These apparent contradictions in Mill's thinking also reflect the fact that he was often operating on two different timescales. On the one hand, he was concerned to bring about certain changes in the short term—wider suffrage, greater freedom of speech, the rationalisation of welfare and government, freer trade—and on the other was concerned about the longer-term consequences of the measures he was advocating: collective mediocrity, a tyranny of public opinion, an overweaning state and wasteful competitiveness. He supported the centralising poor law amendments, while writing about the dangers of state centralisation. He supported a wider electorate (not quite universal—he wanted a basic educational qualification), but worried that mass democracy might drive down standards in public life. He wanted the widest possible dissemination of ideas, but was concerned about how public opinion might hamper freedom just as effectively as despotic governments.

Mill's concern with the way today's solutions could be creating tomorrow's problems finds its fullest expression in his most famous and enduring work, On Liberty. Plenty of ground is covered, including a rich argument for freedom of speech and a meditation on the role of government. It is most famous, however, for the "simple" harm principle cited earlier, which guides the limits of interference in a person's actions. But the harm principle is a poor summary of the essay taken as a whole, and a small ingredient in Mill's liberalism. The principle is, to this day, a powerful counterpoint to paternalism. But for Mill, liberty consists of much more than being left alone. It requires choice-making by the individual. "He who lets the world… choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation," he writes. "He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties." For Mill, a good life must be a chosen life.

Mill's principal target was not state coercion. A potentially bigger threat to individual freedom was the constricting effects of public opinion, or what he variously called "the despotism of custom" and the "tyranny of public opinion." Mill had been greatly influenced by Tocqueville's assessment that American democracy and freedom were homogenising, rather than diversifying, opinions and lifestyles.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:29 AM  |