On Liberty

"On Liberty is a very important document, and one which, because of the clarity with which one can read it and its brevity, is slightly passed over. First-year students are asked to read it, but then it’s thought not to have very great philosophical substance. And sometimes it’s criticised on the grounds that Mill commits himself to saying that reading Aeschylus is of much higher value than going to the pub for a pint of beer. Whereas going to the pub for a pint of beer is sometimes a very pleasant thing, and much more pleasant than reading Aeschylus. Indeed. So people miss a really significant point that he makes, that allowing people the opportunity and space to experiment in quest of the good – and to do so in a way that frees them from the worst kind of tyranny, which is the tyranny of public opinion and oppressive attitudes – is of the very essence in human progress, and that you only get human progress if you will allow a thousand flowers to bloom in that respect. So he’s asking for something very big, because it’s right across all sorts of boundaries. It’s not just a question of education, it’s also a question of sexual morality, and it’s a question of allowing people to arrange relationships with others. [Mill] would have found it, I think, very acceptable indeed that we in our own time have come to be accepting of people who are gay. He would have regarded that as paradigmatic of how we should be open to allowing different sorts of experiment in human relationships to flourish – and he would have spread that across the board. So I applaud that. I think that’s a very significant moment, and a very prescient and a brave one, given that it was a high Victorian period in which it was written. He says that we should be free under the government of the Harm Principle, which is that you shouldn’t do harm to others. That’s right. This again is the point about self-realisation, self-development, the fulfilling of the promise that you find in yourself. Self-knowledge is of course key to that. Indeed, the whole process is premised on having a good understanding of what your capacities are, and to some extent what your limitations are. And perhaps people should be encouraged not to take their limitations too seriously – they should push hard at themselves. This harks way back to the Delphic oracle: “Know thyself”. When you do have some sense of yourself, and some sense of the things that you might be good at and are interested in, then you should go for them. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I’m very fond of quoting what Solon said to King Croesus, about a human life being only a thousand months long. And 300 of those months you sleep, 300 you do banal things. So you have relatively short time to make those self-discoveries and take a grasp of the opportunities that they present to you to do this thing that all these people – Aristotle and Spinoza and Mill – in their different ways are saying makes for the good life, makes for the life that’s worth living."

"Mill’s famous essay is an illuminating reading experience, even if you read it in college. Its thesis is to define ‘the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual’. Its conclusion is that ‘the sole principle for which mankind are [sic] warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of any of their number is self-protection’. He goes on to say that the parental social order has no moral basis for coercing us to do anything against our will – even for our own good, let alone the good of others! He was a utilitarian rather than a libertarian proponent of natural rights, which disqualified him as a lover of liberty for Rand, but file that away and read on, unperturbed. Utilitarian political philosophy is based on the greatest good for the greatest number. Libertarian political philosophy is individual rights. This essay is about why society and the government will take over more and more of our lives and tell us what to do if we don’t resist. It’s the natural way of things. No, we can’t resist. The price of liberty is vigilance and we aren’t very vigilant people. Imagine how John Stuart Mill would feel if he were made to wear a seatbelt because the federal government tells him so. His idea is that there is no reason for society or the government to infringe on individual decision-making except for self-protection and the protection of others. We ought to defend our individual liberties. He even saw in Britain in his time a tendency for the government and society to accumulate power – what libertarians have been worrying about ever since. Some are but some, like Isaac Newton, prefer never to see another human being as long as he lived. He worked in solitude and yet produced some of the greatest benefits of mankind. So, no. Some are and some of us are not."

"I don’t know that it’s obvious, since it’s a classic text of liberalism, not conservatism. I think liberals, of both a libertarian, classical, liberal stripe and a more modern egalitarian stripe, see John Stuart Mill as a common ancestor, but he’s not really in the conservative pantheon. Indeed it was Mill who said, ‘While not all conservatives are stupid, all stupid people are generally conservative.’ So he was not only a liberal political theorist but a liberal Member of Parliament, and definitely not a Tory. He strays from the contemporary libertarian line in a number of respects. But the reason I selected him is that there is a brief passage in On Liberty (in the second chapter on defending liberty of thought and discussion) where he lays forth what I think is the best concise explanation for why there is a left and a right – and why there always will be. Why, even though he wasn’t a conservative and didn’t think much of conservatives, he thought conservatism was a necessary and wholesome part of political life. Let me quote a sentence or two: ‘In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life; until the one or the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away. Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.’ “It was Mill who said, ‘While not all conservatives are stupid, all stupid people are generally conservative.’” I think the typical view of politics from inside a partisan mindset is to see politics as a battle of the good guys versus the bad guys. Maybe the good guys are on the left, maybe the good guys are on the right, but it’s this Manichean struggle and the way to get progress is for the good side to win and impose their will. Mill sees through that and sees that, in fact, politics is a dialectical process. At any given time truth is partly on one side and partly on the other. It’s more a battle of half-truths and incomplete truths than of good versus bad. The excesses of each side ultimately create opportunities for the other to come in and correct those excesses. Liberalism, in Mill’s view and in mine, provides the basic motive force of political change and progress. It will go astray, it will have excesses, it will make terrible mistakes – and a conservatism that is focused on preserving good things that exist now will be a necessary counterweight to that liberalism. When I’m talking about liberalism versus conservatism, I’m also talking about modern egalitarian liberalism and not just libertarianism. You can approach it, as I did in my book The Age of Abundance , by looking at contemporary liberalism and its great triumphs in the 60s and 70s – pushing for civil rights and backing the feminist movement. Those triumphs also had excesses and mistakes mixed in with them. We had problems with growing welfare dependency and the crime explosion, problems with runaway divorce rates and family breakdown, all of which summoned up a conservative movement to respond to those wrong turns. So we see the conservative revival of the 70s and 80s basically making the world safe for the liberal social revolutions of the 60s and 70s. Putting aside where libertarianism fits in, you can see the interplay of left and right correcting each other, fixing each other’s excesses and deficiencies in a way that neither side ever intended but works out better than either side ever would have done for itself."

"I see John Stuart Mill as an intellectual ally of sorts. I think in general it’s not so difficult to make an argument for a culture of debate from within a Western liberal framework. You can always say a culture of debate promotes autonomy because it promotes critical self-reflection and if you live your life in a reflective way you’re more autonomous than if you live it in an unreflective way. You get a version of that in Mill. Mill is a utilitarian, of course, and he thinks that our individuality is a key to our wellbeing. By individuality he means the particular set of talents and strengths that we have, that varies from one person to another. Self-realisation is really the key idea that he promotes. The problem he sees is that society tries to suppress individualism. He thinks social institutions like education and religion and politics always push you towards conformism. They try to impose certain sanctioned lifestyles and values and so you have to counteract this informal power of what he calls the tyranny of the majority. You have to fight for your individuality against the tyranny of the majority that tries to push you into predetermined lifestyles. The way he thinks we can counteract this tyranny of the majority is through a vigorous culture of debate, where people are forced to think about their convictions and that will open up the space within which they can design a life plan that suits their talents and strengths. “I realized a lot of my interlocutors weren’t interested in autonomy and self-realization, but in God’s will.” What I realised over time is that I found this appealing because I grew up in a cultural context where individualism and self-realisation where very highly valued. Intuitively it makes sense to me. I then discovered, once I engaged in this project, and had discussions with people around the world, that a lot of my interlocutors were not so interested in autonomy and self-realisation. They were much more interested in living according to God’s will. I realised that I could not make a Millian case for a culture of debate if I wanted to get these people on board. For them, I would say Mill is not so useful. But you could also say this situation in itself is not a good one. Once we have a society that doesn’t marginalise and suppress minorities, then you can start having a debate that goes beyond these collective identities. But again, I think beyond this question of collective identity, there are a lot of people who just don’t place a lot of value on individuality. It’s something that is very deeply ingrained in our Western culture. We think we have to somehow find our own way and do our own thing and be different from others and find our distinctive place in the universe. But a lot of people don’t share that ambition and so in that sense I think the Millian project is also a provincial one. That seems to me to be something very natural. I think this is a fact about human psychology . We need some kind of experience of contestation in order to start calling into question the validity of our prejudices: in order to recognise our prejudices as prejudices and not mistake them for the truth. In theory, you could just sit in your armchair and start reflecting on your beliefs. But it seems to me that if we’re not challenged we don’t really make the effort of thinking about these things. I think that friction is a productive thing."

"This is a fantastically important book even today, written by one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers around. To me, it seems to enshrine the Enlightenment notion attributed to Voltaire that “I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. What is rich about this work is that it doesn’t just assert the importance of free speech for the speaker without going into why it is important. One thing that very strongly impressed me over the years is its argument that we can all improve. Our arguments can only be improved by airing them in the public sphere. Indeed. Also, we always have to be prepared that possibly we are wrong. It is only by having those debates that you can improve your own arguments, but also possibly reconsider your position. John Stuart Mill says, “Truth gains more even by errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.” I think it is better to have people try out ideas in the public sphere, even if they are wrong, than to simply parrot the right answer. That is what I think Mill is saying there. “I think it is better to have people try out ideas in the public sphere, even if they are wrong, than to simply parrot the right answer.” One of the important things about On Liberty is this idea that we shouldn’t just adopt certain positions or say certain things because it is fashionable to do so. Because he encapsulates why tolerance and freedom have to be actively fought for and actively asserted."

"Absolutely not. You can find notions of free speech not just in Ancient Greece—where a massive amount of what we think of as free speech and democracy comes from—but, interestingly, in ancient Chinese texts, in ancient Indian texts, in the edicts of the Emperor Ashoka. It’s really important to say that the idea has been around forever, and not just in western culture. But in the modern western world, you start in the 17th century with the English Revolution, with John Milton, then with the Enlightenment—English, French, Scottish, and American. Then you go, on the one hand, to the First Amendment in the U.S., which is obviously a classic statement of free speech, and in England, to John Stuart Mill. In my view, Mill is one of those mildly irritating authors like Tocqueville, who say so much so well that it’s difficult to say it better. Actually, when I say On Liberty , I mean above all chapter two of On Liberty , “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” which says so much, so brilliantly, so eloquently… We where? We in the West, we in Britain? Which country are we talking about? That’s a rather good question. The answer is interestingly complicated, because, of course, a question of free speech is also a question about power relations, who is in a position to speak freely? The ideal of free speech is an ideal of equality, where everyone is free to speak freely. Now of course, the world of Victorian Britain didn’t have that. Did the servants have freedom of speech? Did women have freedom of speech? Did colonised people in the British Empire have effective freedom of speech? Certainly not. So in that sense, we have more, because more people have more right to speak freely—and more ability, because so many of us have a smartphone or a computer. “The mark of a free society is that we restrain ourselves” On the other hand, I think Mill would be extremely worried by some of the taboos we see today, the sense that we have to tiptoe around all sorts of really difficult subjects. I don’t think he would have been keen at all on hate speech laws, because one of the key things he said—and where I am very much a Millian—is that the mark of a free society is that we restrain ourselves. The state is not the father telling you, like a child, what you can do and what you can’t do, and putting you in the corner. Mature, adult citizens make their own choices, and we choose what I call ‘robust civility.’ That’s exactly what he thinks, but he insists very strongly that it shouldn’t be imposed by law. Yes, and that the criteria should not be mere offence—he’s very good on that. But his central statement is about seeking the truth. What he says is very original, which is that many false statements may contain a grain of truth, and even an utterly false statement challenges us to restate our position. It’s therefore a way to keep the good sword of truth sharp, if you’re constantly confronting it with other arguments. He talks about the ‘deep slumber’ of a decided opinion, of received wisdom. That’s at the heart of what he’s trying to argue—the argument from seeking the truth. He also has this wonderful passage where he says that we’re so much shaped by the world we’re in that the same causes which make someone a churchman in London would have made him a Buddhist or Confucian in Peking. That’s so profoundly true. We’re so shaped by the environment, that you need that contrary, idiosyncratic opinion to shake it up. This is Mill’s ‘harm principle’—that I should be free to say or do anything, so long as it does not do harm to others. That’s core to modern liberalism, the basic framework. Then the argument becomes, ‘What harms other people?’ So take the torrent of horrible stuff—rubbish, abuse, hate speech—which is flowing through the internet. As I say in the book, the internet is the largest sewer in human history, and the sewerage is all waiting to spill out of your smart phone. The question is, what’s genuinely harmful in that? Now, that’s very difficult to work out because, as with so much else with free speech, context is all. If I started ranting to you about Tutsis in Rwanda here, sitting at a table in north Oxford, it would be stupid, but it wouldn’t have harmful effects. In the context of Rwanda in 1994, people got killed as a result. Nonetheless, it’s immensely clarifying to start with the question about harm, and it’s harm , not mere offence. One of the diseases of our time is that people are saying, ‘You shouldn’t say that!’—just because it’s merely offensive to somebody. It’s what I call the offensiveness veto. You almost get to the point where just one person has to stand up and say, ‘I’m offended’ for a speaker to be disinvited from a university. Yes. This is a simple distinction, but I think it’s a really, really important one to bring into the debate. At the moment, we have this cauldron we call ‘hate speech.’ Within that is really, really dangerous stuff, which ends up with people being killed or silenced, as well as just very offensive stuff, or rubbish, or stupidity. What you have to do is take apart the ingredients of this stew and say which parts we need the state to go after. The state should go after what I call ‘dangerous speech’—something that is intended and likely to lead to physical violence or serious psychological harm. Hate speech as such—hateful speech—I say we have to counter in civil society, by calling people out on it in everyday life. People say something stupid about Muslims, you call them out on it. People make a stupid racist joke, you call them out on it, either online or in real life. “What we’re all trying to do is to teach our children to navigate the high seas of the internet” But no. 1, in principle it shouldn’t be the state having to organise all that, because then we’re children back in nursery school. No. 2, because there is so much more speech as a result of the internet—just oceans of it—the state is totally incapable of policing all of that. So the state should focus on the really dangerous stuff. For dangerous speech, people endlessly quote Oliver Wendell Holmes: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” That’s a pretty silly thing to do, but Mill’s example is much better. He says that it was fine to criticise corn dealers—who were the, I don’t know, investment bankers of his day—but if someone is inciting an angry mob to violence outside the corn merchant’s house, that’s a different matter. It’s a very simple image, but it gets you started on what we mean by dangerous speech as opposed to hate speech. Absolutely. But, at the same time, that’s why you’ve got ten simple principles. The metaphor that runs through my book is a metaphor of navigation. Michel Foucault quotes an ancient Greek philosopher, saying that we should teach free speech like navigation. It’s a wonderful image. What we’re all trying to do is to teach our children to navigate the high seas of the internet. These are very high and often quite rough seas. You’ve got to start with a few basic principles of navigation—so you have your Pole star in the north—and then go into the detail. But that’s okay, because one of the things we all do is to ignore it. I think that part of the necessary resilience is just ignoring this stuff. The example I give in the book is YouTube, which has promoted a channel called ‘No Hate Speech’ and actually, the comments on this channel are an anthology of hate speech. It starts with, “Hitler had the right idea,” and goes on down. If you find the page, it’s absolutely wonderful stuff."

"On Liberty was published in 1859, the same year as the Origin of Species but wasn’t entirely eclipsed by it. It’s a slim book. There was actually a version of it published in Mill’s lifetime that could fit into a worker’s pocket. It’s a book written for a general audience, though today the language can seem convoluted because Mill wrote in very long sentences with quite complicated syntax at times. What this book does is hammer home one truth. Mill described it as a “philosophic textbook of a single truth”. According to him it was hugely influenced by his discussions with his wife, Harriet Taylor, though she didn’t physically write it, and it’s his name on the cover. As the title suggests, it’s focused on liberty, on freedom. It puts forward what’s come to be known as ‘the harm principle’ which is that the only justification for the state or other people interfering with the lives of adults is if they risk harming others with their actions. (Adults doesn’t include children or people who’ve got psychiatric problems, or peoples in their ‘nonage’, as he rather worryingly puts it in the book—that is a kind of imperialist denigration of some more ‘primitive’ people as opposed to the Western, ‘civilized’ human beings he’s writing for). Then the whole book is an of unfolding of that principle in different areas. “The people with whom you disagree do you a huge favor by making you clarify what you think” Put it another way, John Stuart Mill is very vigorously against paternalism (or maternalism), of acting as a parent would to a child, of protecting someone for their own sake—whether that’s by creating rules, or by what he called the ‘tyranny of the majority’, the great forces of social power that shape people’s lives through pressures to conform. He felt that individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves and make their own mistakes. You could argue with people, you could criticize them for what they’ve done, but you should never coerce people who are adults, because that invades their autonomy in significant ways, and will be bad for society in the long run. Mill was famous for his utilitarianism , the idea that you should aim to maximize happiness for the greatest number of people. His was a more sophisticated version of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism. Bentham, one of his mentors, cashed out everything in terms of pain and pleasure. For John Stuart Mill, in contrast, there were higher and lower pleasures, and these were not commensurable, there’s no common currency in which you could measure them both. He thought of human beings as progressive in the sense that we could become more fulfilled in all kinds of ways. And he wanted a society which gave us space to grow and to do that. He felt—and this is part of his empiricism and he’s very much in the empiricist tradition—that we learn by our mistakes. You cannot know, in advance, how things are going to turn out, you need to experiment. And we are all what he called ‘experiments of living.’ Now, each of us probably knows better than other people what will make us happy. But even if we get it wrong, it’s better that we’re allowed to make our own mistakes, and experiment for ourselves, than have somebody else’s view of what we should be forced upon us. He was actually an MP for a while at Westminster, a member of the Liberal Party. Libertarian philosophy can find a lot in John Stuart Mill. It’s written very much from an individualistic point of view, with the claim that by allowing individuals to flourish, we will produce a better society. So, for instance, one of his arguments is that what makes societies progress, often—and this is controversial—is geniuses. We need geniuses to push the boundaries, to make us think differently, to invent new things, to find radical new ways of doing things. According to Mill, just about every genius is perceived as weird and an outsider figure because they don’t conform with the expectations of other people. The conditions which allow geniuses to flourish is to give them space to do what they want to do, by not making them conform with other people, or coercing them to be like other people. So that if you want to have geniuses, you need to give such people personal space to do stuff that other people might disapprove of. As long as they don’t harm other people in the process, they should be free to do that, even if it offends other people that they’re doing and thinking these things. So that’s one way in which society is improved according to Mill. The other general way is that he believes individuals relish making their own mistakes. Choosing for themselves is almost an existential position. He also defends extensive freedom of speech. Chapter two of On Liberty is the most important defence of a liberal position on freedom of expression, where he argues that people should be free to express themselves up to the point where they incite violence. That point shouldn’t be measured by the words that they utter, but by the context in which they utter them, and the likelihood of its giving rise to violence. So, for instance, he says it’s fine to write ‘corn dealers are starvers of the poor’ in a newspaper editorial, but if you put that on a plaque and wave it in front of an angry mob outside a corn dealer’s house, that constitutes incitement to violence. And that is the point at which you can curb an individual’s freedom of expression. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So he makes a distinction—still very important, I feel—between offending people, which he thinks is an almost inevitable consequence of saying things in public, and actually harming people. This has been controversial too, of course. He didn’t have a rich concept of psychological violence, what could be done to someone with words alone through a certain kind of hate speech. That’s something which you might want to modify. But, generally, the idea that society benefits from a free market of ideas is one which a lot of people still respect and believe. He puts it in terms of the value of conversation, of public discussion of key ideas. The people with whom you disagree do you a huge favor by making you clarify what you think and encourage you to hold your beliefs in a non-dogmatic way. He’s very much into the idea that until you’ve had your ideas tested by somebody who believes they’re false, you just hold them as a mere dogmatic belief, not a living belief that has survived criticism. In a sense, that chapter is a summary of what many of us think is central to philosophy in general, the idea that you test ideas to destruction, and one of the best ways of doing that is by having conversations with people with whom you disagree. So in fact, the single voice that stands in opposition to the mob, as it were, is the one that he values most highly, because it’s the one that makes people think. It’s easy to conform and even if the person is wrong, there might be a little bit of truth in what they say that wouldn’t otherwise come out, so you don’t want to silence them in advance and stop them saying things. He’s much closer, I would say, to the way free expression is treated in American law than in British law, because we do have restrictions on the things that people can say in the UK. There are good arguments for having laws against anti-racist, anti-homophobic and anti-transphobic speech, perhaps, but he was much more laissez-faire in this respect than many European countries’ laws are. I think it highly unlikely that he would approve of censorship of Holocaust denial, for instance, even though he’d think it would be outrageous that people are denying its existence. The point is that when people do that, it’s an opportunity to refute them, and to show point by point where historically they’ve gone wrong. They shouldn’t be silenced in advance. It didn’t come out of the blue. There are lots of precedents in Milton, for instance. Many of his arguments were prefigured in a little book that Milton wrote called Areopagitica , which was a tract in reaction to pre-censorship of books, banning books before they’re published, killing books, as Milton put it. Mill came out of quite an anti-religious group of free thinkers. If you look at them, many of the arguments about freedom of expression are reactions to certain sorts of censorship and arguments to conform that came from religious sources. He’s part of a group of intellectuals who felt that freedom was incredibly important and was essential to what a human being is. Within the utilitarian tradition, there was a strong thread of allowing people to flourish in whatever way they wanted to when they weren’t harming other people, because that would add to the general happiness in the world. Interestingly, for instance, I mentioned his mentor, that eccentric figure, Jeremy Bentham. Although it wasn’t published in his lifetime in the 18th century, Bentham wrote about the irrationality of prosecuting practising homosexuals, because that would likely diminished the amount of pleasure in the world, and they weren’t harming other people by their consensual actions. That was very radical when homosexuals were still being hanged. He certainly would have been prosecuted if he’d published it in his lifetime. So Mill didn’t come out of nowhere. No one comes out of nowhere."

"They start from opposite ends of the spectrum. Hobbes regarded absolute government as necessary for human contentment, and thought it required no other justification. John Stuart Mill regarded human contentment as depending on an altogether wider range of factors than mere security. He starts from the proposition that every exercise of coercive power has got to be justified because all constraints of liberty inhibit the development of human talent. On Liberty is the classic statement of traditional liberal values about the limits of state coercion. It’s an eloquent argument for personal liberty on the grounds that it’s the condition in which human beings are most likely to flourish and be happy. “Tom Bingham’s book is a wise book . . . It is the fruit of a good deal of experience.” The question which he is trying to answer is, “what restrictions on personal liberty is it legitimate to impose by law?” He famously believed that people should only be prevented by law from doing things that harm others. So you should not prevent people from harming themselves and you should not prevent them from doing something simply because other people disagree or disapprove. The law exists to protect us from harm. It doesn’t exist to recruit us to moral conformity. Mill was very concerned about pressures to conformity, which he believed were an inherent problem in democracies, such as Victorian Britain was becoming when he wrote. Some of his concerns are extremely pertinent to today’s world. Well, he certainly objected to the idea that the law should save us from sin. Of course, in his day, the main pressures to enforce standards of behaviour, regardless of their impact on others, came from religious groups. But that is not always true, nor did Mill imagine that it would be. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The criteria which I sought to apply in choosing my five books is that each one has to be thought-provoking and it has to have high literary quality. And Mill does write beautifully. His style couldn’t be more different from that of Hobbes, but it’s elegant and it’s reasoned, like everything that Mill wrote. His autobiography is a masterpiece. We live in an age that expects conformity and believes that moral judgments should be made collectively and enforced on those who don’t agree. I think that Mill would have deplored the pressures created by social media to conform to particular ideas. He would have deplored all of the laws which require us to act in particular ways even though there is no harm to others, for example the rules about fur farming. Much modern law gives coercive effect to moral principles about which we don’t all agree and whose observance by an individual makes no difference to anyone else. It just gives true believers the satisfaction of knowing that they’ve imposed their values on someone else. This was the essence of what Mill objected to."

"Mill’s argument is very different in its setting from Locke’s. It’s about what happens when imperatives to religious conformity and uniformity of belief have dribbled away, when hanging and burning are off the agenda. Mill thinks that the space that was occupied by a more or less successfully imposed religious monoculture will be occupied now, if we’re not careful, by a tyranny of majority opinion. His worry is that the everyday prejudices and opinions of ordinary people would become a kind of monolithic structure which gradually pulls everyone into its ambit, such that everyone starts to act and believe and think in the same way. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That’s right up to a point. Mill doesn’t worry overmuch about the mob ruling through politics (most of the mob didn’t have the vote, after all). He takes for granted that the kind of institutional settlement that followed the English revolution of 1688, in which you’ve got the slow development of a constitutional monarchy, will stick – it’s OK, we don’t need to worry about absolute rulers imposing their will on the people, and we need not really fear ‘the people’ imposing their will on everyone else by seizing political power directly for itself, but we do have to worry very much about a mass of people imposing their will on everyone else through society. And it’s that really – the idea that you need to have the liberty of thought and discussion in order to improve society, and to save it from the stultifying effects of uneducated opinion. He thinks that individuality is a good thing in itself, in a romantic way, but also seems to think that by allowing the liberty of thought and discussion, including the liberty to make mistakes, that that has a positive effect overall."

"The tradition is that it is given to the president of the Liberal Democrats rather than the leader, which is a subtle but important distinction in Lib Dem land. But you’re quite right. The traditions of J. S. Mill are still handed down like some sort of totemic emblem of everything that we’re supposed to still believe in, even now. It’s extraordinary, given it was written in 1859. John Stuart Mill spawned the British liberal political tradition—not entirely singlehandedly but he was instrumental in it—that then came to shape and define so much of modern democracy all around the world. Of course, he was a man of his time and he had what we would now regard as outdated views on some subjects. But on other subjects—from workers’ councils to feminism—he was actually remarkably forward thinking and prescient, even by today’s standards. It begins with the individual, unlike any other political tradition that I’m aware of. Socialism is about the ability of collective action, and particularly the state, to act as a battering ram for progress. Conservatism, as the name implies, is about conserving—broadly speaking—the pecking order and the way that things are. I think what distinguishes liberalism, and why it’s very radical and is still radical, is that it believes that there is something beautiful and good and dynamic and positive about the freedom that individuals have to shape their own lives as much as possible—as long as it doesn’t intrude negatively on other people’s lives and other people’s freedoms. That sounds very trite now because for a long time, particularly in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the period when people like Francis Fukuyama were declaring the ‘end of history’, there was a complacency settled on liberals. There was a feeling that, ‘Well, we’ve won . The belief that privacy, the sanctity and the rights of the individual should be protected has won out against the collectivism of the 20th century.’ “John Stuart Mill spawned the British liberal political tradition…that then came to shape and define so much of modern democracy all around the world.” I should immediately draw a very sharp distinction between liberalism and libertarianism. It’s not a sort of dog-eat-dog capitalism. Liberalism accepts that there is a role for the state and collective action and that there are all sorts of things that you can’t do without being in concert with others. Its philosophical roots are about how arbitrary and random power—whether it’s in the hands of monarchs or governments or the nobility or religious leaders—should not trump (excuse the pun) and be given priority over the innate rights and freedoms of individuals. So we became complacent after the fall of the Berlin Wall because we felt that it was now a settled assumption that would no longer be questioned. And, of course, the extraordinary thing over recent years has been the eruption of angry populism and the politics of identity. There is this wall-building view of life in which populists harness the legitimate anger that many people have about the status quo and direct it, through the politics of blame, at a particular group—whether it’s Islam or the European Union or Mexicans. What we’re having to relearn now is the fire-in-the-belly liberalism that drove Mill to write On Liberty in the first place. Yes. If you look at the language now deployed by Paul Dacre—aka Darth Dacre—in the Daily Mail, which has these chilling echoes of the language of the 1930s, what is so striking is that he seeks to vilify and condemn everyone from Mark Carney to the judges to anyone who had the temerity to vote to remain in the European Union. He is seeking to delegitimize—not just discredit or disagree but actually delegitimize—the right of the losing side in a democracy to continue to hold the views that it does. That is an astonishing turn of events, because a liberal pluralist democracy relies on the idea that no one segment of the population ever has the right to emphatically and irreversibly bury the aspirations and the needs and the hopes of other parts of society. In other words, a liberal pluralist democracy is all about competing interests and viewpoints constantly jostling side-by-side. One moment, one side wins. The next moment, another side wins. It’s a constant ebb and flow. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But what we’re entering now, particularly through the prism of Brexit , is a wholly different political culture in which we basically are being told that those in British society—and particularly the youngsters—who clearly hold the view that we should be going in a different direction, are no longer entitled to hold those views. That is an extraordinarily dangerous turn of events. That’s one of the reasons why—bringing it bang up to date—I think there is a wider significance to the one-eyed, partial interpretation that this present Conservative administration has imposed upon the Brexit referendum. They have taken a mixed mandate—which actually revealed a rather deeply divided country with lots of diverse views—and homogenised it by claiming that it can only be applied in one very particular, narrow way. But in a complex, diverse, plural society, you can’t just brush the needs and aspirations of many, many of your fellow citizens under the carpet for very long without there being a reaction. I think that’s the thing that J. S. Mill and liberals down the ages have always understood. I feel part of the reason is that we have a slightly misleading and at times self-congratulatory image of ourselves as a nation of uniquely free people. We’re plucky islanders, and each and every one of us stands on our own feet. We’re not like Johnny Foreigner across the channel who relies on the heavy hand of the state and religion or the region or other collective forms of identity. We slightly flatter ourselves because, of course, what we have in British society—which many foreign ministers have always found quite difficult to grasp—is this astonishing grip of class identity. Class identity still, I think, smothers and distorts true liberal individualism as much today as it did in the more overtly class politics of the 1950s. “What we’re having to relearn now is the fire-in-the-belly liberalism that drove Mill to write On Liberty in the first place.” Of course, it’s becoming more complicated. One of the things that is complicating it is that place and location is now becoming a bigger determinant of social and political identity than it was in the past. You see that in Scotland, and you see that in Sheffield. Many good, decent, lovely people I’ve known for years in my constituency in south-west Sheffield, who voted to leave the European Union last year, would tell me that the reason they were doing it was because they wanted to poke London in the eye. They disliked being constantly told what to do by London. So, you have this extraordinary phenomenon of lots of people in the north of England voting against Brussels to make a point against London. Now that’s not new but it is accompanying the more traditional class-based forms of identity. But I think that every country, every community, every tribe needs a narrative—a story—which nations, communities, and tribes tell themselves about themselves. And, by definition, stories are part fact and part fiction. I think we have this long British tradition of liberal individualism but I think it has been papered over—and still is—by class-based politics. Of course. Emotion always trumps fact when it comes to determining people’s votes. The heart is a much stronger organ than the brain when it comes to the ballot box. I’m in a somewhat atypical position—with a Dutch mum and half Russian dad. One of the books that I’ve chosen— The Master and Margarita —I wouldn’t have read if my Russian grandmother had not recommended it to me. I wouldn’t have read Axel Munthe’s book, The Story of San Michele, unless my mum had said that she loved reading it. And, obviously, I’m married to Miriam with kids who are comfortable both in the UK and Spain. I’m not pretending that my experience is typical and I’m certainly not saying that my experience is any more valid than anyone else’s. The only thing I would say, however, is that whether you trace your ancestry to the Norman invasion, Celtic chieftains, or Cornish tin miners, we are and always have been geologically, tectonically, geographically and culturally a European nation. One of the things that the Darth Dacres of this world have done—and they’ve done it brilliantly, from their point of view—is that they have somehow encouraged the belief that we are nothing to do with the hemisphere that we inhabit. “The heart is a much stronger organ than the brain when it comes to the ballot box.” And I find that so curious because we have been bound up with Europe, and helped to shape Europe, and—at times—led Europe for millennia. It’s a source of great sadness to me that we don’t give ourselves, as Brits, more credit for what a wonderfully pioneering and leading European nation we have always been. And I don’t just mean that in referring to our role in World War II or the Industrial Revolution or the Enlightenment but also, more recently, within the European Union. Two of the three biggest innovations that have shaped it in recent decades—the enlargement of the European Union to Central and Eastern Europe, and the creation of this huge, borderless marketplace, the single market—were invented in London. I think one of the things that the vested interests—who have successfully won the argument to pull us out of the European Union—had to do was very unpatriotic. They had to constantly downplay how European we were, and how successful we were as a European country, because they had to portray the European Union as something alien that had been imposed upon us. That’s just not true—but they were successful in that. So, one of the things that I’d like to play a small role in is reminding people how intimately European we are. Axel Munthe, the author of ones of the books, for instance, was married to a Brit. Even though it’s about a Swedish doctor who has bought this chapel in Capri, he was heavily influenced by British thinking. I see my dad’s mother—my grandmother—who was part of that white Russian diaspora that left Russia, and whose family was expelled at the time of the Revolution. They settled in both Paris and London, but they all drank deeply from the well of British liberalism—a belief in fair play and internationalism. “Whether you trace your ancestry to the Norman invasion, Celtic chieftains, or Cornish tin miners, we are and always have been geologically, tectonically, geographically and culturally a European nation.” That’s why when you speak to people in the Netherlands and other European countries that feel associated with the United Kingdom they feel so sad. It’s because they feel that we’ve generally been—not always—this very large and benign influence. I don’t want to extrapolate too much from my own experience, because every family is different, but I just think what we have witnessed, in recent times, is a grotesque rewriting of our own very European history. There is something astonishing about our continent. It’s a quilt—a patchwork—of large and small nations with their own weird traditions and languages and histories. We’ve had a huge amount of conflict—we’ve had the two world wars in the last century, which disfigured not only our continent but the whole world. We have created some of the greatest art, some of the greatest inventions, some of the greatest figures in world history. And yes, sure, we’re now no longer a young, growing continent like parts of Asia or Latin America are. But it’s still an astonishing place. The amount of diversity in such a concentrated corner of the globe is, I think, without parallel anywhere in the world. And I just think we should rejoice in that rather than constantly denigrate it."

"Certainly. They were both written for popular audiences, but whereas Marx was explicitly writing as an advocate for the working class, or for intellectuals who would assist the working class, Mill was writing against conservatives who sought to prevent the expression of ideas they regarded as dangerous. He put forward what he explicitly says is an argument from utility, that is, he’s not arguing from the independent value of freedom for its own sake as a principle, but on the basis of the good consequences that freedom of ideas will have for society and the development of individuals as ‘progressive beings.’ Like Marx, Mill thinks we’re making progress, though I wouldn’t say he’s a determinist like Marx. I also wouldn’t say that he thinks we’re going to reach some kind of perfect state at the end. Marx’s vision of communism was that this would solve the riddle of history. I don’t think Mill had such an idea. But he did think that we make progress through rational inquiry, through free discussion, and through getting rid of dogmas which we believe without sufficient evidence. He puts up several arguments for freedom of expression, but perhaps the most important is that those who want to suppress ideas that they disagree with assume some kind of infallibility. They assume that they cannot be wrong in the things they believe in, and therefore, conversely, can be certain that the ideas they want to suppress are false. Mill points out that very often, throughout history, people have thought that they were certainly right, and then turned out to be quite wrong. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Mill also says that even if our beliefs are true, if we suppress opposition to them, our beliefs will become a kind of dead dogma. The way for something to be a living truth is for it to be open to challenge and to have to respond to those challenges. I chose this book particularly because we are having a lively discussion about freedom of expression today. Some of the challenges to freedom of expression today come from the left rather than from the right, although some of them still do come from the right. In this context, Mill’s arguments are still relevant and deserve to be more widely known and more widely thought about. If people do think about them, they’ll perhaps be more willing to support thinkers with whom they disagree, because they will understand that the value of allowing ideas to be expressed does not depend on whether the ideas are true. That’s right. Philosophy is exactly the kind of subject that thrives on criticism and discussion. As you say, I do think utilitarianism is the most defensible ethical view, but I don’t claim infallibility about that, and I’m always open for people to try to persuade me that I am wrong, and I have changed my mind on some aspects of utilitarianism. In a way, it’s particularly ironic when philosophers in the 21st century are not able to express themselves. Perhaps I’m particularly attracted to chapter two of On Liberty because I have myself had my freedom of expression challenged. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, in Germany, I was drowned out by protestors. I had invitations to speak that I had accepted cancelled. And even when I went to Princeton in 1999, there were protests against my appointment there. People said that somebody who held my views— these are my views about euthanasia—should not have a Chair at Princeton. Perhaps for that reason I feel this issue in a personal way, as well as thinking about it as a philosopher. Mill does make her immense contribution clear. We don’t know fully whether it really was co-authored, though it does look like the kind of collaboration that we would now think of as co-authorship. We should perhaps also mention that Mill wrote “The Subjection of Women,” which was an early work on behalf of equality for women. In that he refers to people who have a low opinion of the mental abilities of women, and says that men’s views about women may often depend on the woman with whom they’re in closest association, namely one’s wife in most cases. I’m sure that his appreciation of Harriet Taylor’s intellectual abilities was a major contributing factor to his confidence in being able to say that women should have the same rights as men, including the right to vote, which they didn’t have at that time. A married woman then didn’t even have the right to own property: when she married, all of her property became her husband’s property. Mill was briefly a Member of Parliament, and tried hard to change that legislation. It was changed shortly afterwards."