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Liberalism and the Legacy of Mill

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Stefan Collini
Stefan Collini
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Type
Review Articles
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The Historical Journal , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 1977 , pp. 237 - 254
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

1 Stephen, James Fitzjames, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, edited by White, R. J. (Cambridge, 1967 [1st edn 1873])Google Scholar; for earlier attacks see Rees, J. C., Mill and his Early Critics (Leicester, 1956)Google Scholar.

2 Among the best examples of this trend are Burns, J. H., ‘J. S. Mill and Democracy, 1829–61’, Political Studies, V (1957) (repr. in Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed.Schneewind, J. B. [London, 1969])Google Scholar; Himmelfarb, Gertrude (ed.), Mill's Essays on Politics and Culture (New York, 1962) (repr. in her Victorian Minds [London, 1968])Google Scholar; Pappé, H. O., ‘Mill and Tocqueville’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xxv (1964)Google Scholar; Robson, J. M., The Improvement of Mankind: the Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill (London, 1968)Google Scholar.

3 The house organ of the industry is The Mill Newsletter, published by the Toronto University Press; it contains comprehensive bibliographies of work published on Mill.

4 A balanced survey of the debate over laissez-faire, which cautiously modifies this view of Mill's role, is Taylor, A. J., Laissez-faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a brilliant, impressionistic, sketch of Mill's relationship to the liberal party, see Vincent, John, The Formation of the British Liberal Party 1857–1868 (London, 1966)Google Scholar, ch. 3. There is an interesting discussion of Mill's views on ‘government growth’ in Ryan, Alan, ‘Utilitarianism and Bureaucracy’ in Sutherland, Gillian(ed.), Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth Century Government (London, 1972)Google Scholar.

5 London, 1970. The book was published in the United States as John Stuart Mill, which presumably rendered that more usual tide unavailable for the present volume.

6 Schwartz, Pedro, The New Political Economy of J. S. Mill (London, 1972)Google Scholar.

7 Stillinger, J., The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill's ‘Autobiography’ (Urbana, 1961)Google Scholar; Cumming, R. D., ‘Mill's History of his Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xxv (1964)Google Scholar; Thomas, W., ‘J. S. Mill and die Uses of Autobiography’, History, LVI (1971)Google Scholar.

8 Mill, John Stuart, Principles of Political Economy, Collected Works III (Toronto, 1965), p. 799Google Scholar.

9 Ibid. p. 800. As Dr Wolfe notes, citing the Autobiography, Mill ‘on more than one occasion…berated the widespread jealousy of government interference which had become“a blind feeling preventing or resisting even the most beneficial exertion of legislative authority” in England’ (p. 28).

10 Ibid. p. 800.

11 Ibid. p. 937.

12 ‘Every question which can possibly arise as to the policy of contracts, and of the relations which they establish among human beings, is a question for the legislator; and one which he cannot escape from considering, and in some way or other deciding.’ Ibid. p. 802.

13 Ibid. p. 803.

14 Ibid. p. 937.

15 Ibid. p. 936 (My emphasis).

16 Ibid. pp. 937–8.

17 Ibid. p. 946.

18 See fn. 2 above.

19 The essays on women ‘are the only writings by Mill which do have a real affinity with On Liberty, indeed, which do not actually conflict with it’ (p. xx).

20 Among the best known discussions are: Rees, J. C., ‘A Re-reading of Mill on liberty’, Political Studies, VIII (1960)Google Scholar; Rees, J. C., ‘Was Mill for Liberty?’, Political Studies, xiv (1966)Google Scholar; Friedman, R. B., ‘A New Explanation of Mill's Essay On Liberty’, Political Studies, XIV (1966)Google Scholar. There is a careful philosophical analysis of Mill's essay in Brown, D. G., ‘Mill on Liberty and Morality’, Philosophical Review, LXXXI (1972)Google Scholar. Most relevant of all is Ten, C. L., ‘Mill and Liberty’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xxx (1969)Google Scholar which is in part an explicit criticism of Professor Himmelfarb's earlier statement of her case. Professor Himmelfarb makes no mention of these studies nor do they appear in her bibliography: her stated policy of letting Mill ‘speak for himself’ means in practice that we are given only her own interpretation, unconnected by the work of other scholars.

21 This point has already been well made by Ten in the article cited in fn. 20.

22 Principles of Political Economy, pp. 207–8Google Scholar. The best discussion of Mill's socialism is in Robson, op. cit. pp. 245–71. (It is ironic, in view of her account of Harriet's part in leading Mill into the excesses of On Liberty, that she suggests that ‘one might discount it [the chapter on socialism in the Political Economy] as the contribution more of Harriet Taylor than of Mill’ [130–1].)

23 Ibid. pp. 940–1.

24 Ibid. p. 142.

25 Brown (art. cit. pp. 145–6) objects that these general obligations do not come under Mill's formula of preventing harm to the interests of others, but I can see no reason why they shouldn't. It seems perfectly intelligible to speak of, say, tax-evasion as harming the interests of others. It is, of course, hard in such cases to specify which individuals are being harmed, but Mill's principle does not require this - he recognizes ‘damage to the individual or to the public’.

26 The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill 1840–1873, edited by Mineka, Francis E. and Lindley, Dwight N. (vols. XIV–XVII of the Collected Works) (Toronto, 1972), p. xxxGoogle Scholar.

27 Pappé, H. O., John Stuart Mill and the Harriet Taylor Myth (Melbourne, 1960)Google Scholar. Pappé was criticizing the earlier works of Hayek and Packe, but it would seem, in the light of more extensive evidence now available, that he exaggerated somewhat in the opposite direction. The most recent and most balanced account, which still gives less importance to Harrietthan Professor Himmelfarb does, is Sumner, L. W., ‘ More light on the later Mill ’, Philosophical Review, LXXXIII (1974)Google Scholar. This would not have been available to Professor Himmelfarb at the time of writing her book.

28 Later Letters, p. 294 (15 Jan. 1855)Google Scholar.

29 Actually, the connexion with Mill's principle has by this stage become pretty tenuous. Thus she refers to his description in On Liberty of trade as a ‘social act’ as ‘an extraordinary assertion for Mill to have made, not only because it was in striking contrast to his earlier position but also because it assumed that only the exchange of material goods involved people in a social relationship and that all other forms of intercourse - the communication of ideas and attitudes, of manners and morals - did not’ (327).

30 Mill and his Early Critics, previously cited.

31 See, for example, A. and E. M. S[idgwick], A., and E. M. S., [idgwick], Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir (London, 1906), pp. 38–41Google Scholar, Morley, John, Recollections (London, 1917), I, 59–61Google Scholar.

32 D. G. Ritchie expressed this standard criticism particularly forcefully in his attack on the ‘metaphysical theory’ of ‘the abstract individual’ which underlay the prejudice against state intervention. He moved quickly on to his prize example: ‘It is this theory of the individual which underlies Mill's famous book on Liberty. ’The Principles of State Interference (London, 1891), pp. 11– 12Google Scholar.

33 Thus, for example, Hobhouse, who treated Mill as a New Liberal avant la lettre, had to admit that in resting his case on this distinction Mill ‘was still dominated by the older individualism’. Hobhouse, L. T., Liberalism (London, 1911[New York, 1964]), p. 65Google Scholar; also p. 76. Maccun, who gave Mill an honourable place in the radical tradition, lamented that ‘the pity is that in his eager advocacy of this great truth Mill should have tried to set it on so inadequate and, indeed, so false a ground’. Maccun, John, Six Radical Thinkers (London, 1907), p. 82Google Scholar.

34 Schwartz, The New Political Economy of J. S. Mill, discusses examples of Mill's interventionism; Richter, Melvin, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and his age (London, 1964)Google Scholar, reveals the limits of Green's ‘Collectivism’ (see esp. p. 204 for the judgement: ‘By the end of his life, Mill's practical position differed little from Green's’); Collini, Stefan, ‘Hobhouse, Bosanquet and the State: Philosophical Idealism and Political Argument in England 1880–1918’, Past and Present, 72 (1976), pp. 86–111CrossRefGoogle Scholar, briefly discusses the relationship between idealism and the Individualist/Collectivist debate.

35 Dicey, A. V., Lectures on the Relations between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (London, 1905 [2nd edn, 1914])Google Scholar, on how On Liberty expressed ‘the predominant opinion of the time’ (p. xxx), and how it represented the high point of ‘Benthamite individualism’ (p. xxviii), on how it ‘appeared to thousands of admiring disciples to provide the final and conclusive demonstration of the absolute truth of individualism’ (p. 183), and so on. Barker, who in general reproached Mill for failing to have been Green, called him ‘the prophet of individualism’ and scolded him for his ‘false distinction’. Barker, Ernest, Political Thought in England 1848–1914 (London, 1915) [revised 2nd edn, 1947], pp. 1Google Scholar, 47. Sabine continued the tradition, complaining of ‘the undearness of Mill's criterion for defining the proper limits of legislation’. Sabine, G. H., A History of Political Theory (London, 1937 [ 3nd edn, 1951], p. 597Google Scholar, And even Bullock and Shock conclude that ‘the distinction on which [;Mill]; sought to base his social philosophy proved untenable and was repudiated by die next generation of liberal diinkers’. Bullock, Alan and Shock, MauriceThe Liberal Tradition from Fox to Keynes (Oxford, 1956), pp. xli–xliiGoogle Scholar.

36 Autobiography, ed. Stillinger, J. (Oxford, 1971), p. 138Google Scholar.

37 Sidgwick, Henry, Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses (London, 1904), p. 242Google Scholar.

38 Cairnes, J. E., Some Leading Principles of Political Economy (London, 1874), p. 316Google Scholar.

39 This is his argument in the Political Economy, pp. 819–32Google Scholar.

40 For the extent of his influence, especially as an expert witness before the parliamentary committees of 1852 and 1861, see Shehab, F., Progressive Taxation (Oxford, 1953)Google Scholar.

41 Political Economy, pp. 808–13Google Scholar. Mill was in favour of exempting ‘a certain minimum of income, sufficient to provide the necessaries of life’, but above that advocated strict proportionality.

42 These are touched on in Emy, H. V., ‘The impact of financial policy on English party politics before 1914’, Historical Journal xv 1972), pp. 103–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 His discussions of Mill's relationship with Socialism is not quite as novel as he suggests, in that it is extensively dealt with in Robson, The Improvement of Mankind. Wolfe mentions this book but says (p. 36, f n.) that it appeared too late to be of use in writing this chapter, an odd remark considering that Robson's book appeared in 1968.

44 McBriar, A. M., Fabian Socialism and English Politics 1884–1918, (Cambridge, 1962)Google Scholar.

45 Pierson, Stanley, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism: The Struggle for a New Consciousness, (Ithaca, 1973)Google Scholar does not fill this gap. There are a few interesting remarks in Hobsbawn, Eric, ‘Dr Marx and the Victorian Critics’ in his Labouring Men, (London, 1964)Google Scholar, and some characteristic provocation by Uchtheim, George, in his A Short History of Socialism, (London, 1970)Google Scholar.

46 For two stimulating sketches of the relationship between ‘Socialism’ and ‘Progressivism’ see Clarke, P. F., ‘The progressive Movement in England’ Trans. R. Hist. Soc.., 5th series, xxIv (1974), pp. 159–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Barker, Rodney, ‘Socialism and Progressivism in the thought of Ramsay Macdonald’ in Morris, A. J. A., (ed.), Edwardian Radicalism 1900–1914: Some Aspects of British Radicalism, (London, 1974)Google Scholar.

47 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Fabians Reconsidered’ in Labouring Men, previously cited (quoted and disagreed with by Dr Wolfe on p. 4, fn. 12); Halevy, Elie, Imperialism and the Rise of Labour (London, 1951), p. 365Google Scholar: ‘Convinced imperialists and looking to a national or militarist state to realize their programme of moderate collectivism, they never felt anything but contempt for every formula of Liberalism and free trade.’