John Stuart Mill and modern liberalism: A study in contrasts

Abstract

The Millian corpus is looked upon as a deposit of essential truths by which liberals live today, a kind of liberal-democratic ur-text (Gray, 1995;Ten, 1974). Beyond the confines of political-philosophical and political-theoretical scholarship, this is overwhelmingly how Mill is taught: In surveys of modern political thought, his books (or, usually, just book) enter as the point at which a modern liberal-democratic mindset and its cardinal commitments are supposed to have begun to receive a systematic coherence (Turner, 2017).There is an element of truth in this portrait, of course. Liberalism is devoted to women's rights, to liberty and autonomy, to representative government; something called democracy-to which Mill claimed repeated allegiance-seems indubitably to have triumphed. Upon closer inspection, though, it is difficult to credit modern liberal-democratic politics with having a particularly Millian hue.However common and in some ways compelling, many of the assimilations of Mill to the supposed liberal ascendancy in twentieth-and twenty-first-century Anglophone/Western-European societies do not hold up to scrutiny.Nor, indeed, would this disjunction have come as a great surprise to previous generations of commentators: It was widely believed in the early decades of the last century, for instance, that Mill's greatness lay in epitomizing a perspective on politics already largely bygone (Dicey, 1914;Ritchie, 1891). Some of this sentiment of eclipse reflected tropes-familiar but, articulated at the usual level of generality, not all that illuminating-about the supposed passing away of a "classical-liberal" mentalité in favor of new, more organicist or state-oriented strands of liberalism (Seaman, 1978).1 Furthermore, though, this sense of distance reflected that era's more accurate assessment of the kind of political thinker that Mill was. While his Logic and Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy were major works in first philosophy, in the domain of politics proper Mill repeatedly disavowed the pretense to originality in first principles (Mill, 1963, vol. 1, p. 251). Instead, qua public moralist and political commentator Mill was, and was understood to be, above all a kind of practical thinker: He was not a generator of new principles so much as a master synthesizer whose forte was to relate, with lucidity and a certain doggedness, a plurality of widely discussed values to live questions about