John Stuart Mill Was No Saint, You Know
He was a tireless champion of individual rights. Or was he?
Ah, John Stuart Mill, that great champion of liberty. He helped to usher us all into an age of freedom and progress. Thanks to his passionate defences of the rights of the individual over herself, we were able to step out of the darkness of barbarism and into the bright light of reason, science and humanism. He was a secular saint: one of those thinkers who stood over and above the ordinary world and envisioned something truer and better. Or perhaps not—and not just because his particular vision of the world had its flaws anyway.
The thing you discover when you re-read Mill, or really any of those thinkers seen to be architects of our supposedly enlightened age, is that they were not quite what you think. Do not think I am moralising: for one thing, I could not ever get away with it for long before someone pointed out my myriad sins. But I am also no fan of the current zeal for digging into the past, looking for something to be upset by. People are complex. Nor am I wild about our present habit of judging historical figures by the standards of today. (In any case, those standards tend to be applied selectively: Karl Marx said some viciously racist things in his letters to Engels, but no one seems to mind.) I do find it valuable, however, to dwell on how imperfect many of our most famous thinkers were (or are)—especially when their failings are ironic.
Marx said some viciously racist things in his letters to Engels.
To J.S. Mill, then, towering figure in the pantheon of liberal thought. Here is the man who wrote that ‘over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign’. Well, all right then. But he also argued, in Considerations on Representative Government (and in respect of colonialism) that ‘despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians,’ provided the end goal is to improve the condition of those ‘barbarians’. Tyranny is fine, for John — but it better bloody well be for the good of those you lord over.
And he does not stop there. He even wades into the very dark and murky waters of slavery. He condemned slavery in the United States, and quite right, too; but he made some exceptions around the acceptability of forced labour elsewhere. He made excuses, for instance, for the perpetuation of serfdom in Russia, calling human bondage a transitional phase, and one needed for the country to move forward into the future while remaining stable.
He also made some exceptions as regards the legitimacy of forced labour.
But then, for J.S., some were not quite ready for the burdensome rights and duties that are part and parcel of a free society. Like the Founding Fathers, who thought that ‘all men’ (though not slaves, Native Americans, and other minorities) were created equal, J.S. Mill was not quite as inclusive as he now seems. By this point, it is practically a requirement of being included in the Western canon. The Athenians, after all, excluded women, slaves and metics (foreigners) from the democracy that they were the first dream up.
Ought we to dismiss Mill as a thinker, in that case? No. To recognise that John Stuart Mill could defend tyranny and slavery and still promote individual rights (to the point of encouraging ‘experiments in living’) does not negate his contribution to political philosophy and the human story. It just gives him a certain complexity. It perhaps reminds us not to idealise real people, since real people are prone to keeping two sets of books, and rarely look blemish-free when observed through the long lens of history.
