John Stuart Mill: The Liberal Pessimist

European Consortium for Political Research Annual Conference, Potsdam, Germany 10-12 September 2009 Paul Corcoran University of Adelaide John Stuart Mill: The Liberal Pessimist 1. Introduction Optimism has been an inveterate characteristic of political liberalism. The archetypal liberal is optimistic about social, moral and material progress; the individual’s capacity for reason and self-determination; the liberating legal reform; human equality as both a foundational principle and a legislative telos; civilisation as a gradual unfolding and expansion of prosperity, physical well-being and happiness. John Stuart Mill believed in all of these principles. Consequently it is surprising to discover that Mill was also in many ways a pessimist. Mill devoted much of his life to advocating liberal reforms. His intellectual commitment was dedicated to developing a ‘science of morality’ as the foundation upon which those optimistic goals could be achieved. The aim of this science was to illuminate the path to rational government and to enhance the moral and intellectual character of society as a whole. Its features would include optimal personal liberty and autonomy, a diverse and creative culture, and virtually unlimited, if always incremental, perfection of individual character. Mill was also deeply pessimistic about the achievement of these goals, believing that the incipient age of democratic politics and material prosperity produced tendencies that might stifle and even destroy liberal hopes. Critics have often attributed these contrasting and seemingly paradoxical features of Mill’s thought to inconsistency and intellectual confusion. However I will argue that Mill’s pessimism reveals an intellectual depth and a forthright political realism about England’s parliamentary democracy. His mood reflects a sophisticated appreciation of the political and moral consequences of a dynamic industrial economy that was inspiring a socialist reaction in the early decades of the nineteenth century, especially in England and France. It was also a recognition of the cultural and psychological impact of material affluence, social equality and conformity that had only begun to be noticed by the new sociology evolving in the thought of de Tocqueville, Comte and Mill himself. As a response to both of these new directions in 2 European thought, Mill’s pessimism was prescient. Unlike the Continental thinkers, Mill was keenly aware of the methodological limits of scientific sociology and convinced of the dangers to freedom and creative diversity lurking in the utopian matrices of scientific social organization. His pessimistic critiques of political liberalism and socialism in their original emergence point the way to explaining why his ideas remain provocative and illuminating in contemporary debates concerning multiculturalism and human rights. Despite being a leading advocate, Mill’s pessimism about liberal democracy was even handed. He had serious doubts that democracy could genuinely triumph against the weight of tradition and conservative institutions, but he was also keenly aware of the dangers inherent in its emergence, the ‘coming of the masses.’ His pessimism was reinforced by his opinion of England’s deficient civilisation in comparison to that of Europe, a deficiency exacerbated by the very elements that characterised England’s modernity and prosperity. Finally, as a life-long agnostic and trenchant critic of the established church, there is an implicit pessimism in Mill’s private reflections on a ‘religion of humanity’ as a necessary dimension of a rational social science. Mill’s concerns in each of these areas arose not from caution or timidity, but from a profound commitment to free inquiry, diverse and creative individuality and the inexorable progress of rational scientific thought. Importantly, his pessimism never undermined a lifelong commitment to radical movements, utilitarian reform, universal suffrage for women as well as men, labour unions and the claims of individual choice against feudal privilege, moral prescription, and social conformity. A vast scholarship over the past two generations has treated Mill as a theorist of liberalism and utilitarianism. The criticism has mainly focused on apparent conflicts between his views on liberty and utility and, more recently, on seeming contradictions and limitations inherent in nineteenth-century Eurocentric ethical preconceptions. However this paper focuses on the broader view of Mill as a life-long publicist, political activist and an eminent, deeply reflective intellectual. Even a cursory survey of his collected work reveals an astonishing life of direct engagement in the social, intellectual, literary and political life of Victorian England. Indeed, his major output was in political, literary and scientific journals and newspapers. Mill’s reform efforts were not just literary, but took the form of direct engagement. He was wide-ranging in his interests in scientific subjects. He actively corresponded in 3 French with France’s leading thinkers, translating, reviewing and introducing them to English readers. He advised politicians in both government and opposition. He was an activist in such radical reform movements as criminal law, female suffrage and the antislavery movement. As a young man he was arrested for handing out pamphlets on birth control. For most of his adult life he worked daily as an official for the East India Company, and advised Parliament in legislating its governance. These features of his personality and life’s work make him much more than simply a liberal-utilitarian political theorist. When we examine Mill’s views on liberal democracy, we are exploring the wide-ranging views of a man who, all his life, was directly engaged in debating it, instituting and reforming it in England, questioning it, comparing its prospects in America and Europe, speculating about its rivals of the feudal past and of the socialist future. From this broader perspective, criticisms that Mill’s ‘liberal theory’ was confused, internally inconsistent and unsystematic seem narrow if not insignificant. That he embodied some nineteenth-century preconceptions we may now see as prejudice. But that he was cautious and sceptical of some political tendencies is hardly surprising in one who was both a practical reformer and a probing intellect. Had he not exhibited those qualities, he would not have been a man of his own era, or of interest to ours. It is only from Mill’s contemporaneous perspective that we can appreciate a Fabian publicist’s biographical précis in 1913, which concludes with this estimation: Had he lived another ten years he would almost certainly have been amongst the founders of the Fabian Society.… It appears well within the bounds of probability that the attitude of the evolutionary Socialist upon matters connected with society…is approximating to that of Mill. And long before they emerge as things accomplished Mill will have received his rightful share of recognition as one of the moulders of modern Socialism and the future State. It is as a broadening influence that he is most important, infusing the doctrines of Liberalism with something more approaching liberality, and directing, for the first time, to the claims of labour a substantial portion of public attention. (West 1913, 21-22) To the extent that Mill could be said to abandon liberal tenets of laisser-faire economics and strict political equality, he did so not as a lapse into political conservatism but in response to his acceptance of principles articulated by French socialist thinkers. Yet his eventual rejection of socialist methodology and its aspirations for authoritarian social reformation reaffirmed the liberal values of individuality, privacy and experimental pragmatism as well as the sceptical and empirical strains of British political culture. This reaffirmation came, as he well knew, at the cost of both damning and 4 defending what he deemed to be England’s inferior intellectual development and its worsening commercialised competitive culture. He was an activist for radical social reforms and universal suffrage and supported organized labour while at the same time pessimistically warning against the looming dangers of political democratisation. A review of these tensions in Mill’s thinking provides a timely insight into the normative and universalising claims on behalf of democracy and human rights in contemporary theory. In a global perspective recently awakened, with its ideals of moral recognition and democratised political participation, Mill’s optimism and pessimism afford a salutary reflection on the particular origins of those claims. Mill’s complex intellectual disposition serves, indeed, as a point of departure for thinking about the profound religious, moral and political conflicts, both local and global, of contemporary society. 2. Critical Advocacy of Democracy From his teenage years Mill’s advocacy of utilitarian legal reform and the enlargement of the franchise placed him in the forefront of democratic change in Britain. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of a wider suffrage and republican constitutionalism in revolutionary France. Mill’s enthusiasm for popular revolution in France in the 1830s seems at odds with his later reservations about the ill effect of democracy. Yet Mill’s Autobiography (1873)1 demonstrates that he had not forgotten his youthful countenancing of ‘any struggle’ to overthrow the restored monarchy and made him hope for the revolutionary spirit to transform Britain: I thought the predominance of the aristocratic classes, the noble and the rich, in the English Constitution, an evil worth any struggle to get rid of…. I was not only as ardent as ever for democratic institutions, but earnestly hoped that Owenite, St.-Simonian and other anti-property doctrines might spread widely among the poorer classes. (I 177, 179) In 1828, at the age of twenty-two, Mill drew parallels between the aspirations of French revolutionaries, in particular the role of popular participation, and the project of political reform in England. Addressing the London Debating Society (‘Perfectability’ 1 For the sake of brevity and simplicity, Mill’s works will be identified in the text by title and original publication date, with quotations referenced to the relevant volume and page number in the Toronto edition of the Collected Works: John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963-1991), 33 vols. Available: http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/165. 5 (1828), XXVI 433), he called on the radical reformers to ‘organise the political institutions of the country so that no one could possess any power save what might be given to him by the favourable sentiments, not of any separate class with a separate interest, but of the people.’ As Coleman (1987, 339) notes, from 1828 to 1830 Mill’s advocacy of democratic participation evolved from an a priori view of human nature – ‘man’s rational pursuit of his interests and his insatiable hunger for power’ – to an assumption of inevitable historical progress. But it was also from this early period, with enthusiasm for the July Revolution bitterly disillusioned by its failure, that Mill’s attitude to the practical prospects of democracy became less doctrinaire. He acknowledged that the arrival of political democracy was likely to be very costly, and its consequences not entirely favourable from a moral and intellectual point of view. Concerning the price to be paid, at least in his private correspondence (to John Sterling, 20 October 1831), Mill expressed a reckless enthousiasme for revolutionary violence so long as it spared him and a few others. Yet Mill’s hope for revolutionary change is darkly pessimistic when he identifies the enemies of democracy. The Tory, Mill observes, ‘is essentially incompatible with any large and generous aspirations.’ He feared that even if democratic reforms could be achieved, the forces of conservatism would frustrate meaningful change ‘because the inert mass of our sluggish and enervated higher classes can be moved by nothing that does not come…with a vengeance…they cannot be led, but must be driven: the clamours of the “fierce democracy” can alone stir their feeble and lazy minds, & awaken them from the sleep of indifference.’ Mill’s fervour is couched hypothetically, but with the tacit assumption that England possessed insufficient democratic militants for the ruthless task at hand. If there were but a few dozens of persons safe (whom you & I could select) to be missionaries of the great truths in which alone there is any well-being for mankind individually or collectively, I should not care though a revolution were to exterminate every person in Great Britain & Ireland who has £500 a year. Many very amiable persons would perish, but what is the world the better for such amiable persons. (XII 83-84) In the manuscript letter Mill, with youthful chivalry, crossed out the next sentence: ‘I should only regret the women, whose proper sphere is that of the private virtues.’ But hope survived. When Grey’s Reform Bill of 1832, the third attempt at parliamentary reform, was defeated in the House of Lords, Mill saw this as the revolutionary spark. The rejection of the Reform Bill by the large majority of 41 in the House of Lords, has given an immense impulse to the mouvement in this country. All chance that the Bill 6 when passed should prove a healing measure is at an end. The House of Lords is now as much detested as ever the House of Commons was. Nothing less than the creation of from 60 to 100 liberal Peers, to change the character of the House, can now give it any chance of remaining in existence. It is said that they flinch, and will pass the Bill without any new creation, but that will not now save them. They will come into collision with the Reformed House on some other point, & will certainly go to the wall. You may consider the fate of the Church as sealed…. (XII 75) Mill’s radical convictions are revealed in his singling out working class organizations as the only hope for maintaining some semblance of public order in such volatile times: I am convinced that we are indebted for the preservation of tranquillity [sic] solely to the organisation of the people in Political Unions.… I conversed the other day with a Warwickshire magistrate who told me that the meeting of 150,000 men a few days previous would have done any thing without exception which their leaders might have proposed. They would have passed any resolutions, marched to any place, or burnt any man’s house. The agricultural people are as determined as the manufacturers. The West is as exalté as the North…the West is ready to join in any popular movement if necessary. (XII 77) Mill sees the nation teetering on the brink of class warfare. An overthrow of the constitutional order is the likeliest outcome. If the ministers flinch or the Peers remain obstinate, I am firmly convinced that in six months a national convention chosen by universal suffrage, will be sitting in London. Should this happen, I have not made up my mind what would be best to do: I incline to think it would be best to lie by and let the tempest blow over, if one could but get a shilling a day to live upon meanwhile: for until the whole of the existing institutions of society are levelled with the ground, there will be nothing for a wise man to do which the most pig-headed fool cannot do much better than he.… If [the old system] goes all at once, let us wait till it is gone: if it goes piece by piece, why, let the blockheads who will compose the first Parliament after the bill passes, do what a blockhead can do, viz. overthrow, & the ground will be cleared. (XII 75-78) Despite the apparent zeal conveyed by his description of these events, Mill admits that ‘in fact I am myself often surprised, how little I really care about them.’ Despite his radical convictions, the twenty-five year old Mill’s métier is that of a disengaged intellectual. The only thing which I can usefully do at present, & which I am doing more & more every day, is to work out principles…of morals, government, law, education, above all serf-education. I am here much more in my element: the only thing that I believe I am really fit for, is the investigation of abstract truth, & the more abstract the better. If there is any science which I am capable of promoting, I think it is the science of science itself, the science of investigation – of method. (XII 78-79) In the coming years, Mill’s views on the intellectual effects of democracy were clearly influenced by the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose own ideas about popular government in American had changed over the years, moving from enthusiastic to deeply 7 reserved and critical. In Mill’s review of the first volume of Democracy in America (London Review, October 1835), he quotes this passage from de Tocqueville: There has established itself in America, in respect to knowledge, a certain level of mediocrity. All intellects have approximated themselves to this level; some have risen up to it: others have come down to it. There are therefore found an immense multitude of individuals possessing very nearly the same number of ideas in religion, in history, in the sciences, in political economy, in legislation, and in government. (XVIII 84) Such views brought into focus Mill’s own reservations about democratic reforms and the many impacts of industrial development in England, as well as his sense of what he took to be its weak intellectual culture and the inertial effects of England’s conservative Church and universities. In so far as Tocqueville’s view of America was widely understood to be a vision, for good or ill, of the future, it was all the more reason for Mill to be pessimistic and cautious about the levelling effects of liberal and democratic reforms in England. Mill considered, with Tocqueville, that democracy was the inexorable political system. It was to be welcomed as an increase in human liberty and economic prosperity. But as Tocqueville made clear, democracy itself carried with it tendencies inimical to liberty and the diversity of human character. In later years Mill’s radical views were still freely expressed even in print. In a newspaper piece (‘Condition of Ireland,’ Morning Chronicle, 6 January 1847), he lamented the idle land retained by the feudal lords in Ireland – ‘fanciful claims of men, who have made no use of the land for twenty generations’ – when it could be beneficially divided into productive farms for the landless poor. Can any one wonder at Socialism, or Communism, after this? Can we be surprised that men should be found who passionately reject and denounce the principle of property, when we see into what a base superstition the worship of it has grown – how it deadens men’s minds to the ends for which property exists, erecting property itself into an end. (XXIV1031) Mill’s alternating hopes and despair concerning the prospects of democracy in France were again raised and dashed during the 1848 Revolution, issuing in Louis Napoleon’s coup in 1851 (Varouxakis 2002, 75-6; 153-4). These episodes underscore Mill’s considerable experience as both a political thinker and an active publicist. His ideas about democracy, in other words, were inextricably woven together in his experience as interested observer, theoretician and engaged activist in radical movements over a period of several decades. To criticise Mill as having changed his mind over his 8 lifetime with respect to liberal democracy is tantamount to criticising the dynamics of nineteenth-century political and social history in Britain, France, Germany and America. 3. The Coming of the Masses Mill’s trepidation about an emerging democratic culture was clear. What Tocqueville had identified in a frontier democracy was even more threatening in England, where stifling pressures for conformity emanated from, as it were, above and below. Mill’s concerns about mass society present a striking contrast to the democratic sympathies and revolutionary enthusiasm he confided only a few years earlier. But as ever he adopted an objective, even fatalistic, perspective on this epochal development of civilisation – as his reading of Guizot, Tocqueville and Comte had convinced him that it was. Mill expressed both awe and submission, as one might feel in the face of a great storm or earthquake. The view, expressed in his two lengthy essays, ‘Civilization’ (London & Westminster Review, April 1836) is perhaps akin to the humble wonder we feel today when viewing brilliant astrological photos of the planets or the spectacular birth of a galaxy. Thus for Mill, the great Reform Bill was not registered as the achievement of a few intellectual missionaries of moral truths or the enlightened act of rugged parliamentary leadership. Rather it was the accomplishment of a new, larger and more potent factor, the pervasive combinatory force of the ‘masses.’ The country is covered with associations…. But the greatest novelty of all is the spirit of combination which has grown up among the working classes.… A more powerful…instrument of combination than any of these…, [t]he newspaper carries home the voice of the many to every individual among them: by the newspaper each learns that others are feeling as he feels, and that if he is ready, he will find them also prepared to act upon what they feel…. Hundreds of newspapers speaking in the same voice at once…were what enabled the whole country to combine in that simultaneous energetic demonstration of determined will which carried the Reform Act. Both these facilities are on the increase [and] will enable the people on all decisive occasions, to form a collective will and render that collective will irresistible.… When the masses become powerful, an individual, or a small band of individuals, can accomplish nothing considerable except by influencing the masses…. [B]y the natural growth of civilization, power passes from individuals to masses, and the weight and importance of an individual, as compared with the mass, sink into greater and greater insignificance. (XVIII 125) For Mill this momentum influenced England than in any other nation, the effect of material progress and its inevitable concomitant, the sway of public opinion. As a powerful force of nature, its effect might be for good or ill. ‘The change which is thus in progress, and to a great extent consummated, is the greatest ever recorded in social affairs: the most complete, the most fruitful in consequences, and the most irrevocable.’ 9 (XVIII 126) The phenomenon was more profound than simply a change in tastes and opinions, or a levelling influence in manners and popular culture. Rather, the changes would render obsolete the ‘ancient institutions,’ including constitutional principles and traditional distributions of power, office and privilege. In language verging on the scornful, Mill asked ‘those who call themselves Conservatives,’ whether ‘they really think it is possible to prevent the masses from making [their] power predominant,’ given that ‘the chief power in society is passing into the hands of the masses’? (XVIII 126) The triumph of democracy, or, in other words, of the government of public opinion, does not depend upon the opinion of any individual or set of individuals that it ought to triumph, but upon the natural laws of the progress of wealth…. He must be a poor politician who does not know that whatever is the growing power in society will force its way into the government, by fair means or foul. The distribution of constitutional power cannot long continue very different from that of real power, without a convulsion…. Were the Constitution of Great Britain to remain henceforth unaltered, we are not the less under the dominion, becoming every day more irresistible, of public opinion. (XVIII 126-27) Whether Mill considered this inexorable development ‘fair or foul’ is a tantalizing question, but he was certainly scornful of what he regarded as England’s insidious means of institutional resistance. As a case in point, he expressed his ‘utter abhorrence’ of the English universities in their conscious and stubborn resistance to social change. Thus Mill satirically ‘defends’ Oxford and Cambridge: ‘You believe that the University is to prepare youths for a successful career in society: I believe the sole object is to give them that manly character which will enable them to resist the influences of society.’ In his own voice Mill asserts that the ‘vicious’ scope of ‘the English Universities…is to prevail upon their pupils, by fair means or foul, to acquiesce in the opinions which are set down for them; that the abuse of the human faculties so forcibly denounced by Locke under the name of “principling” their pupils, is their sole method in religion, politics, morality, or philosophy.’ (XVIII 139, 141) The theme of grand but dangerous powers exercised by mass society had been impressed upon Mill by Tocqueville’s examination of the slow but inexorable sevencentury evolution of human equality in Europe and the abrupt, virtually abstract, institution of egalitarian society and democratic government in America. (Mueller 1956, 138-40). How far had these influences developed in England and Europe? Mill himself had advanced egalitarianism, and continued to advocate liberal reforms for the rest of his life, despite a growing sense of trepidation and pessimism. Would the plains really be 10 raised? Could the eminences of genius and creativity survive, much less flourish, over ‘level playing fields’ and popular combinations? Every step in civilization – every victory of intellect – every advancement in wealth – has multiplied the resources of the many: while the same causes, by their indirect agency, have frittered away the strength and relaxed the energy of the few. We now find ourselves in a condition of society which, compared with that whence we have emerged, might be termed equality; yet not only are the same levelling influences still at work, but their force is vastly augmented by new elements which the world never before saw. (Review of Democracy in America, XVIII 50) In such passages Mill’s social psychology comes to the fore, indicating his focus had shifted from radical reform in English politics to larger questions of the interplay between character formation and its cultural context. To put this in the conceptual language of Mill’s scientific interests, how might the practical science of politics relate to the systematic and abstract science of social (cultural and civilisational) development? Because of the complexity and inter-relatedness of these issues, Mill has been called a radical as well as a conservative. Despite his frank pessimism about the poor and worsening prospects of democratic civilisation, he nevertheless supported political equality and liberal reform. But when his did so, his exacting and even-handed analyses of the social inertia imposed by ancient Tory privilege, seemingly exacerbated by the dulling effects of mass society, caused Mill to question the way forward. Is there, then, no remedy? Are the decay of individual energy, the weakening of the influence of superior minds over the multitude, the growth of charlatanerie, and the diminished efficacy of public opinion as a restraining power, – are these the price we necessarily pay for the benefits of civilization; and can they only be avoided by checking the diffusion of knowledge, discouraging the spirit of combination, prohibiting improvements in the arts of life, and repressing the further increase of wealth and of production? (Civilization, XVIII 135) Mill’s optimistic reply to this rhetorical question is, ‘Assuredly not.’ But it is an expression of hope, not a consequence of his analysis. In any case, the radical changes in ‘government and policy’ are unstoppable: The change which is thus in progress, and to a great extent consummated, is the greatest ever recorded in social affair: the most complete, the most fruitful in consequences, and the most irrevocable. Whoever can meditate on it, and not see that so great a revolution vitiates all existing rules of government and policy, and renders all practice and all predictions grounded only on prior experience worthless. (XVIII 126) Addressing himself to those who are blind to the inexorable ‘triumph of democracy,’ Mill drew attention to social and cultural transformation: 11 We put it to those who call themselves Conservatives, whether, when the chief power in society is passing into the hands of the masses, they really think it possible to prevent the masses from making that power predominant as well in the government as elsewhere? The triumph of democracy, or, in other words, of the government of public opinion, does not depend upon the opinion of any individual or set of individuals that it ought to triumph, but upon the natural laws of the progress of wealth. (XVIII 126-27) As Brady (1977, xxv) has observed, ‘Mill welcomed the general results of this onward thrust of civilization, but was disturbed by some of its features.’ Mill tried, but failed, to be as confident about his democratic sympathies as he was about its inexorability. It is, rather, a matter of disposition, sympathy and opinion. With regard to the advance of democracy, there are two different positions which it is possible for a rational person to take up, according as he thinks the masses prepared, or unprepared, to exercise the control which they are acquiring over their destiny, in a manner which would be an improvement upon what now exists. If he thinks them prepared, he will aid the democratic movement: or if he deem it to be proceeding fast enough without him, he will at all events refrain from resisting it. If, on the contrary, he thinks the masses unprepared for complete control over their government – seeing at the same time that, prepared or not, they cannot long be prevented from acquiring it – he will exert his utmost efforts in contributing to prepare them, using all means, on the one hand, for making the masses themselves wiser and better: on the other, for so rousing the slumbering energy of the opulent and lettered classes. (XVIII 127) Mill was doubtful that the upper classes had the capacity to relinquish the privilege and wealth that enabled them to pervert the ‘great instruments of national culture,’ the government, the Church and the universities. He asked, ‘what Tory has a scheme in view for any change [to] make the institution wear a less disgusting appearance to the eye? … [T]heir object is to profit by them while they exist.’ (XVIII 128) Mill’s disgust was expressed in language that, considering his readers’ familiarity with the terror of the French Revolution, might have been as chilling then as it is today. Mill certainly seemed to speak on behalf of the ‘many who are determined enemies’ of existing institutions against ‘those who call themselves Conservatives,’ but have yet to learn, that bodies of men who live in honour and importance upon the pretence of fulfilling ends which they never honestly seek, are the great hindrance to the attainment of those ends: and that whoever has the attainment really at heart, must expect a war of extermination with all such confederacies. (XVIII 129) Was it truly in Mill’s ‘heart’ that he countenanced ‘extermination’ as a means? Mill’s argument was, at best, skilfully ambiguous. Mill’s critique was not simply directed at the desuetude and moral debilitation of the upper classes. He moved beyond scorn to examine at the level of sociological theory the effects of social change on all social classes, especially the middle class. 12 One of the effects of a high state of civilization upon character, is a relaxation of individual energy: or rather, the concentration of it within the narrow sphere of the individual’s money-getting pursuits. As civilization advances, every person becomes dependent, for more and more of what most nearly concerns him, not upon his own exertions, but upon the general arrangements of society. In a rude state, each man’s personal security, the protection of his family, his property, his liberty itself, depended greatly upon his bodily strength and his mental energy or cunning: in a civilized state, all this is secured to him.… There remain, as inducements to call forth energy of character, the desire of wealth or of personal aggrandizement. [N]early the whole of the energy of character which exists in highly civilized societies concentrates itself on the pursuit of that object. The effect of ‘advanced civilisation’ on the wealthy is perversely inverted. Mill sketched characters that appear to be from the pen of Oscar Wilde avant la lettre. In the case, however, of the most influential classes…the desire of wealth is already sufficiently satisfied, to render them averse to suffer pain or incur much voluntary labour for the sake of any further increase.… Thus it happens that in highly civilized countries, and particularly among ourselves, the energies of the middle classes are almost confined to money-getting, and those of the higher classes are nearly extinct. (XVIII 129-30) It is interesting that this analysis of the coming of the masses, published in 1836, is consistent with Mill’s views expressed twenty-three later in On Liberty (1859): …the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.… At present individuals are lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world. The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses. This is as true in the moral and social relations of private life as in public transactions.… But they are always a mass, that is to say, collective mediocrity.… I am not complaining of all this. I do not assert that anything better is compatible, as a general rule, with the present low state of the human mind. But that does not hinder the government of mediocrity from being mediocre government. (XVIII 268-69) What we are able to draw from Mill’s combination of optimism, pessimism and even fatalism about the emergence of democratic society is his adherence to a sociological perspective. Rather than adopt doctrinaire moral and economic beliefs, or ideological advocacy of a party program, Mill remained hopeful that enlightened minds and empirical analysis could discern, gradually and in the spirit of scientific inquiry, laws of social and civilisational development. He also believed that the effects of this development on individual character were available for empirical investigation in a given society. Such knowledge, in turn, could stimulate informed debate and rational reforms that would advance civilisation and encourage human creativity. 4. Civilisation 13 The guarded optimism together with frank pessimism that characterisd Mill’s view of the masses was reflected in his writings about civilisation. Like many other nineteenthcentury writers, Mill frequently used the term civilisation in a generalised conversational manner to capture separate features and concepts. At times he classified different civilisations chronologically or as distinct cultures. At other times he used the term to mean a single historical process originating in ‘barbarism’ and evolving toward civilisation. In the latter case, Europe was assumed to be the most advanced human society in so far as it best exemplified the progressive social influences of reason, science, secularism, political liberty and democratic government. Mill’s reliance upon these controversial concepts and historiographical schemes has, of course, been widely criticised in recent years (Levin 2004, 80-84). However, much of Mill’s writing on civilisation was narrowly focussed on the relative levels or degrees of intellectual and political development in England and France, or Europe generally. England tends not to come off very well in the comparison, but Mill adopts a cosmopolitan stance. The ‘progress of democracy’ was inevitable, and its arrival at least a hopeful prospect. The crowd of English politicians, whether public men or public writers, who live in a truly insular ignorance of the great movement of European ideas, will be astonished to find, that a conclusion which but few among them, in their most far-reaching speculations, have yet arrived at, is the point from which the foremost continental thinkers begin theirs…. Not to determine whether democracy shall come, but how to make the best of it when it does come, is the scope of M. de Tocqueville’s speculations. That comprehensive survey of the series of changes composing the history of our race [is a] movement towards democracy dat[ing] from the dawn of modern civilization, and has continued steadily advancing from that time. Eight centuries ago, society was divided into barons and serfs: the barons being everything, the serfs nothing. At every succeeding epoch this inequality of condition is found to have somewhat abated. (XVIII 50) Mill lamented that in England, ‘the most insular of all the provinces of the republic of letters,’ intellectuals have largely ignored other civilisations, whereas ‘on the continent of Europe…the philosophic study of past and of foreign civilizations, is one of the encouraging features of the present time…. In France and Germany it has become a characteristic of the national intellect.’ (‘State of Society in America,’ London Review (January 1836), XVIII 94) 5. The Question of Religion Exploring the optimism and pessimism of Mill’s thinking invites a brief examination of his views on religion, if only because his essays on the subject might suggest a disillusionment in his later years from a life of secular rationalism and antipathy to 14 established religion. Mill had been carefully raised according to his father’s plan as resolutely agnostic. He was a trenchant critic of the English and Roman churches as inveterate enemies of reason and science, and his intellectual disposition was that of a staunch advocate against the submissive effects of religious dogma and priestly authority. Nevertheless, it is tempting to think of his private and deeply considered reflections in the three essays on religion as a kind of disillusionment with social science, utilitarianism and secular rationalism. Might this be a return to the poetry and emotion that he had embraced as the result of his existential crisis at the age of twenty-one, when he first experienced the limitations of his formation as the child prodigy, a ‘thinking machine’? In fact the background to the essays is considerably more complicated than the existential doubts of widowed and dying old man. Indeed, Mill’s reconsideration of the role of religion in society was stimulated by his lengthy exchanges with Auguste Comte’s conception of a new scientific religion of humanity. Mill’s ‘English’ disposition of scepticism was steeped in empiricism and experimental method in science, together with a commitment to a large sphere of individual liberty and toleration, especially in matters of faith, political opinion, and religion dissent. He found Comte’s proposal to revive the feudal structures of absolute dogma and priestly hierarchy quite bizarre, and with unfailing civility, told Comte as much in the last phase of their active correspondence. Yet this vast chasm between the two thinkers presented to Mill a challenge: to explore and understand the importance of religion in the formation of character and its wide effects in society. If, as Tocqueville and Guizot taught, a people’s culture and social formation profoundly influenced political institutions, then surely the contribution of religious experience to the formation of belief, faith, emotional attachment and allegiance must be the subjects of social scientific inquiry. Thus Mill was moved to ask whether belief, faith and spiritual life played an essential role in society, both in the formation of individual character and the stability and quality of a political culture? Mill might have dismissed religion as an outmoded artefact, surviving simply as a concentrated and institutionalised form of conservatism, an enemy of reason and science, an excrescence of superstition and absolutism that was an unnecessary drag on rational reform and individual liberty. Indeed Mill often expressed these very criticisms. But as early as the System of Logic (1843), he acknowledged the importance of religion in 15 forming and sustaining feelings of fealty as a precondition for any society’s stable existence: The second condition of permanent political society [a system of laws being the first] has been found to be…the feeling of allegiance or loyalty. This feeling may vary in its objects, and is not confined to any particular form of government; but whether in a democracy or in a monarchy, its essence is always the same; viz. that there be in the constitution of the state something which is settled, something permanent, and not to be called in question; something which, by general agreement, has a right to be where it is, and to be secure against disturbance, whatever else may change. This feeling may attach itself, as…in most of the commonwealths of antiquity, to a common God or gods, the protectors and guardians of their state. (VIII 922) Having recognised the importance of religion as effectively equivalent to law as a requisite condition of political society, it is not surprising that Mill took it upon himself to address the topic in greater depth in his essays on Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865) and in the posthumously published Three Essays on Religion (published in 1874; the first two being completed in 1854, the third in the period 1868-70). He approaches religion from an analytical perspective of scientific sociology rather than as a belief system requiring ethical tolerance or logical refutation. Mill’s interest was not driven by a liberal-minded appreciation of diversity, nor simply another instance of his freethinking ‘many-sidedness.’ What if faith, as developed in some form of religious practice, is essential to the formation of individual identity and character, and to the development of society’s collective coherence, cultural experience and strength? (System of Logic, VIII 922) Mill raised this question privately in his diary entry of 23 January 1854: There seems to be so little talent now, only because there is universal uncertainty about the great questions, and the field for talent is narrowed to things of subaltern interest. Ages of belief, as Goethe says, have been the only ages in which great things have been done. Ages of belief have hitherto always been religious ages: but Goethe did not mean, that they must necessarily be so in future. (XXVII 645-46) Mill’s letters to Comte speculated about the importance of feeling, sentiment and emotional and æsthetic experience, a view Comte dismissed on the grounds that only reason, science and the intellect were to determine social reformation. For Mill, the important elements of medieval Christianity (to individual character and experience) were the heightened spiritual devotion aroused by the music and liturgy in the spectacle of the mass, the beauty of the art and architecture, the affiliation of the congregants. Comte sought to diminish or extirpate these features, insisting that life should be arranged and regulated according the scientific precepts of positive knowledge 16 established by the superior intellects of the philosopher-scientists. Faith, or the wide range of emotions, had nothing to do with it. What was important was not how people felt, but how they acted. They must be guided not by opinion, feeling or disposition, but by the laws determined by the positive knowledge of the social system. So in a curious way, Mill the agnostic unbeliever was a defender of religion and religious practice against Comte, the founder of the new religion. As Iris Mueller (1956, 131-32) notes, Mill credited the French thinker as ‘the first to realize the susceptibility of majesty in the idea of the human race, as a source of emotion and as a motive for conduct.’ Despite Mill’s revulsion from Comte’s maniacal claims as the pope of the new religion, in a diary entry of 24 January 1854 (XXVII 646), Mill expressed his guarded appreciation of the ‘cult of humanity’ proposed in Comte’s Système de Politique Positive (1851-54). Mill’s Three Essays on Religion (X 369-489) therefore effectively engaged in theological speculation about the ‘rationality’ of religious faith. That is to say, he does not simply discuss religion sociologically, as an institutional tradition: a locus of political power and cultural transmission. Like Machiavelli, Mill acknowledged the social utility of religion and faith. But Mill goes further, inquiring into the psychological and characterological (Mill might have preferred his term, ‘ethological’) process of religious belief and an acceptance of a transcendent, divine or creator being. Does the individual need, or benefit from, belief in a suprarational being to broaden and deepen one’s personal identity and humane sympathy? Is character better formed for affiliation, duty, honesty and a life purpose if these things are given meaning and emotional force from such belief? Must society require of its citizens a bedrock belief in a supreme being as a foundation for the state’s legitimacy and coercive authority? Mill’s willingness to extend political speculation to a theological terrain ‘dismayed his disciples’ (Feuer 1976, 96; Morley 1888), who worried that even entertaining the idea of a ‘religion of humanity,’ much less Comte’s supervening conception of the Grand Être, could undermine the rigorous secular rationality of Mill’s life’s work. Yet in a wider view, Mill’s inquiry only revisited the sensitive terrain of faith and politics explored by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, as well as many other political theorists. It is easy to forget, in a secular age, that these ‘modern’ political philosophers acknowledged, however minimally, what had been required of citizens and subjects from ancient times. 17 Confessed faith in the Deity had always been morally and legally requisite for membership in civil society. Indeed, in the ideal republic of Rousseau’s Social Contract, exile or death was prescribed for atheists. 6. Conclusion Mill’s optimism and pessimism regarding civilisation and religion, and his trepidation about egalitarian mass society, are timely and significant perspectives on a body of thought that is perhaps more relevant today than when On Liberty was published 150 years ago. Mill’s emotional dispositions illuminate his intellectual curiosity and rigorous honesty with respect to moral and political issues that continue to challenge contemporary political theory. There has been a resurgent inquiry in recent years concerning the role of religion in politics. The age-old claims and counter-claims on behalf of the ancient religions in conservative Christianity, Zionism, and Islamic theocracy and jurisprudence are as vexing, and perhaps more violent, than they have been for centuries. The obvious salience of religion in practical politics – in mass movements, powerful interests, legislation and litigation – is echoed in political theory. The Enlightenment ideal of secular rationalism as a core presupposition of politics in Western modernity seems increasingly archaic. Secularism has yielded ground to ‘non-sectarianism,’ a semantic shift that reflects significant normative changes and conceptual misgivings in the multicultural and pluralist debates of liberal theory. The growing importance of theological argument and privileged claims on behalf of religious culture are now commonplaces of global politics, though this would have been a surprising and provocative claim a decade or two ago. Among modern Western intellectuals, until recently, scientific discourse seemed solidly grounded in positivist empirical method; secular utilitarianism was the accepted language of social policy and legislation; rationalism was the prevailing method in intellectual debate. In other words, the ‘conventional’ Mill of utilitarianism, individuality, agnosticism, empiricism, and experimental science that prevailed in conventional approaches to moral, political and philosophical questions in the contemporary West, and in many other regions of the world, is challenged on many theoretical fronts: pluralism, feminism, postmodernism and post-colonialism inter alia. 18 This change in perspective suggests that it is timely to revisit the ‘unconventional’ Mill who identified the importance of religious faith in conceptions of political authority. Acknowledging the creative potential of spiritual experience, Mill recognised that ideas, and our adherence to them, were not simply naked facts produced by a rational faculty; nor are they mere prejudices and conditioned beliefs. Rather, knowledge and associated ideas in part arise by curiosity, passion and reflection. Ideas are inescapably embodied in images, sounds and objects; they arouse æsthetic and emotional responses we have to their patterns and significance; and such feelings in turn stimulate us to preserve, perfect and value them. From such experiences come not only the formation of individual character, but our sense of belonging to groups, our adherence to customs and habits and our allegiance to institutions. These were not only the adventitious conditions of tribes and nations or utilities for wielding power, but rather were the common resource and foundation of civilisation. To understand these things was, for Mill, the work of moral science, and it was from such a perspective that he broached the idea of a cult or religion of humanity. Such a viewpoint, now described as ‘constructivist’ or ‘cultural embedment,’ offers an ironic estimation of recent efforts to ‘export’ democracy or any other political ideology: one of the most important, and until lately, most neglected…principles [in] social science may be considered established; namely, the necessary correlation between the form of government existing in any society and the contemporaneous state of civilization; a natural law which stamps the endless discussions and innumerable theories respecting forms of government in the abstract, as fruitless and worthless.’ (System of Logic, VIII 919-920.) This was, for Mill, not to deny the importance of other factors, such as tradition or material wealth. Indeed Mill (1845) urged the social scientist to ‘look upon history as an indispensable test and verifier of all doctrines and creeds.” But it was nevertheless his considered opinion that the progressive direction of history was shaped by the power of ideas and the knowledge accumulated by reason, experience and science. Mill was convinced, Feuer (1976, 91) notes, that ‘political revolutions…originate in moral revolutions.’ Underlying all progressive change, in Mill’s view, was simply a persisting moral aspiration in men which could never be stifled but rather endured through all the ‘compressions’ of human character to avail itself of the rare social transformations which enabled humanity to resume its linear advance. Mill’s pessimism is reflected in his view that this advance was not determined or inexorable. Nor was it permanent. Mill elaborated this indeterminacy in his final and 19 most speculative essay of religion, Theism (X 459, 488-89). So there were no causal forces that predicated or predetermined humanity’s efforts to accomplish civility, liberty. Indeed, as Feuer (1987, 96) summarises, there was in human nature the opposing instinct for domination, for ‘hatred, selfishness and cruelty.’ That civilization had risen as far as it had against the evil inscribed in man’s animal nature seemed a cosmo-historical fact of such improbable proportions that its actual occurrence defied the categories of sociological understanding. Thus it was that Mill was driven toward a sociological theology. In contemporary thinking, there has been a re-emergence of the idea of a ‘religion of humanity.’ It is not always expressed in theological or metaphysical language, but there is a febrile tissue of moral and philosophical idealism implicit in the contemporary discourse of international law and justice, universal human rights, the rights of future generations, the rights of animals, and the sanctity and supremacy of the natural world. Clearly these movements have mass appeal as well as well intellectual exponents. Not unlike religions, they attract passionate followers, zealous and charismatic leaders, and are popularly represented by simple doctrines rather than a coherent framework of ideas. There have also been sophisticated voices overtly proposing the necessity of something very like the ‘religion of humanity’ speculated upon by Mill and even Comte. For example, Václav Havel’s plea on behalf of human rights appeals to a common supervening metaphysical faith in a realm beyond ‘the world of human covenants – in a realm that I would, for simplicity’s sake, describe as metaphysical.’ human beings – the only creatures who are fully aware of their own being and of their mortality, and who perceive their surroundings as a world and have an inner relationship to that world – derive their dignity, as well as their responsibility, from the world as a whole; that is, from that in which they see the world’s central theme, its backbone, its order, its direction, its essence, its soul – name it as you will. Christians put this quite simply: man is here in the image of God. (Havel 1998) Havel (1994) frankly appeals to a transcendent cosmology as the only hope for global cooperation, unity and peace: since time immemorial, the key to the existence of the human race, of nature and of the universe, as well as the key to what is required of human responsibility has always been found in what transcends humanity, in what stands above it. Humanity must respect this if the world is to survive.… However different the paths followed by different civilizations, we can find the same basic message at the core of most religions and cultures throughout history: people should revere God as a phenomenon that transcends them; they should revere one another; and they should not harm their fellow humans. 20 It is highly unlikely that Mill would have expressed or embraced such views. But it is at least worth speculating that the yearning for transcendence of which Havel speaks is a latter day enunciation of Mill’s own appreciation of a religion of humanity (Diary, 23 January 1854 XXVII 645): ‘Religion, of one sort or another, has been at once the spring and the regulator of energetic action, chiefly because religion has hitherto supplied the only Philosophy of Life, or the only one which differed from a mere theory of selfindulgence.’ 21 References Brady, Alexander 1977. Introduction, Essays on Politics and Society, vol. 18, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Hobson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Coleman, J. (1987) ‘John Stuart Mill and the French Revolution,’ in ed. J. C. Wood, John Stuart Mill: Critical Assessments IV, London: Croom Helm, 335-353. Comte, Auguste 1851-54. Système de politique positive, ou Traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l’humanité, 4 vols. Paris: Mathias. Feuer, L.S. 1976. ‘John Stuart Mill as a Sociologist: The Unwritten Ethology,’ in J.M. Robson and M. Laine eds, James and John Stuart Mill: Papers of the Centenary Conference. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 86-110. Havel, Václav 1994. The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World, a speech delivered in Philadelphia, 4 July 1994. Available 28 April 2005: http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/havelspeech.html Havel, Václav 1998. Speech given by President Václav Havel commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Switzerland, Geneva. 16 March. Available 7 July 2009: http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=projevy&val=135_aj_projevy.html &typ=HTML Levin, Michael 2004. J.S. Mill on Civilization and Barbarism. London: Frank Cass. Mill, John Stuart 1845. ‘Guizot’s Essays and Lectures on History,’ Edinburgh Review, October (XX 717). Mill, John Stuart 1963-1991. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. J.M. Robson ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 33 vols. Accessed from http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/165 Morley, John 1988. Critical Miscellanies III. London, New York, Macmillan, 18861908. Mueller, Iris Wessel 1956. John Stuart Mill and French Thought. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 22 Verouxakis, Georgios 2002. Victorian Political thought on France and the French. London: Palgrave. West, Julius 1913. John Stuart Mill, Fabian Tract No. 168. London: Fabian Society.