All of this is described in painful—yet fascinating—detail in his Autobiography (1873). It doesn’t require reading between the lines to recognize that young Mill was given too much to chew too soon and ended up by being unable to digest it all. But the remarkable thing is not that John Stuart Mill broke under the strain of his dominating father/teacher. It is astonishing that he survived and became one of the most eloquent and persuasive writers in the English language, and the author of some indispensable books.
Having said this, I must immediately confess to a personal bias in favor of John Stuart Mill. I admit that I am mesmerized by the style of Mill; I don’t know any philosopher I enjoy reading more. There is an elegant yet tough sinuousness about his sentences, a compelling inevitability about his line of thought. He can make even platitudes sound as if they were the most novel and earthshaking truths. And probably many of his truths are self-evident, and not in need of the battalions of arguments that he brings forward to support them.
On the other hand, little that John Stuart Mill says about government is—at least in my opinion—not true. And even if his truths are often platitudinous or self-evident, they are the kind of commonsense notions that bear repeating. They are so important that they must never be forgotten—even if the price for not forgetting them is to hear them too often.
Take the short book On Liberty that Mill had been working on for years but that he did not publish until 1859, when he was fifty-three years old. Its object, as Mill himself said, was “to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion.” That principle was that the only justifiable reason for interfering with the life of any adult human being was self-protection—“to prevent harm to others.”
His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise.
In short, as Mill sums up, “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” He may—indeed, in a just society he must—be hindered from harming other people. But if he desires to harm himself he must be allowed to do so, as long as harm to himself does not harm others as well. And anyway, who should be the final judge of harm? We often find it easier to see the “good” for others than for ourselves. We passionately wish them to allow us to make our own mistakes. But so with them, as well.
Mill educes many convincing arguments for his views, which I confess seem true to me. One of the arguments is a social one. That society is better off in every way in which all are free, than in which only some are free. “Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.” And, in the most famous statement of this position Mill ever made:
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
Shortly after Mill suffered his nervous breakdown, in 1825, he met the woman who would be the greatest influence on his life and thought. She was at the time married, but when her husband died, Mill married her. He had known her for twenty years and she had only seven years to live. But those seven years of marriage to Harriet Taylor were the happiest of his life.
Mrs. Taylor taught Mill many things, not least of which was his sense of indignation, which never ceased to increase, at the “subjection of women”—this being the title of one of his most famous books. Indeed, The Subjection of Women (1869) is a remarkable document, written in the heat of a passionate love for a woman whom we would call today a “women’s libber.” An even better book, however, because of its much greater generality, is Considerations on Representative Government (1861), which deals with, and obliterates the arguments in behalf of, all kinds of benevolent despotism, not just that of husbands over their wives.
Representative Government considers in eloquent detail all of the classical problems of government, and particularly of democracy. A glance at the table of contents of the book is in itself instructive. In my view, the most interesting of all the chapters is Chapter 3, “That the ideally best Form of Government is Representative Government.” The chapter opens with a ringing challenge: “It has long …been a common saying, that if a good despot could be ensured, despotic monarchy would be the best form of government. I look upon this as a radical and most pernicious misconception of what good government is; which, until it can be got rid of, will fatally vitiate all our speculations on government.” This doctrine, which is held, more or less without thinking about it, by most of the human race, is indeed both radical and pernicious. There would seem to be all sorts of spurious support of it. For one thing, most “governments” with which we are familiar are benevolent despotisms. The family is not a democracy, at least when the children are little. The children are “ruled” for their own good, as perceived by their parents. A university is not a democracy, although some radical students in the 1960s and later tried to make it one—and in so doing did much harm to higher education. A corporation is not a democracy; the chief executive officer does not decide what to do on the basis of a majority vote of his employees, or even of his stockholders. Nor is a sports team a democracy; the coach tells the team what to do and they had better do it, for his judgment of what is best for the team is, supposedly, better than theirs. In fact, the only government under which we live that is or should be a democracy is the government itself. That, Mill insists, must not be a despotism, no matter how benevolent.
Why not? The answer, finally, is not simple. Despotisms seem more efficient, Mill says, but they really are not. Despotisms seem more able to defend themselves, but they really are not. Despotisms seem more able to ensure the comfort and contentment of their people, but again they really are not. Most important of all is the effect that despotism, even the most perfectly benevolent despotism, has on the individuals that the despot rules. Despotism has the inevitable effect of making its subjects slaves. Free government makes its citizens free. It is incomparably better to be free than to be a slave.
The arguments in favor of freedom, and of participation in the state by all adults, women as well as men, poor as well as rich, are thorough and, I think, completely convincing. Representative Government is thus an important book to read at a time when despots everywhere are presenting their spurious allurements—in Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East, and in all the Communist countries. Sometimes it almost seems easier to give in and to say, well, if every other government is a despotism, why should ours not be so too? That way we would not have to work so hard at governing ourselves. But we must never stop working to do that. The reasons for this are many, but the most important of them is expressed by John Stuart Mill, not in Representative Government but at the end of his companion volume, On Liberty: