The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Then, perhaps inevitably, the mirror cracked. John Stuart Mill had convinced himself that his entire goal in life was to be a progressive reformer like his father. Then one day he asked himself a vital question:

  Suppose that all your objects in life were realized, that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be effected at this very instant, would this bring a great joy and happiness to you? And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!”

  It was, he remembered later in his Autobiography, as if he had woken up from a dream. It instantly plunged him into a deep depression: “I seemed to have nothing left to live for.” Everything he had learned and done had been to please others, including his father. What he now realized was that there had been nothing left for himself.29

  The depression lasted for two years. What pulled him out was the one thing that his father and Bentham had most despised: Romantic poetry at its most “useless,” especially Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Later, Mill called reading Wordsworth for the first time one of the great events of his life.30 He discovered through the Romantics what had been missing from the Utilitarian calculus, namely the actual experience of life.

  He had learned that for most human beings, “experience” is not a philosophical abstraction or passive absorption of information. It is an active engagement with the world, a constantly changing encounter with empirical reality, including the lives and dreams of others. Mill discovered that a walk through the mountains or down a London street or playing a game of cricket (which his father never allowed him to do), riding to hounds or playing softball on weekends or running for a simple political office like alderman or sheriff, opens a door to personal growth and self-fulfillment, as well as to physical and mental health, that no amount of time buried in books can duplicate.

  Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

  Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

  To me the meanest flower that blows can give

  Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

  Mill’s encounter with the Romantics, and then other minds outside his father’s circle, forced him to revise Utilitarianism. He never gave up the idea that utility—that is, the greatest good for the greatest number—should remain an important guide to public policy. But it cannot be the only guide. He learned from Thomas Macaulay’s famous critical review of his father’s Essay on Government that trying to construct a political vision from purely deductive principles is a guaranteed failure, because it ignores the complexities of real life. If Bentham and his father had led an enlightened Aristotle down a Platonist dead end, Mill’s goal was to lead their Aristotle back out again.

  To start with, he learned from Coleridge (who was an avowed Burkean conservative as well as a poet) that the social world around us is not just the result of wrongheaded thinking or systematic injustice, as his father and Jeremy Bentham believed. It reflects a complex organic historical development and consists of institutions that give meaning and purpose to the lives of ordinary people, however pointless they may seem to the ivory tower philosopher. Social reality has a hidden purpose, Coleridge taught—a purpose that, like Nature herself, we tamper with at our peril.31

  Then Coleridge and Macaulay both showed him that the first task of an intellectual is not to trash and overturn existing institutions of his society, as both Bentham and Marx tried to do. It is to understand first of all how and why they came about. By doing so, we can discover certain basic principles of human nature to serve as the basis of thoughtful reform instead of headlong revolution.32 And from the French philosopher Auguste Comte, Mill learned that once we have discovered those principles, it might be possible to construct a science of man (which Comte called sociology) that will be as certain and universally applicable as Newton’s Principia.

  This became Mill’s new ambition, one worthy of his tremendous brainpower and learning acquired at such a personal cost. It was to do for the modern age what Aristotle (that “judicious utilitarian,” as Mill called him) had done for the ancient and medieval worlds: bring together our understanding of man and our understanding of nature into a single overarching system. Mill even devised his own system of logic to serve as its framework.a However, Mill wanted his new system to take into account two realities that the historical Aristotle would have missed. The first was the reality of man’s material historical development, as Smith and Hume (and Hegel and Comte) had acknowledged.33 The other was the overriding importance of individual freedom.

  This was, of course, something Hegel had not acknowledged (or Comte, for that matter). Like Marx, Hegel built his philosophy entirely around proving that man’s happiness depended on reaching the final stage of community, either the nation-state or the classless society. Indeed, Hegel had no interest in unleashing the power of the individual unless he happened to be a “world-historical individual” like Alexander or Napoleon.

  The Romantics, however, did. What Mill ultimately did was to steal their clothes while they were out bathing with the Infinite. The amount of individuality in a society, he would write, “has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained.”34 One could in fact sum up Mill’s final vision of the free society as “Every individual his own genius.” However, Mill had also reversed the Romantics’ formula. He was determined to show that free market capitalism was not the enemy but the savior of the free creative individual.

  Mill never completed his great plan for what he termed “an Exact Science of Human Nature.” However, the works he did leave before his death in 1873 on logic and political economy, plus On Liberty (1859), Considerations on Representative Government (1861), and Utilitarianism (1863), stirred British intellectual life as no other author had. Mill is the direct progenitor of British liberalism, not to mention modern libertarianism. Indeed, later eminent Victorians like Arthur Balfour and Leslie Stephen explicitly compared his impact on the British intellect to that of Aristotle in the Middle Ages.35 When young men at Cambridge or Oxford in the 1870s or 1880s discussed any question on politics or economics or metaphysics, the cry would inevitably come up: “Read your Mill!”

  Of all his works, the one that lives on today is the shortest, On Liberty, which he wrote with his wife, Harriet Taylor, and published in 1859. It has enshrined Mill’s interest, even obsession, with protecting the freedom of the individual to do what he or she desires (Mill was a keen supporter of votes for women) without interference except to protect public safety. It is the Nicomachean Ethics of today’s libertarians.

  It also set Mill in direct opposition to Hegel and Marx. “Mankind are greater gainers,” its introduction reads, “by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”36 It is hard to imagine any sentence more at odds with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right or Marx’s Grundrisse.

  At the time, On Liberty had another important purpose. It spelled the definitive end of the teleology—or the idea that everything that happens serves some greater higher telos, or purpose—that both Plato and Aristotle (not to mention Saint Augustine and Hegel) had used to describe human nature and human affairs. In the Politics, Aristotle did see individual householders as the foundation of a free society, but he still believed that human nature itself was directed toward a single telos.b Mill responded that we are here to fulfill not one final single end, but many ends—as many as there are individual human beings.

  For Mill, it is the healthy diversity of purposes and destinies that makes for a happy society and a truly free society. The purpose behind individual liberty is not allowing people to do whatever they want, it is allowing people to do what his father had never permitted him: to discover in their own way what truly fulfills them. This, Mill argued, is the essence of true freedom.37

  This was also the great key to Western civilization and its history, Mill argued: the increasing empowerment of the individual. “What has ma
de the European family of nations an improving, instead of stationary, portion of mankind?” Mill asked. Not any innate superiority, but “their remarkable diversity of character and culture.” This diversity has created a “plurality of paths for its progressive and many-sided development,” from the various Greek city-states to modern nations: indeed the more the better.38 For Mill, uniformity is the enemy of progress, because it becomes the enemy of individuality and personal choice.

  This is true for capitalism as well. Mill agreed with his father and Bentham that the free market has an optimal economic utility, because it provides the most goods of the highest quality at the lowest price. However, the secret to keeping those who attend capitalism’s banquet happy is not just keeping the price of a ticket low or providing more food; it also means allowing attendees to choose when they are going to eat, and which dishes. The free market works best at sorting out these individual preferences, something that (as anyone who visited a department store in East Germany or the Soviet Union realized) government does very poorly.c

  In doing so, the market also serves a cultural utility. Far from generating chaos, the result of diverse choices is a division of labor that benefits everyone. As Mill states, “The only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty,” and his Principles of Political Economy made it clear that free market capitalism’s chief virtue was that it made sure there were “as many possible centers for improvement as there were individuals.”39 For Mill, uniformity is the enemy of progress. Diversity is the regular source of growth and renewal, whether one is talking about the Manchester cotton mills or Silicon Valley.

  In the same way, Mill believed, representative government on the British or American model worked best because it encouraged individuals to stand up for their rights, thus encouraging an energetic self-reliance.40 The most famous example of how individual freedom works to achieve public goods is found in On Liberty’s discussion of freedom of thought.

  Allowing men and women to say what they believe, Mill argues, and publish what they think is true promotes the spread of new discoveries and truths while pushing out the false and misleading. This is what is sometimes referred to (somewhat misleadingly) as “the marketplace of ideas.” Mill’s analysis owed less to economics than it did to the Romantics. Freedom of speech adds to the creative intensity of life. The free exchange of ideas will prevent a culture from growing stale and rigid. Even debates about issues that seem entirely settled, like whether the earth is flat or if the Holocaust happened, can serve this purpose of wakening us from “the deep slumber of decided opinion.” It is a fact, Mill argues, that “the fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors.”41

  The other half, he implies, is the result of dogmatism and the freezing up of society against its lone voices of dissent. Socrates, Jesus, Martin Luther, Galileo: Shelley had treated them as great poets, whose insights illuminated eternal truths. The value of these figures for Mill is as history’s great dissenters, the unpopularity of whose opinions serves as a benchmark for society’s next advance. That society which opens a space for individual dissent, and actively debates its own most basic tenets and truths, is for Mill the one that lives and breathes and grows. The one that doesn’t stagnates and dies.

  “A people, it appears, may be progressive for a certain length of time, and then stop. When does it stop? When it ceases to possess individuality.” This is what happened to Egypt and China, Mill affirms. It hadn’t happened to Europe—yet.42 But could it? In 1859, Mill saw two dangers on the horizon.

  The first was the expansion of democracy. This was a paradox for someone who, on the political front, was one of democracy’s biggest champions—including votes for women. However, Mill sensed in the sheer bulk of mass democratic society a new and unforeseen kind of tyranny, “the tyranny of the majority.” The individual will feel a pressure to agree with a consensus shared by millions and millions of people whose views have assumed equal cultural value; the validity of a point of view will simply be that everyone else holds it. Those outside the consensus, Mill believed, will become outcasts—even viewed as a threat.

  Middle-class man would be replaced by mass man, Mill feared, the compulsive conformist who “practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political tyranny.”43 This was long before anyone had thought of television. Today, it’s a nightmare that still haunts many intellectuals: the fear of being buried alive in a society that plays video games in the morning, shops at Wal-Mart in the afternoon, and watches Keeping Up with the Kardashians in the evening.

  Some see this fear, like Mill’s, as a thinly disguised elitism. Others have pointed out that the dangers lie very much the other way: that the complete indulgence of individual preference to the point of what Mill approvingly called “eccentricity” opens the door to no cultural or moral standards at all—as anyone browsing the Internet soon realizes.d Still, no one wants to live in a world in which individual creativity has been reduced to designing our own vanity plates. Mill’s fears about what a truly democratic culture might look like poses a nagging problem for the Aristotelian calculus. It hangs over On Liberty as much as it does over Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (virtually a point-by-point refutation of the first chapter of On Liberty) and, much later, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd.

  The other danger Mill sensed was the growth of socialism, specifically Marxist communism. Again, this was paradoxical from someone who came to describe himself as a socialist and saw relieving poverty as a social imperative. Mill’s later writings strongly reflect the view that an entirely market-driven system must eventually give way to one that shares more of the fruits of prosperity with others.

  All the same, the touchstone of Mill’s version of socialism remained individual choice. As Nicholas Capaldi has argued, Mill’s socialism is one in which formal class distinctions disappear and everyone becomes an autonomous entrepreneur. Mill never accepted the Rousseauian notion of a general will to which the individual must submit. On Mill’s terms, redistribution of income and resources must be voluntary, rather like a farmer’s co-op or a start-up software company in which employer and employees agree to share the profits.44

  This was precisely the kind of socialism Karl Marx most detested. By the same token, Marx’s version was the one that Mill most feared. He watched the founding of the first Communist International, spoke to some of the English delegates who attended, and did not like what he heard. Marx, like Hegel, believed crisis and revolution were history’s path to freedom. Mill believed history showed they were the path to slavery. The idea of the proletariat seizing the means of production was “obviously chimerical,” he wrote, and would only plunge humanity into the brutal state of nature envisaged by Thomas Hobbes.

  From it would emerge a society far worse than its bourgeois successor, he warned. If the compression of individuality by the majority was already becoming a problem, “it would probably be much greater under Communism.…”45 Man’s progress would be stifled; the wellsprings of creativity would dry up; and society would be reduced to “a multitude of well-cared-for slaves, rather than a nation of free and independent men.…” If, therefore, Mill concluded, “the choice had to be made between Communism with all its chances [of failure], and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices … Communism would be as dust in the balance.”46

  After 1870, however, that was the choice men—or at least intellectuals—were increasingly called to make. Mill had stated (echoing David Hume) that the story of history is the struggle between liberty and authority. Are human beings happiest when they are left alone or when they submit to an order greater than themselves?47 As the nineteenth century wore on, the heirs to Aristotle and the Enlightenment became the staunchest defenders of liberty, while the partisans of Plato were increasingly attracted to the authority side of the barricades.

  This is the origin of the famous split between classical l
iberalism and its modern paternalist and statist cousin, progressivism. It was already happening in Mill’s own country. Shortly after his death, the so-called British Idealists would use Hegel to fashion a distinctly Anglophone theory of the welfare state.48 On the other side, Herbert Spencer would mount a countertheory in The Man Versus the State that made far more concessions to laissez-faire economics than Mill the on-again, off-again socialist could ever have endorsed.

  In Spencer’s case, at least, another factor had entered the arena—one that had dazzled Karl Marx almost as much as it did Spencer. It was a book by Charles Darwin called On the Origin of Species, and it would open a brand-new front in the perennial battle between Plato and Aristotle, this time in natural science.

  * * *

  * This was L’Histoire de la Gironde, published in 1832.

  † Hegel was helped here by the fact that in written German, every noun begins with a capital letter. A table is a Table; a sandwich a Sandwich; and likewise history is History and ideas Ideas—suggesting a realm of disembodied yet potent universals that someone with a Platonist bent is bound to find irresistible.

  ‡ Its ultimate source may again be Pythagoras, where one or the Unlimited (what Hegel called the Subject) produces its opposite, two or the Limit (Hegel’s Object), which then come together to form three, the triad, from which all other forms and numbers arise.