Mill, Liberty and the Facts of Life
| Author | Murray Milgate,Shannon C. Stimson |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00311 |
| Published date | 01 June 2001 |
| Date | 01 June 2001 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Mill, Liberty and the Facts of Life
Shannon C. Stimson
University of California, Berkeley
and Murray Milgate
Queens’ College, Cambridge
This paper examines John Stuart Mill’s discussion of economic liberty and individual liberty, and
his view of the relationship between the two. It explores how, and how effectively, Mill developed
his arguments about the two liberties; reveals the lineages of thought from which they derived;
and considers how his arguments were altered by political economists not long after his death. It
is argued that the distinction Mill drew between the two liberties provided him with a framework
of concepts which legitimized significant government intervention in economic matters without
restricting individual liberty.
[T]he so-called doctrine of Free Trade […] rests on grounds different from,
though equally solid with, the principle of individual liberty asserted in
this Essay. […] As the principle of individual liberty is not involved in the
doctrine of Free Trade, so neither is it in most of the questions which
arise respecting the limits of that doctrine (On Liberty, pp. 116–7).
When contemporary liberals read their own views back into John Stuart Mill they
often claim to see a liberalism that goes all the way down – one that permeates his
moral, political and economic thought. When they look up and notice tensions,
near-contradictions, or differences in the way Mill talked about liberty in each of
these spheres, they have then to decide whether he was confused, inconsistent or
hopelessly eclectic. It may just be that the problem lies less in Mill than in the
general presumption that the same vision of liberty runs through all of his thought.
That Mill’s discussions of liberty contain a fundamental disjuncture has of course
not gone unnoticed. In a famous essay entitled ‘Individualism: true and false’
(1946), Hayek drew a sharp distinction between what he called a ‘false’ rationalistic
individualism as exemplified (he claimed) by the English utilitarians and the French
physiocrats, and a ‘true’ anti-rationalistic individualism which he associated with
Adam Ferguson, Smith, Burke and Tocqueville. To ‘false’ individualism Hayek
attributed illiberal political tendencies, while to ‘true’ individualism he attributed
genuine political liberty. What is interesting about Hayek’s dichotomy is that
it located John Stuart Mill in both camps (1946, pp. 11 and 28) and accurately
recognized the existence of a disjuncture in Mill’s discussion of liberty. Of course,
according to Hayek, Mill’s opinions were to be understood as a confusing mixture
of earlier contrasting traditions, so that they had the dual consequence of obscuring
from view the ‘true’ character of individualism (1946, p. 26) and of giving indi-
vidualism a bad name (1946, p. 11).
In another influential reading of Mill, Gertrude Himmelfarb highlighted the same
disjuncture in Mill’s argument. Like Hayek, Himmelfarb seems to have been
© Political Studies Association, 2001.
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S H A N N O N C . S T I M S O N , M U R R A Y M I L G A T E
interested in recovering from Mill what she took to be a more ‘temperate, humane,
capacious liberalism’ (1974, p. xxii) whose luminaries included Montesquieu,
Burke, Tocqueville and the Founding Fathers (1974, p. 337). The strategy she de-
ployed to arrive at essentially the same conclusion as Hayek, however, was rather
different. Himmelfarb held that Mill never intended to extend ‘the one very simple
principle’ of On Liberty to all forms of social action, and she called attention instead
to the other Mill whose thoughts on liberty were expressed in different works.
This other Mill, she argued, placed significant weight on the positive functions of
society, government and the state in enforcing moral values (1974, p. 336). On
Himmelfarb’s reading, then, Mill’s discussions were less a misleading mixture of
opposing traditions than two quite separable arguments about liberty between
which contemporary liberals must choose.
While it is true that there are two arguments about liberty in Mill’s work, it can
be argued that their sources and implications are different from those either
Himmelfarb or Hayek would have us believe. They should be seen neither as a
confusing mixture nor as an inconsistency requiring us to choose between opposed
and incompatible views.1 Instead, Mill’s arguments appear to originate, in part, in
a distinction he drew within both his science of politics and his science of political
economy between what might usefully be called ‘matters of opinion’ and ‘matters
of fact’ – and the methods of analysis appropriate to each. This distinction runs
deep in Mill’s thinking. Once it is recognized, it becomes possible to understand
and account for many of Mill’s complex commitments to liberty.
It helps to explain, for example, his praise of laissez-faire on the one hand and his
sympathies with socialism on the other. It clarifies why he valued free competition
in the market place for ideas, but warned of the destructive effects of competition
on character and culture in the market place for commodities. It reconciles his fear
of the encroachments of a paternalist state with his advocacy of expansive govern-
ment as an enabler of both economic and moral progress. In short, the key to under-
standing the complexities of Mill’s arguments about liberty appears to turn on
tracing the differing scope of his science of politics and political economy respect-
ively, and revealing the qualitatively different character of the argumentation and
conclusions of each.
The aim of this paper, therefore, is to re-examine Mill’s account of economic
and moral life, and to consider Mill’s theories of politics and political economy
in relation to the views of other utilitarians and classical political economists. The
interest here is neither in evaluating varieties of liberalism, nor in determining
whether it is better to treat ideas about economic liberty and individual liberty as
being closely connected or disjoint. Instead, our intention is to consider how, and
how effectively, Mill was able to develop his arguments about liberty; to reveal the
lineages of thought from which they might have derived; and to show how his
arguments were altered by political economists not long after his death.
Individual Freedom, the Freedom of Trade and the
‘Facts’ of Economic Life
The grounds upon which Mill felt that it was possible to draw so clear a distinction
between the discussion of the two liberties is bound up with his particular
M I L L , L I B E R T Y A N D T H E F A C T S O F L I F E
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conception of the relation between the sciences of politics and political economy,
as well as with his vision of the distinctive character of the science of political
economy itself. While political economy and the science of politics were both moral
sciences, they differed significantly in their reach. Political economy was to be
conceived narrowly; as a science that studied the acquisitive behaviour of wealth-
seeking individuals. Mill described it as one concerned exclusively with man ‘as a
being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging of the
comparative efficacy of means for obtaining that end’ (1836, p. 137). Furthermore,
according to Mill, the predictions of political economy involved only those ‘phe-
nomena of the social state as take place in consequence of the pursuit of wealth’
or, what amounts to the same thing, the economic behaviour of individuals in a
competitive market. In this manner, Mill was able to claim that political economy
abstracted from ‘every other human passion or motive; except those that may be
regarded as perpetually antagonizing to the desire of wealth, namely aversion to
labour and desire of the present enjoyment of costly indulgences’ (1836, pp. 137–8;
see also 1872, VI.ix.§3).
It was for this reason that Mill maintained that ‘with respect to those parts of
human conduct of which wealth is not even the principal object, […] Political
Economy does not pretend that its conclusions are applicable’ (1836, p. 139). In so
describing economic man, Mill was insistent on its status as an abstract construct;
one that was instrumental to the analysis of market behaviour, but that never-
theless remained ‘an arbitrary definition of man’ (1836, p. 144).2 While necessary
to the science of political economy, this model of man was far too attenuated to
form the basis of a broader science of politics. For Mill, that science was concerned
with the larger and ‘permanent interests of man as a progressive being’ (1859,
p. 16) rather than with man as a ‘trampling, crushing, elbowing’ market participant
(1871, IV.vi.§2). In this way, the science of politics, which embraced ‘every part of
man’s nature, in so far as influencing the conduct or condition of man in society’,
became for Mill the ‘foundation of practical politics, or the art of government, of
which the art of legislation is a part’ (1836, p. 136).3
Mill’s claim was that the laws of the market take on the character of the laws
of the natural sciences (1872, VI.ix.§3; see also 1836, p. 125). They are ‘abstract
truths’ (1836, IV, p. 329) and ‘errors in political economy’ are not in any simple
sense ‘the rejection of any practical rules of policy which have been laid down
by political economists’, but rather they demonstrate ‘ignorance of economic facts,
and...
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