Class politics in On Liberty
Quick note before the post itself: I wrote a piece for The Fitzwilliam about priorities for organ donation policy, and in particular the shortcomings of Ireland's recent Human Tissue Bill. It’s more polished than my usual output on here, and I hope some of you give it a read!
When I was being taught J. S. Mill at uni, contextualising him was in vogue. I mean, I went to Cambridge, contextualisation is the name of the game there. But my recollection is that Mill specifically was seen as a particularly promising target; so much so that it spread even outside of the history and politics faculties most associated with the Cambridge School approach (I heard a lot in the philosophy faculty about Mill on empire).
I don’t know if this is still the fashion, academic trends come and go. But regardless, I was never sure how to feel about this. The most popular contextualising approach was to locate Mill in imperialist British discourse.1 Mill’s imperialism is by now well-known, but I was always unclear about how much it was actually core to his thinking, versus how much it could be cleanly separated out. I mean, a lot of Mill’s thought was explicitly imperialist, and the sheer quantitative argument is important. But in terms of contextualisation, I don’t know how much learning this should change our view of the bits that are not explicitly imperialist, which tend to be the bits we remember and care about. For instance, it seems like you could delete the bit about Indians needing despotism from chapter one of On Liberty and the rest of it would remain, not only coherent, but actually the same—Mill’s meaning would be unaffected. Do not take me to mean that this has to be the case, that a thinker’s best ideas can always be nicely separated from their specific political commitments (again: Cambridge!). But the converse isn’t necessary either—even if everything is interconnected in a Quinean web, there’s still a distinction between core and periphery. My point is just that, in this specific case, I was never really convinced.
And anyway, even ignoring this, the way people talked about Mill-on-empire sometimes seemed wrongheaded. By modern standards, with our preconceptions formed by familiarity with post-Powell imperial nostalgia, Mill was a deeply weird imperialist. A harsh critic of overreach, a moral crusader against brutalities inflicted in the name of British rule, a clear-sighted observer of other imperialist powers (and especially the American Confederacy)—this is not the kind of man our preconceptions would have us expect to leap to the defence of Company raj. Part of the lesson should surely be that Victorian England was so imperialist, at such a deep level, that even such a man as this was thinkingly (crucially, not unthinkingly) an unequivocal cheerleader for empire; our expectations should be reset. But often, so dedicated were people to linking Mill’s name with empire, they tended to play down how little Mill’s imperialism conformed to modern assumptions, with all the attendant lessons that should be drawn.2
Now, I was a big fan of another dimension of Mill contextualisation, dedicated to establish the ways in which Malthusianism runs through all of Mill’s thought, being more fundamental in many ways than his feminism and even his liberalism. (Gregory Claeys’ work on this blew me away when I first read it.) I had a lot of fun with this in my master’s dissertation, suggesting that On Liberty marked a kind of high-point for British Malthusianism before its long decline in the later nineteenth century, and then making a link between Mill on the stationary state and Nick Bostrom on astronomical waste via Malthus. (My dissertation was tremendous good craic.) But in my experience this was generally a pretty marginal theme, with relatively little work done on it.
But a third dimension, which did have a lot of buzz around it, was an attempt to link Mill’s ideas to class politics, and in particular bourgeois class politics. This is obviously a kind of Marxist reading, though I’m not sure how much direct influence Marxist historians had on this development (as opposed to the clear background conditioning influence). But there was a lot of emphasis on how, in Considerations on Representative Government and Principles of Political Economy, Mill positioned himself as a middle-class observer of the advance of working-class power, thinking through politics in the light of this tendency. It was generally acknowledged that Mill had a somewhat equivocal and patronising view of the British working class, and robust and interesting debate took place over the degree to which he should be seen as a confused and imperfect ally of socialism and working class empowerment, versus being—with many qualifications—fundamentally opposed. (The Chapters on Socialism being as odd and fragmentary as they are only exacerbated the debate.)3
I thought all this was interesting, but I mostly had no strong feelings either way. But things were different when these quasi-Marxist readings attempted to rope in On Liberty and assimilate it to this interpretation of Mill. The Liberty, I insist, is Mill’s least bourgeois work—more than that, it is an explicit anti-bourgeois tract, and this is crucial to understanding it.
Let’s start from the start. What question was Mill asking in On Liberty? Well, the common but blatantly incorrect reading is he that he was, in the first instance, concerned with ‘the moral limits of the criminal law’. But criminal law, and law in general, is a subsidiary theme of On Liberty, touched on near the end but only as a particular instance of a more general phenomenon. We can see this clearly when Mill sets out his question in chapter one. I quote at length:
[W]hen society is itself the tyrant… its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries… Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to … fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compels all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism. [Chapter 1, pp.8–9 in the Stefan Collini edition; emphasis mine.]
Mill’s fundamental concern was finding that limit: asking ‘how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control’. Crucially, he believed that ‘collective opinion’—custom and conformism—was the primary driver of social control: he modelled law and politics directly downstream of collective opinion. In On Liberty, the power of the state is just one tool among many which society uses sometimes but not other times; it perhaps invites different practical considerations because of its severity, but in terms of motivations and justification it is on a par with other forms of ‘interference’. Mill did not always use this model of state power, but he deployed it consistently throughout On Liberty, and the structure of the work and its argument reflect it.
So Mill was really asking about the legitimate sphere of customary morality; he thought criminal law mostly just reflected social power. He wanted to ask how far we should try to restrain the influence of custom. But a difficulty with Mill’s question (as he remarked in a passage not long after the one quoted above) comes from a peculiar circularity: people’s thoughts about when and how to restrain the influence of custom are themselves informed by custom. And because of this circularity, Mill observed that people typically felt no further need to analyse or justify their own customary morality, or explain where it came from. So Mill took it on himself to explain; and, fascinatingly and importantly, he argued that custom ‘most commonly’ arises from class interest.4
There is something (again) very Marxist about the view that social morality is just disguised class interest—disguised even to the people expounding it. But Mill’s models of how class interest gets turned into custom were not necessarily very Marxist. He has three of these models, one of which highlights his worries about and ambiguities towards the British working class: a class that is used to serving becomes servile towards the preferences of its masters. There is an ‘essentially selfish’ interest behind the adoption of servile habits, but the disposition gets fully internalised and is not simple ‘hypocrisy’. And Mill clearly thought this servility was deeply problematic: ‘it made men burn magicians and heretics.’
Ok, so far, so ‘Mill as snobbish bourgeois observer of the working class’. But it’s important that the lower classes are servile towards the preferences of their superiors. In theory, then, if the powerful class had perfectly liberal, individuality-loving set of preferences, the problem would be at very least much mitigated. Maybe in Mill’s stationary state utopia, the ruling elite of educated geniuses would have exactly those preferences, although my own view of Mill on genius suggests otherwise. But regardless of his thoughts about utopia, he was unsparing about reality.
Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority. [Chapter 1, p.10.]
Mill pulled no punches in highlighting how despotic such feelings of superiority can be: he wrote that they were responsible for the custom that governed ‘planters and negroes’ and ‘men and women’—two examples we all know Mill’s exact feelings toward.
And on the other hand, when
a class, formerly ascendant, has lost its ascendancy … the prevailing moral sentiments frequently bear the impress of an impatient dislike of superiority. [Chapter 1, p.10.]
A class that loses it like this becomes impatient with and reactionary against superiority. The adjective ‘impatient’ here is crucial. Mill was, after all, an elitist who believed in the importance of genius; he did not want to insist that there is never any legitimacy in claims to superiority. Indeed, the primary effect of liberty—the reason Mill advocated it—is to help produce genius. Yet an ‘impatient’ class would react against all superiority (and anything that produced such superiority), legitimate or not, liberal or not.
What happens when we apply these three models to class relations in Britain in 1859, when On Liberty was published? We get a clear conclusion: the bourgeoisie is the greatest threat to liberty before the rise of the working class, and it will be implacably reactionary against that liberty even as it is eclipsed; any threat to liberty from working class power will, in the short-term, just be a refracted version of earlier middle-class sensibilities.
This should come as little surprise for someone who has read all the way to the end of On Liberty. When Mill comes to attack concrete practices, what does he focus on? Temperance and Sabbatarian legislation! Whenever he comes to cite an example of social tyranny, it is bourgeois conformism, which he connected with Calvinist, Puritan moralising. But if this were not enough, Mill spells it out for us in black and white:
Those whose opinions go by the name of public opinion are not always the same sort of public: in America they are the whole white population; in England, chiefly the middle class. But they are always a mass, that is to say, collective mediocrity. [p.66; emphasis mine.]
And:
There are still in this country large bodies of persons by whose notions of morality and religion [private] recreations are condemned; and those persons belonging chiefly to the middle class, who are the ascendant power in the present social and political condition of the kingdom, it is by no means impossible that persons of these sentiments may at some time or other command a majority in parliament. [pp.86–87; emphasis mine.]
Now, a contemporary reader of On Liberty who was looking a little further ahead in time might have, on the basis of Mill’s models, predicted that if the working class gained sufficient power it would eventually shed its servility and develop its own feelings of superiority. Indeed, in chapter four Mill predicted exactly this. He projected a ‘strong tendency in the modern world towards a democratic constitution of society’, which meant a march towards working-class power.5 And he made some predictions on what that might come to look like:
[In] the United States—the feeling of the majority, to whom any appearance of a more showy or costly style of living than they can hope to rival is disagreeable, operates as a tolerably effectual sumptuary law… Though such statements as these are doubtless much exaggerated as a representation of existing facts, the state of things they describe is not only a conceivable and possible, but a probable result of democratic feeling, combined with the notion that the public has a right to a veto on the manner in which individuals shall spend their incomes. We have only further to suppose a considerable diffusion of Socialist opinions, and it may become infamous in the eyes of the majority to possess more property than some very small amount, or any income not earned by manual labour. [pp.87–88; emphasis mine.]
Mill saw these opinions already beginning to diffuse through the ‘artisan class’ in Britain, as the majority of ‘bad workmen’ aimed to enforce the opinion that ‘bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good’ via ‘moral’ and (in extremis) ‘physical police’. For someone so concerned with the importance of promoting ‘superior skill and industry’ as Mill was, this is very bad!
But Mill was clear that, if this came to pass, it could not be primarily blamed on democracy, socialism, or the working class. Indeed, he wrote: ‘[i]f the public have any jurisdiction over private concerns, I cannot see that these people are in fault.’ Of course, he thought that this was a big ‘if’, to put it mildly; his point was precisely that a lack of respect for individuality and freedom was the root cause here, and the particular form taken by that lack of respect was secondary.
But many of his readers might not have had any worries about this ‘if’, unless they were forced to consider what would happen if they became the target of ‘moral police’. That is exactly what Mill was trying to do in this passage. He was attempting to scare his middle class readers into realising that, if they did not reject moralising and social tyranny, the security of their property would soon be at risk from the working class; and they would have no recourse, for they would stand condemned by their own words, their insistence that social interference with private matters is legitimate. Actual middle-class attitudes, not the hypothetical attitudes of a future ascendant working class, were what Mill had in his sights.
Again, even if this weren’t clear from the passage itself, Mill spelled it out for us plain as day in the very next paragraph:
But, without dwelling upon supposititious cases, there are, in our own day, gross usurpations upon the liberty of private life actually practised, and still greater ones threatened with some expectation of success, and opinions propounded which assert an unlimited right in the public not only to prohibit by law everything which it thinks wrong, but, in order to get at what it thinks wrong, to prohibit a number of things which it admits to be innocent. [p.88; my emphasis.]
Again, who are the ‘public’? Mill told us: ‘chiefly the middle class’.
Now, Mill was an elitist, of that there can be absolutely no doubt. But principled elitism tells us little about an author’s opinions about actually-existing elites; the contrary idea is an error that is made over and over again in the history of ideas. Mill did not see mass power as a guarantee of good government, precisely because he did not see how it could produce a sufficiently virtuous and genius elite. But perhaps the Considerations suggest that he thought that ‘true democracy’ could succeed where ‘false democracy’ would fail, and summon an elite of genius from the working-class masses. We can debate that. But what we cannot debate, what is transparently clear on almost every page of the Liberty, is that Mill believed there was no salvaging the middle-class elite of his day. It had had its chance, it had made some progress, but it had reached the point of despotic conformism and collective mediocrity and now had to make way.
So yes, On Liberty is a work shot through with class politics. But not in the way it is commonly read. On Liberty is one, long, continuous assault against the British bourgeoisie.
And indeed, this fact might affect how we think about Mill’s class politics more broadly. When considering whether Mill was complicated friend or subtle foe of the British working class in the Considerations and the Principles, it is worth considering one motivation that might fully explain why he seemed so willing to accept the power of the working class in principle, even as he sought to endlessly qualify it when he got down to details: amicus meus, inimicus inimici mei.
Simultaneously important and usefully introductory here are the chapters on Mill (and his father) in Duncan Bell’s Reordering the World and Jennifer Pitts’ A Turn to Empire.
Perhaps this is the essence of historical contextualisation, though. For instance, Pitts’ approach in A Turn to Empire almost seems to be the exact opposite of this: she contrasts Mill with his anti-imperialist liberal forebears, rather than with his imperialist successors. You can only contextualise someone against their past; to compare them with their future is to risk anachronism. So perhaps I shouldn’t complain too much.
Dale E. Miller’s ‘Mill’s “Socialism”’ and John Medearis’ ‘Labor, Democracy, Utility, and Mill's Critique of Private Property’ are two pieces I remember standing out and both discuss the prior literature, but I cannot claim to be up-to-date on this.
The argument I discuss in this paragraph and those that follow can be found on pp.9–10 of the Collini edition.
The context of the line is clear about this (p.87); but you could have guessed this if you have any familiarity with the Considerations.