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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Triumph of the individual, January 11, 2005
This Oxford collection of four definitive essays by John Stuart Mill, arguably the most famous Victorian writer who could be called a philosopher, gives an excellent profile of a rigorous social reformer and political thinker. The subjects of these essays--liberty, utilitarianism, government, and women's rights--are interrelated to the extent that they reveal a man with a sharp sense of history and its impact on the methods and mores of contemporary society. Mill, after all, was of Charles Dickens's generation and therefore witnessed an era in which the British crown was inclined to manifest its power through tyranny in its efforts to maintain a costly worldwide empire.
Mill's basic concern is liberty, both social and civil. He identifies a difference between freedom and liberty--freedom is the state of being free, while liberty is the freedom that a government or governing body grants its people. Briefly a member of Parliament (the workings of which are described in great detail in "Representative Government") and heavily informed and influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," Mill recognized that the most important (and perhaps the only proper) function of a government is to protect the liberties of its citizens. However, people generally get the form of government they deserve; if laws they allow to go unchecked become the tools of despotic powers, they have only their own ignorance or indolence to blame.
An enumeration of Mill's finer points may suffice as a summary of his ideas:
1. Freedom of the press and freedom of expression are essential rights of man. You don't have to accept as true what other people say, but let them say it because there's always the chance that they're right and you're wrong. Mill points out that even the Roman Catholic Church, most intolerant of religions (his words, not mine), allows a "devil's advocate" to offer repudiative evidence before it canonizes a new saint. He notes instances in which religious intolerance still rears its ugly head in the British Empire of his day.
2. Christianity does not have a monopoly on moral authority; literary history gives evidence of this.
3. Individuality should be fostered so that new ideas may flourish, but society, specifically the middle class, establishes the normative values that unfortunately tend to stifle individuality. You have an unlimited right to your opinion, but you are free to act only so far as you do not harm or molest others. Long before Orwell, Mill had the insight that institutional deprivation of liberty is effectively suppression of thought, for how can someone train himself to think independently when doing so could lead to persecution for heresy or treason?
4. State-sponsored education should restrict itself to teaching scientifically provable or reliably documented facts rather than push religious or political agenda. When or if polemical issues are raised, arguments for and against are to be presented as opinions so that students may draw their own conclusions.
5. The utilitarian principle states that actions that promote happiness (in its most obvious form, pleasure) are "right" and those that reduce happiness are "wrong"--in other words, utilitarianism is the opposite of puritanism. Consider how much better it is to be a dissatisfied human being than a satisfied pig, because the human has the potential for so much more happiness than the pig, whose breadth of experience is contained entirely between the trough and the slaughterhouse, could ever know.
6. Women deserve the same rights as men because the social and mental limitations attributed to women are for the most part a male-conceived artifice. Chivalry is a fallacy.
And so on. I'm not sure if it's correct to call Mill a libertarian in modern terms, but he was certainly concerned with the issues with which modern libertarians are concerned. Much of his discourse is relevant to today's world, even though he often draws upon the past for contrast in order to make his conclusions, the implication being that improvement comes with increased knowledge and experience. Anyone who is interested in nineteenth-century thought on democracy and individualism will find much to ponder in Mill's eloquence.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Worth owning, March 15, 2003
The editor of this collection states that when read together, the four essays contained in this Oxford World's Classics edition reveal Mill to be an organized thinker on par with Marx. I'm not quite so sure of that, but I will say the collections feels thematically consistant and well thought out. Readers should not be scared off because Mill is considered a "classic" text. The tone of these essays, with the possible exception of "Utilitarianism" is pretty light, and Mill even occassionally makes an effort to crack a joke. In "On Liberty" and "Utilitarianism" we see an abstract breakdown of his belief structure where he tries to answer questions like, "When is it justified for government to interfere in individuals lives?" and "What is the overarching goal of society?" After he attempts to answer these questions he gets more specific by applying the principles to how government should operate in "Representative Government" and in "The Subjection of Women". Some concepts now outdated, but on the whole, still a relativly strong argument. It is particularly frustrating to see Mill talking about proportional representation in "Represenative Government" and knowing that the logic of that argument has still not made much headway here in the United States well over a hundred years later. Mill's systematic thinking makes this collection worth owning.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The great defender of individual liberty, December 23, 2006
John Stuart Mill, 1806-73, worked for the East India Co. helped run Colonial India from England. Minister of Parliament 1865-68 he served one term. Maiden speech was a disaster his second was great success. He was first MP to propose that women should be given the vote on equal footing with the men who could vote. He got 1/3 support, England gives franchise to women after U.S. He was a great Feminist, his essay "Subjection of Women" is written with great passion and prose. It was a brave position for him to take he was ridiculed for it. He favored democracy, and letting more men from lower classes the right to vote, but believed that people that are more educated should have more votes then less educated because they would make better decisions about what government should do. He would have wanted to extend education to the masses, so that all may have gotten 2-3 votes and so on. He didn't think it should be extended to where a small elite could carry the day on votes. The idea was that if the working class, and middle class, where divided on an issue, the people with more intelligence would have the power to tip the balance. Mill thought that people with more education would probably not only be better able to make political decisions, especially in terms of intellectually being able to see what would be best for the government to do, but that they would also be more concerned about the common good publicly then people in general. He was intensely educated by his father James. John could read Greek, and Latin at 6 yrs.; his Dad tutored him at home. Dad thought environment was everything. He was treated like an adult, never played games with kids; he had a very cerebral upbringing. He had a period of depression in his twenties, it changed his philosophy, and he recognized the importance of developing feelings along with the intellect, this is something that he stressed in his work. He read poetry to get out of depression; he became devoted to poetry and became a romantic. He fell in love with a married woman Harriet Taylor, was a platonic relationship, after her husband's death they married 3 years later and probably never consummated the marriage maybe due to his having syphilis. His dedication to "On Liberty" is to her, very devoted to each other. Both buried together in Avignon France where they used to vacation.
Mill as a moral theorist subscribed to a theory we call Utilitarianism. It means---In some way morality is about the maximization of happiness. Whether actions are right or wrong depends on how happiness can be most effectively maximized. I say in some way, because there are allot of different kinds of Utilitarians. Allot of different ways of saying exactly how it is the maximization of happiness comes into morality. Therefore, happiness is clearly an important idea for Utilitarians. Mill has a hedonistic view of happiness, he thinks that happiness can be defined in terms of "pleasure in the absence of pain." What is distinctive about Mill in this area is that he believes that some kinds of pleasure are better than others are, and add more to a person's happiness than other kinds of pleasures. He believes in what he calls, "higher quality pleasures." These are pleasures, he says, that we get from the exercise of faculties that only human beings happen to have. So the intellect, imagination, the moral feelings, these are the sources of higher quality pleasures people use. His view seems to be that a certain quantity of intellectual pleasure just adds more to your happiness, and a given quantity of some lower pleasure like a kind we would share with the animals such as sensation, taste, sexual pleasure, etc. His "higher quality pleasures" in a way echo Aristotle's ethics. The idea of those things that make us distinctly human that are the real key to our happiness, that is in Mill also. It is not as limited to reason and intellect as Aristotle thinks. Mill recognizes the importance of the appreciation of beauty, aesthetic pleasure, and moral pleasure. He frankly owes a debt to Aristotle that he never properly acknowledges, never gives him proper credit.
"On Liberty" is Mill's is his most widely read and enduring work. It is an indispensable essay on political thought, which strenuously argues for individual liberty. He is defending what he calls the "liberty principle." It is a principle that guarantees individuals quite a bit of personal freedom. "That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." These quoted sentences in John Stuart Mill's book, "On Liberty," embody the crux of his argument; that the power of the state must intrude as little as possible on the liberty of its citizenry. In essence, Mill was against using the power of the state through its lawmaking apparatus to compel citizens to conduct themselves in ways that society deems moral or appropriate. Mill thought that people had not only a right, but also a duty to develop their intellectual faculties, which is indispensable to maximize their happiness. He believed that society improved for all its citizens when they where left unfettered to the maximum extent possible, allowing them to use their imagination and intellect to improve themselves. Mill postulates a theory that societies usually institute laws based primarily on "personal preference" of its citizenry instead of established principles. This lack of clarity of opinion often leads to the government frequently interfering in the lives of its citizens unnecessarily. For Mill, there are very few times when the state can infringe on the personal liberty of others. Firstly, the state has the right to promulgate laws that prevent a person's actions from harming others. Secondly, the state must protect those citizens who are not mature enough to protect themselves, such as children. Thirdly, he exempts, "... backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage." In Mill's view, immature societies need a benevolent leader to rule them until they have developed to a point where they, "... have attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion ..." Mill said this third exemption did not apply to any of the countries in Europe. Mill believed that forced morality by the state on its citizen's liberties was destructive to their inward development, and could even lead to a violent reaction by them against the government.
There are different parts of his defense of this, different arguments that he gives. He has a long chapter on freedom of speech and press. He has some very specific reasons why he thinks those freedoms are important. Always in the background for Mill is the idea of development, and making it possible for more people to enjoy these higher quality pleasures. How do we help people develop their distinctly human faculties, in ways that will help them enjoy their higher quality pleasures? Because for him that is the way, we maximize the total amount of happiness that is enjoyed in the world, and that is the object of morality as far as he is concerned. Utilitarianists believe that maximizing happiness is ultimately, what morality is all about. That does not mean maximizing your own happiness that means maximizing the total amount of happiness that is enjoyed, not only by yourself but also by everybody else as well.
Roger Kimball, in his book "Experiments Against Reality" wrote, "On Liberty" was published in 1859, coincidentally the same year as "On the Origin of Species." Darwin's book has been credited--and blamed--for all manner of moral and religious mischief. But in the long run "On Liberty" may have effected an even greater revolution in sentiment.
I read this book for a graduate class in Philosophy. Recommended reading for anyone interested in philosophy, political science, and history.
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