1 ibid., p. 578. 2 ibid., p. 576.
1 ibid., pp^ 578, 580.
1 Chapter 7: vol. I, p. 259, in Collected Works of ]ohn Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson and others (Toronto/London, 1963-91). Subsequent references to Mill's writings are followed by a reference to this edition by volume and page in the form CW i 259, except that references to On Liberty are given by chapter and a page reference to vol. I 8 of this edition, thus: L 4/2 8 1.
I
Everyone knows the story of John Stuart Mill's extraordinary education. His father, James Mill, was the last of the great raisonneurs of the eighteenth century, and remained completely
Bentham used this phrase frequently: for examples see his 'Legislator of the
1 Democracy m America, part 2 (1840), book 4, chapter 6, 'What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear': vol. 2, p. 3 19, in the edition by Phillips Bradley of the translation by Henry Reeve and Francis Bowen (New York, 1945).
1 Aereopagtta (1644): vol. 2, p. 561, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven and London, 1953-82); Milton's spelling has been modernised in the quotation.
1 L 2/250. The concluding phrase is quoted from 'a cotemporary [sic] author' identified neither by Mill nor by the editor of CW xviii, J. M. Robson.
1 L 3/274-5, 269 ('In this age ... ' ). 2 L 2/240 note. 3 L 4/287.
1 Diary, 26 March 1854: CW xxvii 664.
5 L 4/286.
1 Principles of Political Economy, book 2, chapter 1: CW ii 209.
3 Letter to his wife Harriet, 15 January 1855 (Mill's emphasis): CW xiv 294.
• L 2/242. 7 L 2/229. ' L 4/282.
i
Does knowledge always liberate? The view of the classical Greek philosophers, shared by much, though perhaps not all, Christian theology, is that it does. 'And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.'1 Ancient Stoics and most modern rationalists are at one with Christian teaching on this issue. According to this view freedom is the unimpeded fulfilment of my true nature - unimpeded by obstacles whether external or internal. In the case of the passage from which I have quoted, the freedom in question (I follow Festugiere's interpretation on this point) is freedom from sin, that is, from false beliefs about God, nature and myself, which obstruct my understanding. The freedom is that of self-realisation or self-direction - the realisation by the individual's own activity of the true purposes of his nature (however such purposes or such natures are denied), which is frustrated by his misconceptions about the world and man's place in it. If to this I add the corollary that I am rational - that is, that I can understand or know (or at least form a correct belief about) why I do what I do, that is, distinguish between acting (which entails making choices, forming intentions, pursuing goals) and merely behaving (that is, being acted upon by causes the operations of which may be unknown to me or unlikely to be affected by my wishes or attitudes) - then it will follow that knowledge of the relevant facts - about the external world, other persons and my own nature - will remove impediments to my policies that are due to ignorance and delusion.
Philosophers (and theologians, dramatists, poets) have differed widely about the character of man's nature and its ends; what kind and degree of control of the external world is needed in order to achieve fulfilment, complete or partial, of this nature and its ends; whether such a general nature or objective ends exist at all; and
1 Gospel according to St John, chapter 8, verse 32.
1 Stuart Hampshire, 'Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom', Proceedings of the British Academy 46 (i960), 195-215.
II
I do not, of course, wish to deny that when we say that a man is free - or freer than he was before - we may be using the word to denote moral freedom, or independence, or self-determination. This concept, as has often been pointed out, is far from clear: the central terms - willing, intention, action, and the related notions - conscience, remorse, guilt, inner versus outer compulsion, and so on - stand in need of analysis, which itself entails a moral psychology that remains unprovided; and in the meanwhile the notion of moral independence - of what is, or should be, independent of what, and how this independence is achieved -
1 op. cit. (p. 266 above, note i), p. 92.
1 See p. 2 55 above.
II
The great moments are those when one world dies and another succeeds it. This is marked by a change in the central model. Great moments of transformation occurred, for example, when the cyclical laws of the Greeks were succeeded by the ascending straight line, the historical teleology, of the Jews and Christians; or when teleology, in its turn, was overthrown by the causal- mathematical model of the seventeenth century; or when a priori constructions yielded to methods of empirical discovery and verification. There are those who, like Condorcet or Hegel, Buckle or Marx, Spengler or Toynbee, claim to be able to perceive a single pattern of development in this succession of human perspectives. I do not wish to maintain that such ambitious efforts to reduce the vast variety of conscious human experience to one enormous dominant pattern are necessarily doomed to failure; I confine myself to saying merely that the three great crises which I shall discuss are not satisfactorily explained by the hypotheses of any of
2 Politics i}}7a27; compare also Ntcomachean Ethics i i8oa24-9 and Metaphysics I075ai9.
з Hippolytus 421-2; Ion 672-5; Phoenissae 390-3; Temenidae fr. 737 Nauck.
5 Herbert J. Muller, Freedom in the Ancient World (London, 1962), p. 168.
6 Aristotle, Politics 1 3ioa3 3; Euripides, fr. 8 8 3 Nauck.
1 Fr. 551 Usener: literally 'Escape notice having lived.'
Bion fr. i6a Kindstrand.
See under Epicurus fr. 551 Usener (p. 327, lines 9-10).
Epicurus fr. 6. 71 Arrighetti.
ibid. fr. 247.
1 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, op. cit. (p. 85 above, note 1), vol. 4, pp. 479, 493; cf. eid., Collected Works (London, 1975- ), vol. 2, pp. 502, 519.