Was John Stuart Mill a Liberal?

The English philosopher John Stuart Mill was born in May 1806, 220 years ago, and I was therefore recently invited to discuss his Essay on Liberty at a meeting of an Icelandic book club. Whereas I taught that book in my political philosophy classes at the University of Iceland for 30 years, my view of it has changed over time. I admit that Mill was an excellent, open-minded, and knowledgeable writer. But is his reputation as an icon of liberty deserved?

Freedom of Expression

The most convincing part of An Essay on Liberty is Mill’s argument for the freedom of expression: If a banned opinion is right, people are deprived of the opportunity to exchange error for truth; if it is wrong, they lose the benefit of clarifying and strengthening truth in the attempt to refute it. This argument is certainly still relevant. It is also eloquently put by Mill’s contemporary, Danish poet N. F. S. Grundtvig, who insisted that there had to be freedom for Loki, the rogue, as well as for Thor, the hero. But I must note that the most important freedom for ordinary people is the freedom both to choose their occupation, goods, and services in the marketplace, and to keep as much of their income as possible. Society is not a debating club; it is a struggle to better the conditions of ourselves and our families.

The Harm Principle

Mill’s celebrated harm principle holds that coercion is justified only to prevent harm to others.  This has often been criticised for being unclear. I do not agree. It is clear, for example, that the harm principle would allow addictive substances, provided they did not cause dangerous behaviour; it would also allow prostitution. Moreover, the consequences of prohibiting those activities are likely worse than those of permitting them. But the problem with utilitarian calculations is that they conflate the praiseworthy and the reprehensible. The nurse and the whore are both regarded as producing utility. I prefer the approach of St. Thomas Aquinas. He argued that we are all sinners, but that the law should concern itself only with sins harmful to others, such as violence or theft. In practice, this leads to something similar to Mill’s harm principle, but the crucial distinction between vices and virtues is maintained.

The Error of Redistributive Socialism

Mill was aware that utilitarianism had its problems. He wrote in An Essay on Liberty that he rested his case for freedom on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Here, he blithely made a move from the maximisation of utility—which is what utilitarianism is about—to creating the conditions for human flourishing. I therefore doubt that he can be called a utilitarian. I also doubt that he can be called a liberal. In his Principles of Political Economy, he made a distinction between the laws of production and distribution. The laws of production were, he taught, immutable, unlike the laws of distribution, which could be changed, almost at will. But this is a false distinction, because income distribution by choice provides indispensable information to us about where our abilities and skills are best employed. Thus, it guides production. Redistributive socialism, however, largely depends on this theoretical error.

Who Would Choose Socialism?

In his later writings, Mill thought that socialism might replace capitalism because workers’ collectives were likely to be more productive than privately owned companies. He was wrong. But he emphasised that such collectives had to be voluntary. Under capitalism, people can, of course, choose socialism for themselves and not for others. It is an interesting question how many would do so. The agrarian collective communities of Israel, kibbutzim, provide an answer: Less than three per cent.