Liberty - John Stuart Mill

1 LibertyJohn Stuart MillCopyright Jonathan Bennett 2017. All rights reserved[Brackets]enclose editorial explanations. Small dots enclose material that has been added, but can be read asthough it were part of the original text. Occasional bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations,are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis .. indicates theomission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reportedbetween square brackets in normal-sized launched: March 2005 Last amended: April 2008 ContentsChapter 1: Introduction1 Chapter 2: Liberty of thought and discussion10 Chapter 3: Individuality one of the elements of well-being36 Chapter 4: The limits to the authority of society over the individual49 Chapter 5: Applications61 Free trade.

2 62 Selling poisons ..62 Selling alcohol .. 64 Prostitution and gambling ..65 Dissuasion ..66 Contracts slavery .. 67 LibertyJohn Stuart Mill Contracts marriage ..68 Power of husbands over wives ..68 Bringing up children ..69 Having children .. 71 Size of government ..72 LibertyJohn Stuart Mill1: IntroductionChapter 1: IntroductionThe subject of this essay isnotthe so-called Liberty of thewill that is unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrineof philosophical necessity; I shan t be writing aboutanything like the issue between free-will and determinism.

3 My topic is civil or social Liberty the nature and limits of thepower that society can legitimately exercise over question is seldom posed, and almost never discussed,in general terms. Yet it lurks behind many of the practicalcontroversies of our day, profoundly influencing them, and islikely soon to make itself recognized as the vital question ofthe future. This isn t a new issue; indeed, it has in a certainsense divided mankind almost from the remotest ages; butin the stage of progress into which the more civilized partsof humanity have now entered, it comes up under newconditions and needs a different and more struggle between Liberty and authority is the mostconspicuous feature of the parts of history of which wehave the oldest records, particularly in the histories ofGreece, Rome, and England.

4 But in olden times this con-test was between subjects (or some classes of them) andthe government. By Liberty was meantprotection againstthe tyranny of the political rulers. Except in some of thedemocratic governments of Greece, the rulers were seenas inevitably being antagonists of the people whom theyruled. The rulers consisted of a single governing person ora governing tribe or caste who derived their authority frominheritance or conquest, or at any rate didn t have it throughthe consent of the governed, and whose supremacy mendidn t risk challenging (and perhaps didn t want to challenge),whatever precautions might be taken against its being usedoppressively.

5 Their power was regarded as necessary, butalso as highly dangerous because it was a weapon that theywould try to use against their subjects as much as againstexternal enemies. To prevent the weaker members of thecommunity from being preyed on by innumerable vultures,there needed to be a predator stronger than the rest, whosejob was to keep the vultures down. But as the king of thevultures would be just as intent on preying on the flock aswould any of the minor predators, the subjectshad tobe ina perpetual attitude of defence against his beak and the aim of patriots was to set limits to the power that theruler should be allowed to have over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by Liberty .

6 They tried toget it in two ways. First, by getting certain political liberties or rights to be recognized; if the ruler were to infringethese, that would be regarded as a breach of duty, andspecific resistance or general rebellion would be regarded asjustifiable. A second procedure generally a later one wasto establish constitutional checks according to which someof the governing power s more important acts required theconsent of the community or of a body of some sort supposedto represent the community s interests.

7 In most Europeancountries the ruling power was compelled, more or less,to submit to the first of these kinds of limitation. Not sowith the second; and the principal objective of the loversof Liberty everywhere came to be getting this constitutionallimit on the rulers power or, when they already had it tosome extent, achieving it more completely. And so long asmankind were content to fight off one enemy with help from1 LibertyJohn Stuart Mill1: Introductionanother enemy , and to be ruled by a master on conditionthat they had a fairly effective guarantee against his tyranny,they didn t try for anything more than a time came in the progress of human affairs whenmen stopped thinking it to be a necessity of nature that theirgovernors should be an independent power with interestsopposed to their own.

8 It appeared to them much better thatthe various officers of the state should be theirappointees,theirdelegates, who could be called back from office at thepeople s pleasure. Only in that way, it seemed, could peoplebe completely assured that the powers of government wouldnever be misused to their disadvantage. This new demandto have rulers who were elected and temporary became theprominent aim of the democratic party, wherever any suchparty existed, and to a large extent it replaced the previousefforts to limit the power of rulers.

9 As the struggle proceededfor making the ruling power come from the periodical choiceof the ruled, some people started to think that too muchimportance had been attached to limiting the power thought was this:Limitations on the power of government is somethingto be used against rulers whose interests are habit-ually opposed to those of the people. What we nowwant is for the rulers to be identified with the people,for their interests and decisions to be the interestsand decisions of the nation. The nation doesn t needto be protected against its own will!

10 There is no fearof its tyrannizing over itself. As long as the rulers areresponsible to the nation and easily removable by it,it can afford to trust them with power.. The rulers power is simply the nation s own power, concentratedand in a form convenient for way of thinking, or perhaps rather of feeling, wascommon among the last generation of European liberal-ism, and apparently it still predominates in Europe outsideBritain. Those who admit any limit to what may be doneby a government (setting aside governments that they thinkoughtn t to exist) stand out as brilliant exceptions among thepolitical thinkers of continental Europe.