JS Mill and the Despotism of Progress

Dr Deneen is Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and a well-known writer on political theory from a conservative and Catholic POV.

From UnHerd

By Patrick Deneen, PhD

Conservatives have been fooled by his vision of liberty

In this oppressive era of hushed voices, furtive glances and underground resistance, it is little wonder that John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty has become an inspiration and a recourse for a new generation. Since its publication in 1859, Mill’s brief on behalf of liberty of speech, opinion, expression and action has become a rallying philosophy for those experiencing conditions of constraint, limitation, and oppression — whether political, social, religious, academic or interpersonal. A century and a half after his death, Mill’s argument on behalf of an “atmosphere of freedom”, limited only when words or actions result in harm, is the governing philosophy of the liberal order.

Yet while Mill’s text was written as a defence of the requisite conditions for a liberal society, today it is self-described conservatives who are most likely to invoke its arguments. If it was the free-thinkers in the Victorian era who were likely to be “canceled” by religious traditionalists — the source of most immediate concern for Mill — today the situation is the opposite. Conservatives and “classical liberals” of various stripes today regularly invoke Mill as a refutation against the oppressiveness of the progressives. One of America’s more prominent religious conservatives, the Catholic legal theorist Robert George of Princeton University, has become among the most prominent of Millian free speech defenders. “[We should] go back to John Stuart Mill,” he characteristically suggested last year. “Having legal protection for free, robust discourse in place is one thing, and it’s a very important thing, and it’s, as I say, a necessary thing, but it’s not sufficient. In addition to those legal norms protecting free speech, we need to build a culture of free speech.”

However, it is far from clear that Mill would be pleased by these new admirers of his work. Indeed, there’s good reason to believe Mill would be deeply gratified by the new progressive hegemony his arguments have produced. Mill’s case on behalf of liberty was not, as today’s conservatives and libertarians mistakenly believe, an argument for freedom of expression as an end in itself, but rather, a means toward a further end: regime change. The regime he hoped to overturn was the custom-bound society of Victorian England, as well as the traditional civilisation of the West more broadly, particularly its classical and Christian inheritance. The regime he hoped to usher in was none other than the progressivism that now dominates the major institutions of the West.

Throughout his text, Mill is clear that liberty is a means of displacing what he called “the despotism of custom”. Robert George is correct that Mill’s concern was less the narrowly legal defence of free speech, expression and action, and more a worry about the spectre of social conformity. Mill begins his text by arguing that an earlier generation of philosophers and political actors had secured formal liberalism — limited government and political representation of the demos. He observed that formal liberty was ultimately useless in a society that remained bound by traditional opinion — the social “tyranny of the majority”. His aim, then, was to secure the social conditions of liberty, aligning an increasingly liberal political order with what were less liberal civic, social and private domains.

Social conformity for Mill took a particular form: the untoward social dominance of the many over a small minority of people who were marked by distinctive features of “individuality”. The oppression he decried percolated from the bottom-up, an informal but nevertheless pervasive way of life that was reflected in society’s customary practices. In Mill’s Victorian era, such customs included what might still be categorised as “manners and morals”, regulating informally but powerfully everything from dress to forms of address, table manners to social comportment, expectations of church attendance to avoidance of visible vices. Of course, it also involved social conformity to traditional sexual roles and behaviour, distinguishing between men and women, exerting strong pressure toward marriage, and dispersing the norm that marriage was the necessary institution in which children were born and sheltered, provided for by the man and typically raised primarily by the mother. This web of social expectations constituted a form of “despotism”, and for Mill, its source and most powerful enforcer was everyday people. His philosophy was an argument of how to liberate the unique, inventive, free-thinking few from the oppression of the herd-like, tradition-bound, narrow and unadventurous many. Liberty was the means of moving the social order from one that was conservative to one that was liberationist.