libertarian agenda items as free-market economics, and even the legalization of drugs. Nor is he alone in combining a metaphysical faith in transcendent truths with a support for individual freedoms; ever since the "fusionism" of Frank Meyer in the 1950s and early 1960s, American conservatism generally -- even of the social kind -- has had a strong libertarian component.

Posner goes on to say that "the undogmatic libertarianism of On Liberty may help close the gap between libertarianism and welfare liberalism by helping us to see the gap as the result of a disagreement not over principle but over the best policies for realizing the principle." But this possibility of a unification of libertarianism with the Left will need to compete with another possibility that, thanks in large measure to the efforts of Meyer (particularly in his exchanges with L. Brent Bozell), has already come closer to realization, and may offer a more realizable hope for the future: the incorporation of libertarians within the Right. Ideally, of course, the libertarians would exercise a positive influence on both broad strands of political thought: pulling the Left toward a less coercive economics, and pulling the Right toward a more persuasive approach on ethical matters.

Another highlight of the book is co-editor George Kateb's long introductory essay, in which he defends Mill's libertarianism as based not primarily on utilitarian grounds, but on a fundamental concern for human dignity: "Mill's book is a plea to the world: let there be individuals. There are not enough of them. They are needed. But needed or not, they are in themselves society's highest reason for being. Society exists for them, not the other way around." This is the fundamental insight of Western thought; modern libertarian conservatism stands for the proposition that this vision can be approximated in a really existing just society, and need not degenerate into a Hobbesian/Randian war of all against all. To anyone who would dismiss such a view as utopian, I offer the United States as an impressive example.

-- Jude P. Dougherty is one of America's most valuable Thomist philosophers. He was, for many years, dean of the school of philosophy at the Catholic University of America, and the CUA Press is now publishing, almost simultaneously, two of his engaging works. In The Logic of Religion (178 pp., $24.95), Dougherty examines the phenomenon of religion as it has been understood by Western philosophers from Plato to John Courtney Murray. The book offers, in remarkably brief compass, an excellent introduction to this subject.

One of the more interesting recent figures Dougherty treats is Jacques Maritain, who addressed, from a Catholic perspective, the controversy between church and state:

Maritain recognizes that if religious institutions are to possess any authority, it will be the result of moral influence, the result of their being able through their teachings to reach the human conscience. Of course, this way of carrying spiritual primacy can be checked by an opposite course of action, chosen by other citizens. But Maritain believes that a free exchange of ideas, despite possible setbacks, is a surer way of attaining influence in the long run. The church is less likely to lose her independence, for if the state is enlisted to implement ecclesiastical goals, the state is likely to serve its own purposes first. History has taught us that the secular arm is always eager to exercise control.