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Unit 13: John Stuart Mill: His Life and Theory of Liberty

in customs, and hence not free. In spite of his elitism, he remained an uncompromising liberal, for Notes
he ruled out paternalism, the idea that law and society could intervene in order to do good to the
individual. He explicitly ruled out interference in self-regarding actions. On this score, he differed
from Bentham, who allowed the pleasure of malevolence, namely if the majority abhorred a particular
kind of private conduct, then it was similar to the pain it would cause to the individual if such a
conduct was prohibited. Mill, disagreeing, explicitly stated that the right of liberty could be sacrificed
only for some “other right”, a point that has been reiterated by Rawls. However, he failed to analyze
and establish a relationship between freedom and responsibility.
At times he retained the traditional view derived from Bentham that any compulsion
of even any social influence is an abridgement of liberty. Yet he never supposed that
there could be any important freedom without law and when he identified liberty
with civilization, he did not imagine that there could be civilization without society.
What Mill’s theory required was a thoroughgoing consideration of the dependence of
personal liberty on social and legal rights and obligations. It was this which T.H.
Green tried to add to liberalism.
Mill failed to specify the proper limits of legislation, and was unclear when it came to actual cases.
For instance, he supported compulsory education, regulations of business and industry in the
interest of public-welfare and good, but regarded prohibition as an intrusion on liberty.
Sir Ernest Barker (1950) made an interesting observation when he remarked that Mill, in reality,
was a prophet of an empty liberty and an abstract individual. This observation flowed from the
interpretation that the absolutist statements on liberty like the rights of one individual against the
rest was not substantiated when one assessed Mill’s writings in their totality. Mill separated the
inseparable. The conduct of any person was a single whole and there could be nothing in it that
concerns himself and did not concern others. Bosanquet too advanced a similar point that every
action of a person would affect others and the demarcation between self-regarding and other-
regarding did not hold good.
Mill qualified his statements, circumscribing his original intent on liberty. For instance, his
compartmentalization between self-regard and other-regarding actions, and the tension between
his tilt towards welfarism, which conflicted with individualism, were all indications of this
incompleteness. But the point Barker ignored was the fact that the tension that emerged in Mill
was an inevitable consequence of attempting to create a realistic political theory which attempted
to extend the frontiers of liberty as much as possible. In fact, no political theorist including the
contemporary ones like Rawls, Nozick and Raz, are free from this inevitable tension.
13.4 Equality within the Family and between the Sexes

Mill’s thought and activism could be distinguished from those of his predecessors within the
liberal tradition, because of his application of the principles of liberalism to the question of women.
For Mill, improving women’s position by giving them suffrage, education and employment
opportunities was a stepping stone to progress and civility.
Mill rightly regarded improvement in the position of women as a concern not restricted to women
alone, but of entire humankind. The Subjection therefore made a strong claim for equal status in
three key areas : women’s right to vote, right to equal opportunities in education, and employment.
He acknowledged the tremendous impact the writings of his mentor (Bentham) and his father had
on his intellectual development, for both of them had to grapple with the issue in the course of a
long-drawn-out debate on the subject. The other intellectual influences on Mill with regard to the
women’s question had been those of Harriet Taylor Mill, W.J. Fox, William Thompson and the
Saint Simonians like Saint-Bazard, Enfantin and Pierre Leroux, from whom he learnt to think in
terms of stages of progress.

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