Page 254 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Western Political Thought

Notes that liberty and not happiness was the chief end of the state, and defining happiness to
include liberty, individuality, self-development and self-control, paved the way for many of
the changes that were initiated within English political thought and practice. His most
important concern was the preservation of liberty within a democratic society as an intrinsic
good in itself, and looked down on majority tyranny and mass mediocrity as potent threats
to individuality and liberty. By making liberty the chief aim and objective of the state, he
established the limits of legitimate interference by society and the state in areas that strictly
and exclusively belonged to the individual. He categorically demarcated things that belonged
to Caesar, and the things that did not belong to Caesar.
• The early Utilitarians in general and Bentham in particular, were concerned with the ascendancy
of political democracy as a complement to the Industrial Revolution. The Reform Bill of 1832 was
seen as securing a good government. Mill perceived the dangers inherent in such an extension :
the tyranny of opinion and prejudices, the will of the majority overriding individuality and
minority perceptions. He was no longer concerned about the suppression that authoritarianism
resorted to. Instead, it was the preservation of individual and minority rights against the democratic
state and public opinion. He could foresee the dangers inherent in laissez faire commercialism. It
was not just the freedom to do as one pleased or willed, but freedom of thought, to think
differently (Williams 1958: 71-72). In spite of his passionate advocacy of individuality and liberty
for all including the eccentric, Mill remained intellectually an elitist.
• Mill, like Coleridge and Burke, regarded cultivation of culture as social and emphasized on
the need for institutions that would conform and constitute the individual’s personal needs.
Applying this framework, he argued that :
• A philosophy like Bentham’s ... can teach the means of organizing and regulating the merely
business part of the social arrangements ... . It will do nothing (except sometimes) as an
instrument in the hands of a higher doctrine for the spiritual interests of society; nor does it
suffice of itself even for the material interests ... . All he can do is but to indicate means by
which, in any given state of the national mind, the material interests of society can be protected;
saving the question, of which others must judge, whether the use of those means would
have, on the national character, any injurious influence.
• Mill visualized the state as a moral institution concerned with the promotion of virtue and
excellence in the individual citizen. He felt that a conception of good life was more important
than a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure. He pleaded for the removal of obstacles in the
way of the individual’s self-development that made life less mean and less intolerable for the
masses. He, however, continued to see the state as a product of wills, though not of interests,
and contended that to ignore the state as constituted by human wills was fallacious.
• Mill was essentially a critic of the complacency and conventions of Victorian English society,
as evident from his three main tracts, On Liberty, Representative Government, and The Subjection
of Women. Following the spirit of optimism of the Enlightenment era, he accepted the notion
of progressive advancement of human civilization that the theorists of this period espoused.
Since an individual did not develop in isolation, for the flowering of a vibrant culture,
healthy discourse, diversity and a concern for public affairs, liberty of expression assumed
special significance.
• Mill was the first male philosopher of considerable stature and repute to consider the
“Woman’s Question”. Mainstream thinkers had either ignored it altogether, or written about
women and the role of the family en passant, usually endorsing the stereotype image of the
woman. The Subjection, along with his active support for women’s causes, played a pivotal
role in advancing the women’s movement. He integrated the central themes raised in the
tract with his overall political philosophy. The tract raised many issues of continuing relevance
to women, namely the alleged differences between men and women, sexual division of

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