On Liberty and Liberalism

...In a final, brilliant chapter, "Some Paradoxes and Anomalies," Gertrude Himmelfarb shows us explicitly some of the consequences to contemporary culture of ever-widening use of, belief in, and quotation of (in major legal cases and governmental commission reports) Mill's "one very simple principle...

...That principle is, that .the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection...

...Others have dealt with the problem in one respect oranother, most commonly reaching the conclusion that no real disharmony between the two Mills exists, that the second is a logical development of the first...

...She recognizes the difficulty of ever being utterly sure in these matters, and one must respect the spirit of inquiry in which her hypothesis is reached...

...The scholarly heart of Professor Himmelfarb's book is its detailed, superbly marshalled investigation of how the second Mill, the Mill of On Liberty, with his unwonted, almost bizarre appeal to a "single," "sole," and "sovereign" principle to govern our approach to social policy had come to succeed the younger Mill, "the other Mill...

...Similarly, "the other Mill," emancipated from Benthamite dedication to the sovereign principle of happiness for the greatest number, could write that "men do not come into the world to fulfill one single end, and there is no single end which if fulfilled even in the most complete manner would make them happy...

...The signal merit of Gertrude Himmelfarb's study, from the scholarly point of view at least, is her complete destruction of this rendering of the matter...

...Far from there being "growth" or indeed any form of continuity, there is, as she emphasizes, complete contradiction between the two Mills and, crucial to the point, not development at all, but a kind of reversion involved: the reversion to both the method and manner of a philosophy that Mill had completely broken with...

...If such an authority was "one main need" of that day, think of the even greater intensity of the need in our own day...

...But the hypothesis itself is nonetheless forthright, and she has given it what seems to me incontrovertible foundation in Mill's and his wife's writings...

...The object of this essay," Mill wrote in On Liberty, "is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion...

...Distant as the prospect may be, it is in that direction that we must look for the formation of firmer and healthier intellectual and moral conditions...

...In a bold passage Professor Himmelfarb writes: "Liberals have learned, at fearful cost, the lesson that absolute power corrupts absolutely...

...Nor, as we see, is there ground for any supposition that Mill had simply forgotten the principles of politics and morality—so close in theme and atmosphere to those of Burke, Tocqueville, and others whom Mill had come to admire—which had actuated his work following his break with absolute utilitarianism...

...That alone is the ground on which any authority is justified in its limitation of an individual's thought or action...

...She is widely known and admired for her earlier books on Lord Acton, on Charles Darwin, and on a number of other eminent nineteenth century English minds...

...It is the distinctive contribution of On Liberty and Liberalism that in it we are confronted by the very origins, existential and historical, of that crisis...

...The book's importance cannot, therefore, be overstated...

...Few living intellectual historians come close to Gertrude Himmelfarb (who is Chairman of the Department of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York) in seizing upon a significant, recognized problem and giving it original and authoritative answer in first-rate prose...

...That essay had, as Mill himself declared in his Autobiography, the status of "philosophic textbook of a single truth...

...No one knew that lesson better than Burke in his celebrated observation that kings will become tyrants by policy when governing subjects who are rebellious by principle...

...Even apart from method or logic, there is, as Professor Himmelfarb shows us in rich detail, "the other Mill," the John Stuart Mill of an earlier period who, in no monist or absolutist fashion could tell us that "government exists for all purposes whatever that are for man's good: and the highest and the most important of these purposes is the improvement of man himself as a moral and intelligent being...

...Onesingle principle, as Mill himself acknowledged, nay trumpeted, operates in respect of liberty: self-protection, coupled, of course, with prevention of harm to others, the referent of each purely physical...

...Why, she asks, did Mill, following the long period of liberation, so to speak, return to a logic he had for so long found repugnant, the logic of the absolute and the one, the kind of logic Jeremy Bentham had carried to a grotesque, if brilliant, extreme...

...This brings us to the heart of Profesor Himmelfarb's bold, original, and immensely interesting hypothesis to account for the rise of the second Mill, the absolutist of On Liberty...

...The present book belongs among the very best of Professor Himmelfarb's scholarly studies...

...This is, as Professor Himmelfarb shows us, the supremo paradox of our age: All that has been given to state and individual alike in the way of autonomy of action has been taken from the intermediate, moral sphere that is the sole possible base of genuine political authority and of genuine individual liberty...

...In the nineteenth century such minds as Tocqueville, Burckhardt, James Fitzjames Stephen, and Emile Durkheim would echo that observation...

...And the passage concludes with the ringing statement: "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.- There is no reference, no implication, no hint, it will be seen instantly, of possible moral limits upon the freedom one may rightfully exercise in the community...

...To those who may balk at this explanation, it is enough here to say that Professor Himmelfarb herself is only too aware of and sensitive to the implication...

...Among them was the learned and thoughtful Leslie Stephen who, in an article beguilingly titled "Social Macadamisation," wrote: "The argument, in short, that all moral pressure ought to be destroyed because it may be misapplied implies the assumption that no spiritual authority can ever be set up because the old one turned out to rest on a rotten basis...

...Fundamentally, the hypothesis is that Mill's profound devotion to his wife and her interests coupled with his gathering fascination with the whole women's rights movement, with feminism, acquired within a very few years such momentum, such a central place in his mind that the spirit of On Liberty was the outgrowth and the book itself the fruit...

...Professor Himmelfarb rightly draws our attention to the monistic quality of Mill's definition of liberty and also to the anomaly of this degree of monism, absolutism indeed, in a mind that had, long before On Liberty was written, broken specifically with Benthamite utilitarian absolutism and, more generally, with all forms of monism in morals and politics...

...Her treatment of the Woljenden Report is exemplary in this respect...

...And so was his wife aware of them...

...The theme of the chapter, as nearly as I can state it succinctly, is that the same liberalism which has so largely magnified the power of the political state in social, economic, and moral affairs has, in its Janus-like magnification also of absolute individual liberties, gone a long way toward the destruction of the means whereby political authority in any realm can be given legitimacy and thereby effect...

...For we are given abundant evidence by the author that Mill, even while he was writing On Liberty, was only too aware of those principles...

...We all know Mill as the author of On Liberty, one of the most powerful and persuasive works to come out of the nineteenth century...

...There were, as we learn from Professor Himmelfarb, those in Mill's day who were troubled by the absolutist conception of freedom Mill declaimed in that book...

...It is an open spirit...

...It cannot fail to interest and to challenge those interested primarily in Mill himself—a truly fascinating and seminal mind, as one realizes all over from reading this book—but it will be of no less interest to the many more who are concerned with the present crisis of the liberal mind in Western society...

...The passage just quoted is followed immediately by the statement that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others...

...They have yet to learn that absolute liberty may also corrupt absolutely.'' The affinity between the two kinds of absolutism is very close in history...

...but, as she adds, it is hard to reach any other conclusion, given the mass of direct evidence in its support and given too the amply recorded fact that both Mill and his wife believed, and set forth their belief, that it was, above anything else, Mill's growing preoccupation with the freedom and equality of women that accounted for his singular reversal of attitude toward the larger problem of freedom in society, a reversal that On Liberty in effect consecrates...

...What a cost we pay for our contemporary belief—on a scale so much wider than anything that the Victorian age knew—that liberty and authority are antithetical...

...The "adversary culture" which Lionel Trilling has for so long and so profoundly identified for us, which is based, as Trilling stresses, on the belief that "a primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny ofhis culture...and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment," rests in very large measure upon the conception of liberty that Mill chose to give to the world in his On Liberty...

...It was Durkheim, sociologist and Dreyfusard, who could write: "In sum, the theories which celebrate the beneficence of unrestricted liberties are apologies for a diseased state....Through the practice of moral rules we develop the capacity to govern and regulate ourselves, which is the whole reality of liberty...

...As against this, we should hold that one main need of the day is to erect such an authority upon reason instead of upon arbitrary tradition...

...Self-protection...

...There is no suggestion of the profound qualification Burke had laid down in his famous words that "men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites...

...And this same earlier John Stuart Mill could warn that while it is salutary to encourage everyone to use his own judgment, to go beyond this and encourage the individual to "trust solely his own judgment, and receive or reject opinions according to his own views of the evidence- will necessarily result in such an individual's becoming "a mere slave to the authority of the person next to him...