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open to doubt.
Current status
As already suggested, the early hostility surrounding the Liberty hardened over
time, leaving us today with an essay whose rhetoric is apparently much admired,
at least by liberals, even while its form of reasoning is not taken seriously.
Those few who might be considered disciples of Mill s utilitarian liberalism,
including Morley, Helen Taylor, perhaps Bain, Cairnes and Fawcett, and, through
32
MI LL AND THE LI BERTY
Morley, perhaps even Pater, were quickly swamped by a rejuvenated
panChristian idealism among academics, which, though it was arguably more
egalitarian and democratic than its ancestors, largely reflected the evolution of
majoritarian customs and practices.17 The majority s understanding of traditional
religious and moral values continued and continues yet to be revised as a
result of sustained economic growth and the extension of democratic institutions.
But the one very simple principle of liberty has never gained acceptance.
Indeed, if, as seems doubtful, a new organic period has ever arrived in Western
societies to supplant the critical period in which Mill lived, its creed has not
been his liberal utilitarianism. At best, we now have some pallid imitation, a
somewhat more liberal democratic version of Judeo-Christian ethics or American
constitutionalism, which most accept more or less intuitively as providing
justification for the general shape of social institutions as they have evolved.
And yet, the eloquence of the text-book still inspires those who
recognize the immense value of individual liberty. In our times, such influential
scholars as Berlin (1969), Rawls (1971, 1993), Ten (1980, 1995), Hart (1982),
Gray (1983, 1989), Berger (1984), Feinberg (1984 8) and Skorupski (1989),
for example, have been inspired to propose alternative doctrines that attempt
to preserve Mill s liberal spirit, while abandoning his form of reasoning as
defective. Even these friendly critics charge him with incoherence, however, or
revise the plain meaning of his text, in the course of elaborating whatever form
of liberalism strikes them as an adequate substitute for his allegedly flawed
utilitarian form.
But any hostility toward a Millian creed implicit in those revisionist
accounts pales in comparison to the outright condemnation and disgust expressed
by his unfriendly critics, of whom there continue to be many in the recent
literature. Thus, Himmelfarb (1974, 1994) derides him as a weak and incoherent
figure, pushed and pulled in contradictory directions by others. She seems to
think that he was manipulated by Harriet into a deviant brand of radical liberalism,
sharply at odds with the classical liberalism to which he otherwise seemed
attracted. The radical Mill, spouting nonsense about individual licence, abrasive
feminism and socialism, is seen mainly in On Liberty and perhaps The Subjection
of Women. The classical Mill, voicing more or less reasonable support for
33
GENERAL I NTRODUCTI ON
conventional pieties, family values, private property and free markets,
predominates in his other writings. But it is the radical Mill, let loose upon the
world by the evil Harriet, who now sets the terms of debate in advanced
liberal cultures, with his perverse model of individual licence in matters that are
properly of moral concern, and government interference in markets and family
activities that are properly left alone by classical liberals.
Hamburger (1991a, 1991b, 1995) accuses him of deliberately
misrepresenting his true convictions in the Liberty, apparently out of wild
political ambition. To preserve the Radicals electoral appeal during the 1830s,
and, when that failed, to foster acceptance of a new utilitarian religion that,
despite what he said, really involved subtle forms of coercion against the lower
and middle classes, he was prepared to disguise his truly illiberal belief that
some utilitarian vanguard of journalists, professors and public intellectuals
ought to impose its notion of a morally superior type of character on the
ignorant and passive majority. The majority, he supposedly thought, displayed
a miserable individuality that included, inter alia, a commitment to Christianity.
But these miserable creatures could be fooled into accepting new forms of
coercion, foisted upon them by their betters in the name of liberty. Once the
new religion was accepted and utilitarian radicals like himself could gain electoral [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
