John Stuart Mill

N THE CURRENT discussions of the problems of liberty, perhaps no other work possesses the authority still maintained by John Stuart Mill's essay, On Liberty. Even one of Mill's most uncompromising critics has stated that the grounds on which the liberals argue today not varied perceptibly since and that none of his followers have stated the arguments with Mill's clarity or vigor of mind. 1 While there is strong disagreement over the validity of Mill's position, there is little disagreement as to what his position was, or as to its importance. The prevalent interpretation, accepted by critics and admirers alike, attributes to Mill a position which may be designated, for lack of a better term, as doctrinaire liberalism. According to this interpretation, Mill espoused a doctrine of complete freedom of thought and speech as a universal and absolute rule for society and thus elevated this freedom to the position of society's highest good. Two different reasons are given for Mill's having adopted such a position. First, he is supposed to have been somehow oblivious to the dangers of unlimited freedom; second, liberty was viewed by him as such an absolute principle that it must be maintained at all costs. In spite of its popularity, however, this interpretation of Mill's thought cannot be accepted as accurate. There are certainly many passages in On Liberty that do seem to express the most doctrinaire liberalism. But one may not accept these passages as a definitive expression of Mill's position while their doctrinairism is contradicted by other passages equally clear in meaning and, indeed, by the entire import of Mill's utilitarian philosophy. There are those who have seen these difficulties and consequently rejected the prevalent interpretation. But while insisting that Mill is not so doctrinaire in regard to liberty as he is generally thought to be, they have not gone beyond this to develop a coherent understanding of his thought, which would explain Mill's frequently doctrinaire statements as well as the qualifications which these seem to require. The failure to achieve a coherent understanding of Mill's liberalism has in turn been caused by the failure to recognize the central role that a philosophy of history plays in his thought. The task of this article will therefore be to present this philosophy of history as it is developed in various of his writings and to show how his liberalism becomes understandable in terms of this historical thought. The lack of attention given to Mill's historical thought is surprising when one considers that Mill himself has stated that it was responsible for the most radical change that occurred in his thought.2 The great defect of the eighteenth-century philosophy (and of his own earlier thought), as Mill came to see it, was its and metaphysical character.3 On the basis of the new historical thought, Mill rejected their efforts to develop an abstract conception of human nature, free from the

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