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What's Not in On Liberty: The Pacific Theory of Freedom of Discussion in the Early Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Gregory Conti
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Abstract

It is often assumed that John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859) is representative of the major lines of thought on the freedoms of discussion and the press in the period. In fact, however, Mill's treatise was selective about the kinds of reasons it admitted in support of these liberties. This essay depicts one set of arguments that Mill omitted and that has subsequently been overlooked in the history of political thought. An important element of liberal thought in early nineteenth-century Britain was that the liberty of the press made indispensable contributions to domestic peace and stability. These pacific arguments were elaborated in a wide variety of forms by a number of authors. More specifically, the view that unrestricted liberty of discussion was necessary for peace and political stability drew on an older tradition of thinking about religious toleration as well as newer ideas about the functioning of economic markets and the place of public opinion in the politics of modern societies. In the hands of its proponents, the view assumed psychological, historical, sociological, or metaphysical dimensions. Even though prominent thinkers, including his own father, were associated with this pacific outlook on the liberty of the press, John Stuart Mill rejected it both as an empirically dubious proposition and as an insufficient moral basis on which to build an enduring commitment to open public discussion.

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Articles
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 57 - 75
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2016 

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References

1 W. E. H. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, 2 vols. (London, 1896), 2:402.

2 William Wickwar's Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1819–1832 (London, 1928) and Arthur Aspinall's Politics and the Press, 1780–1850 (London, 1949) are dated but still helpful accounts of the movement for a free press at this time. See also Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1996); Donald Thomas, A Long Time Burning: A History of Literary Censorship in England (New York, 1969); Joel H. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (Westport, 1983).

3 See Frederick Schauer, Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (Cambridge, 1982), 16, 106.

4 On the assumption that Mill is representative of the whole of Victorian liberalism (or of liberalism simpliciter), see John C. Rees, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (Oxford, 1985), 78–79; Ten, C. L., “Mill's Place in Liberalism,” Political Science Reviewer 24, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 179–204, at 179–80Google Scholar; H. S. Jones, Victorian Political Thought (New York, 2000), 35, 95. On the process of Mill's canonization as a political thinker, see Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1993), chap. 8.

5 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. A. Robson and John M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto, 1963–1991), 18:213–310, at 224. All references to John Stuart Mill's work will be to the Robsons' thirty-three volume edition (hereafter CW), published between 1963 and 1991.

6 Samuel Bailey, Essays on the formation and publication of opinions: and on other Subjects, 3rd ed. (London, 1837). Though I will make use of this edition throughout because it is the final one, I have verified that the passages cited in this paper were present from the first edition of 1821.

7 See Thompson, Thomas Perronet, “Essays on the Pursuit of Truth, &c.,” Westminster Review 11, no. 22 (October 1829): 477–89, at 477–78Google Scholar. For later testimonials of the Formation and Publication's influence, see Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians: Volume II, James Mill (London, 1900), 339; Alexander Bain, John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections (London, 1882), 47.

8 The extent to which Bailey has been forgotten is attested by his exclusion from works such as Gareth Stedman-Jones and Gregory Claeys, eds., The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, (Cambridge, 2011) and James Crimmins, ed., Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Utilitarianism (New York, 2013).

9 Both K. C. O'Rourke and John C. Rees have offered reconstructions of the background to and development of Mill's views on the liberty of discussion in which Bailey plays no part; see K. C. O'Rourke, Mill and Expression: The Genesis of a Theory (London, 2001); John C. Rees, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (Oxford, 1985).

10 He discussed Bailey's economics as part of his youthful reading group, wrote a review of Bailey's Rationale of Political Representation, entered into a dispute with Bailey about (of all things) the theory of vision, listed him as an ally in the fight for women's suffrage, and engaged with him on foundational epistemological matters in the Logic.

11 Mill, James, “Formation of Opinions,” Westminster Review 6, no. 11 (July 1826): 1–22Google Scholar.

12 James Mill, The Principles of Toleration (London, 1837). The editorship of the Principles was anonymous, but Keith Quincy has made a persuasive case that John Stuart Mill was the editor; Quincy, Keith, “Samuel Bailey and Mill's Defence of Freedom of Discussion,” Mill Newsletter 21, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 4–18, at 7–9Google Scholar.

13 Bailey, Formation and Publication, 149–51.

14 Jonas Proast, The argument of the Letter concerning toleration, briefly consider'd and answer'd (London, 1690), 14.

15 Bailey, Formation and Publication, 151–52.

16 Ibid., 152.

17 Ibid.

18 William Godwin, An enquiry concerning political justice, and its influence on general virtue and happiness, 2 vols. (London, 1793), 1:241–42. Even Godwin could not sustain quite this pitch of optimism—the three-year horizon for sincerity's vanquishing of error did not make it into the second or third editions of Political Justice.

19 Bailey, Formation and Publication, 152–53.

20 Ibid., 87.

21 Ibid., 152–53.

22 See Ursula Henriques, Religious Toleration in England, 1787–1833 (Toronto, 1961), 254.

23 Wickwar, Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 18–27. Prosecutions for libel were the primary way, in addition to the imposition of taxes on certain kinds of periodicals, of constraining expression. There had been no prior censorship in England since the Licensing Act expired in 1695.

24 For a characteristic statement of the traditionalist fear of the disintegrating impact of a free press, see the collection of Tory poet laureate Robert Southey's political writings, Essays, Moral and Political, 2 vols. (London, 1832).

25 Bailey, Formation and Publication, 153–54.

26 Ibid., 154–55.

27 Ibid., 97–98.

28 Samuel Bailey, Money and its Vicissitudes in Value (London, 1837), 74.

29 Godwin, Political Justice, 2:589–90, 600–1.

30 On Locke's status as a “Whig pillar” of toleration throughout the eighteenth century, see J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985), 229.

31 “It is not the Diversity of Opinions, (which cannot be avoided) but the Refusal of Toleration to those that are of different Opinions, (which might have been granted) that has produced all the Bustles and Wars that have been in the Christian World, upon account of Religion.” John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, trans. William Popple, ed. Mark Goldie (Indianapolis, 2010), 60.

32 Ibid., 13, 55–56, 50–53.

33 For a contextualization of eighteenth-century theories of toleration, including the politique argument, see Richard Popkin and Mark Goldie, “Scepticism, Priestcraft, and Toleration,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge, 2006), 79–109, especially 99–109.

34 See David Hume, History of England: From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688, 6 vols. (Indianapolis, 1983), 5:130; Henry Hallam, The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of George II, 6th ed., 2 vols. (London, 1850), 1:117, 166, 177; Sydney Smith, A Letter to the Electors upon the Catholic Question (York, 1826), 11–17.

35 Bailey, The Pursuit of Truth and the Progress of Knowledge, 236–37.

36 Mill, James, “Sur la Tolerance Religieuse,” Edinburgh Review 16, no. 32 (August 1810): 413–30, at 426–27Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., 426. His Principles of Toleration was also replete with citations of Locke on the ethics of forming beliefs; James Mill, Principles, 10, 24–30.

38 See Lord Grenville's conviction that an uncontrolled press would plunge England into a Terror of its own; William Wyndham Grenville, Substance of the Speech of the Right Hon. Lord Grenville in the House of Lords, November 30, 1819 (London, 1820).

39 John George, A Treatise on the Offence of Libel: With a Disquisition on the Right, Benefits and Proper Boundaries of Political Discussion (London, 1812), 274.

40 Ibid., 274–75.

41 Ibid., 188, 257.

42 Mill, James, “Liberty of the Press,” Edinburgh Review 18, no. 35 (May 1811): 98–123, at 118–21Google Scholar. The future Whig prime minister Lord John Russell also defended the press as epiphenomenal in this way: An Essay on the History of the English Government and Constitution from the Reign of Henry VII. to the Present Time (London, 1821), 293–94.

43 James Mill, “Liberty of the Press,” 119–20 (translation mine). He was quoting the Memoires de Candide, sur la Liberté de la Presse … (1802) by Jean-Baptiste-Claude Delisle de Sales.

44 Ibid., 119.

45 Mill, James, “Liberty of the Continental Press,” Edinburgh Review 25, no. 49 (June 1815): 112–34, at 125Google Scholar.

46 Ibid., 115.

47 See Vincent Starzinger, The Politics of the Center: The Juste Milieu in Theory and Practice, France and England, 1815–1848 (New Brunswick, 1991).

48 Thomas Babington Macaulay, “A Conversation between Mr. Abraham Cowley and Mr. John Milton, Touching the Great Civil War,” in The Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay, 2 vols. (London, 1860), 1:101–24, at 122.

49 Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Southey's Colloquies,” in Critical and Historical Essays, 5th ed., 2 vols. (London, 1848), 1:250.

50 Henry Brougham, Inaugural Discourse of Henry Brougham, Esq., M.P.: On Being Installed Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow (Glasgow, 1825), 47; idem, “Liberty of the Press and Its Abuses,” Edinburgh Review 27, no. 53 (September 1816): 102–44, at 121Google Scholar.

51 Brougham, “Liberty of the Press and Its Abuses,” 121.

52 Macaulay, “Milton,” in Critical and Historical Essays, 1:41.

53 Dror Wahrman calls the 1810–20s the “heyday of public opinion”; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995). On the concept in this period, see Beer, Samuel, “The Representation of Interests in British Government: Historical Background,” American Political Science Review 51, no. 3 (September 1957): 613–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, section 5; Norman Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (New York, 1971), introduction, chap. 1; J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (Berkeley, 1966), 486–87; Xiaobo Zhai and Michael Quinn, eds., Bentham's Theory of Law and Public Opinion (Cambridge, 2014). And see James Thompson's overview of the literature on public opinion in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Thompson, British Political Culture and the Idea of Public Opinion, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 2013), chap. 1.

54 James Mill, “Liberty of the Press,” 121.

55 For James Mill's negative assessment of the Whigs, see Donald Winch, “The Cause of Good Government: Philosophic Whigs vs. Philosophic Radicals,” in That Noble Science of Politics, ed. Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow (Cambridge, 1983), 91–126.

56 Macaulay, “William Pitt, Earl of Chatham,” in Critical and Historical Essays, 2:190. See also Russell, History of the English Constitution, 2nd ed. (London, 1823), 471–72.

57 Joseph Hamburger, “The Whig Conscience,” in The Conscience of the Victorian State, ed. Peter Marsh (Syracuse, 1979), 19–38, 29.

58 For rare instances when Mill gestured toward themes reminiscent of the classic pacific arguments, see John Stuart Mill, “Law of Libel and Liberty of the Press,” in CW, 21:1–34; idem, “The French Law against the Press,” in CW, 25:1116–18; idem, Speech on Meetings in Royal Parks, 22 July 1867, in CW, 28:216–17.

59 John Stuart Mill, “Coleridge,” in CW, 10:125, 134.

60 John Stuart Mill, System of Logic, in CW, 8:926; idem, “Coleridge,” in CW, 10:134.

61 Ibid.

62 Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, in CW, 19:547.

63 See O'Rourke's disproof of Himmelfarb on this point: O'Rourke, Mill and Expression, 53–56. For Himmelfarb's interpretation of Mill as abandoning his support of freedom of the press during the height of his Coleridgean period, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (New York, 1974), esp. 46–47.

64 Mill, “Coleridge,” in CW, 10:134. On the notion of the “age of transition” in Victorian Britain, see Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven, 1957), 8–23.

65 John Stuart Mill, “The Spirit of the Age, I,” in CW, 22:233.

66 Hence his praise for the St. Simonians for being “the only association of public writers existing in the world who systematically stir up from the foundation all the great social questions,” as well as his repeated commendations of working-class voices in politics even when they appeared to be doing no more than “ventilat[ing] their nonsense” and giving voice to “wild aberrations,” precisely because the working classes were less inclined than other segments of society to accept conventional principles unquestioningly; see John Stuart Mill, “Comparison of the Tendencies of French and English Intellect,” in CW, 23:444; idem, “Recent Writers on Reform,” in CW, 19:350.

67 Mill, On Liberty, in CW, 18:252; idem, “The Spirit of the Age, I,” in CW, 22:233. For an analysis of how Mill came to discard the idea that an end to the current age of transition would be realized in the future, see Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1978), 169–70.

68 Even if these risks included revolution. Though Mill deplored the revolutionary mindset of the French, he had no general normative opposition to revolution; see Williams, Geraint, “J. S. Mill and Political Violence,” Utilitas 1, no. 1 (March 1989): 102–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 John Stuart Mill, “Walsh's Contemporary History,” in CW, 6:342.

70 Hamburger, “The Whig Conscience,” 28. On the young Mill's, and the philosophic radicals' contempt for the Whigs more generally, see Joseph Hamburger, Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (New Haven, 1965), 65–67.

71 John Stuart Mill, “Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review,” in CW, 1:298–300, 294. The Whigs' record on liberalization of discussion during the 1820s and early 1830s was, from the radical perspective, deficient: Wickwar, Struggle for Press, 146, 152, 292, 301; W. J. Linton, James Watson: A Memoir (Manchester, 1880), 42–43.

72 John Stuart Mill, Letter to Macvey Napier, 15 October 1842, in CW, 13:551.

73 Alison, Archibald, “The Influence of the Press,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 36, no. 226 (September 1834): 373–91, at 380, 382, 377, 389Google Scholar. The final line quoted is itself an approving quotation by Alison of a Dutch book on the press.

74 See Stuart Warner, foreword to James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (Indianapolis, 1993), ix–xxiv, at xxii.

75 Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 67, 31.

76 Stephen, James Fitzjames, “Journalism,” Cornhill Magazine 6, no. 31 (July 1862): 52–63, at 57Google Scholar; idem, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 51.

77 James Fitzjames Stephen, “Burke and de Tocqueville on the French Revolution,” Horae sabbaticae, 3 vols. (London, 1892), 3:153–71, at 169.

78 Stephen, “Journalism,” 57; idem, Liberty, equality, fraternity, 3, 20–21.

79 Mill, On Liberty, in CW, 18:224.

80 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, in CW, 1:53.

81 Mill, On Liberty, in CW, 18:221.

82 Mill, “Coleridge,” in CW, 10:122.

83 Ibid., 124.

84 See John Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford, 1988); Collini, Winch, and Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics; Jack Lively and John Rees, eds., “Introduction,” in Utilitarian Logic and Politics: James Mill's “Essay on government,” Macaulay's Critique, and the Ensuing Debate (Oxford, 1978), 1–50.

85 See Gertrud Lenzer, ed., “Introduction: Auguste Comte and Modern Positivism,” in Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings (New Brunswick, 1998), xxxi–lxxxii; Aurelian Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (Lanham, 2003). On English Comtism, see Christopher Kent, Brains and Numbers (Toronto, 1978).

86 See Bell, Duncan, “What Is Liberalism?,” Political Theory 42, no. 6 (December 2014): 682–715CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Dissent in Abrams v. United States, in The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ed. Richard Posner (Chicago, 1992), 316–20. Jill Gordon is one of the few scholars to recognize that it is incorrect to attribute “the marketplace of ideas” to Mill: see Gordon, , “Mill and the ‘Marketplace of Ideas,’” Social Theory and Practice 23, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 235–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 See Goldman, Alvin I. and Cox, James C., “Speech, Truth, and the Free Market for Ideas,” Legal Theory 2, no. 1 (March 1996): 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton, 2013), 54.