“Freedom”, in the Anglo-American literary tradition, is a word that excites a visceral response. From Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence, the idea of “liberty” has inspired reverence, passion, and eloquence. It is a touchstone, with dangerous even revolutionary connotations, as Shakespeare understood. In Act II, scene II of The Tempest, there’s a moment when Caliban, almost rapping, expresses a wild inarticulate desire for liberation:

’Ban ’Ban Ca–Caliban

Has a new master – Get a new man!

Freedom, high-day! High-day, freedom! Freedom, high-day, freedom!

And so, when John Stuart Mill addressed the idea of the free and sovereign individual in On Liberty, he was plugging into a current of English thought with deep and ancient connections. More immediately, he was picking up from Tom Paine, Adam Smith and William Godwin. But he had a different philosophical agenda from his predecessors. Those traditions, the popular and the radical, celebrated something perilously close to a state of nature. Mill’s more sober purpose was to transform the idea of liberty into a philosophically respectable theory and express it in a form that could co-exist with Victorian culture and society, animating the body politic, but not upsetting it:

“The subject of this essay is not the so-called ‘liberty of the will’, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of philosophical necessity; but civil, or social liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.”

There was no one better suited to this challenge than JS Mill. After the extraordinary education described in his Autobiography, he had emerged as the widely respected and leading philosopher/economist of his age. Years later, looking back, the Tory prime minister Arthur Balfour recalled that, during his student days at Cambridge, “Mill possessed an authority in the English universities comparable to that wielded in the Middle Ages by Aristotle.”

Within weeks of his wife's death, Mill overcame the anxieties he nurtured and delivered his manuscript

On Liberty was also inspired by Mill’s peculiar personal situation. Rejecting the father who had subjected him to a bizarre upbringing, the subject of his Autobiography, he had formed “a perfect friendship” with Harriet Taylor, a married woman with advanced “bohemian” ideas about love, marriage and divorce. For 20 years, until Mr Taylor died in 1849, Mill and his mistress could not marry. Once they were free to tie the knot, they withdrew to the suburbs to commune with a life of intense privacy, cut off from convention and conformity, and increasingly obsessed with intimations of mortality. Mill was explicit about these thoughts as an inspiration for On Liberty: “We have got a power of which we must try to make good use during the few years of life we have left. The more I think of the plan of a volume on Liberty, the more likely it seems to me that it will be read and make a sensation.”

He was pitching the idea of the book at an exalted level, and even claimed, in a nod to Gibbon’s account of his decision to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that he had first conceived it as he was “mounting the steps of the Capitol”. In the end, however, it was indeed overshadowed by mortality. Harriet Taylor died in 1858. Within weeks of her death, Mill overcame the anxieties he nurtured about so great a subject, delivered his manuscript to the publisher, and the book appeared the following February, as both a memorial and an intellectual landmark.

In the English literary tradition, 1859 is an annus mirabilis. As well as On the Origin of Species, No 60 in this series, this was the year that saw the publication of that Victorian classic, Self-Help by Samuel Smiles, and also A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. On Liberty joins these titles as a work of exquisite prose (Mill is a fine, lucid writer) advancing “one very simple principle”, an idea he expresses thus:

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

What follows is a complex elaboration of this “very simple principle” in various spheres – thought, discussion, action – in which Mill establishes that the liberty of the individual should be absolute so long as he or she does not interfere with other individuals:

That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant . . . Over himself, over his body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

This freedom, inevitably, has to be qualified, to preserve civil concord. At the same, as a profound individualist, Mill never ceases to champion the sovereignty of the free man, who must never become a wage-slave, or mere cog in an industrial machine:

It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery – by automatons in human form – it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilised parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce.

On Liberty articulates Mill’s adamant belief in the importance of humanity:

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

All of this leads to Mill’s concluding summary: a classic British statement about the role of the state.

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The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes – will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing.

A decade after the appearance of On Liberty, Matthew Arnold published Culture and Anarchy (No 59 in this series), which some have seen as “a powerful indictment” of Mill’s doctrine. Arnold querulously suggested that “doing as one likes” was a charter for the Englishman’s right “to march where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes.” This was the beginning of a Victorian backlash to Mill’s spirited and measured assertion of the English individual’s rights. It’s an argument that continues, in very different language, to this day.

A signature sentence

“Such being the reasons which make it imperative that human beings should be free to form opinions, and to express their opinions without reserve; and such the baneful consequences to the intellectual, and through that to the moral nature of man, unless this liberty is either conceded, or asserted in spite of prohibition; let us next examine whether the same reasons do not require that men should be free to act upon their opinions – to carry these out in their lives without hindrance, either physical or moral, from their fellow men, so long as it is at their own risk and peril.”

Three to compare

John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)

Jeremy Bentham: Chrestomathia (1816)

John Stuart Mill: Autobiography (1873)

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