On a Contradiction in Mill's Argument for Liberty
| Author | Michael Levin |
| Published date | 01 September 1999 |
| Date | 01 September 1999 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9256.00099 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
On a Contradiction inOn a Contradiction in
Mill's Argument forMill's Argument for
Liberty.Liberty.
Michael Levin
1
Mill took very seriously the warning example
from China that even a civilised country
could stagnate and become a backwater of
world development. Although certain sections
of Mill's On Liberty have been scrutinised,
evaluated and debated with intense care,
this, his most fundamental warning to his
own society ± that it was systematically
undermining its own pre-eminence ± has sti-
mulated relatively little investigation. This
article notes Mill's concern with social stag-
nation and suggests that, even in terms of his
own presentation of the balance of social
forces, his proposed countermeasures of
`eccentricity' and `refusal to bend the knee'
are futile gestures quite insucient to combat
the tendencies he outlined.
Civilisation and regression
`We have a warning example in China
. . . they have become stationary ± have
remained so for thousands of years'. (Mill,
1989 [1859], pp. 71±72)
Most recent discussion of On Liberty has
been on its philosophical aspects and has,
consequently, neglected its fundamental poli-
tical purpose. Mill wrote On Liberty because
he thought that liberty was under threat and
that the very foundations of European global
pre-eminence were being undermined.
Our main purpose will be to concentrate
on that aspect of On Liberty that consists of a
social and political manifesto concerned to
defend Western civilisation against powerful
tendencies eroding it from within. On this
issue the baleful warning example of China is
crucial, for Mill believed that China was a
once advanced civilisation that had come to a
standstill, stuck in the sluggish backwaters of
the historical stream.
Mill's most developed and best-known
argument on China as a warning to the West
is in chapter 3 of On Liberty. Here Mill
moved from his focus on individual self-
development to the more global issue of how
Europe had elevated itself above the rest of
mankind. China now appears as the supreme
example of a characteristic of the whole East.
Mill noted that civilisation had died out in the
Byzantine Empire and also that `The greater
part of the world has, properly speaking, no
history, because the despotism of Custom is
complete. This is the case over the whole
East' (Mill, 1989[1859], p. 70 and see p. 65)
Mill assumes that `Those [unspeci®ed]
nations must [emphasis added] once have
had' the originality that made them `the great-
est and most powerful nations of the world',
but they were only `progressive for a certain
Politics (1999) 19(3) pp. 153±157
#Political Studies Association 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 153
Michael Levin, Goldsmiths College, University of London
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