John Stuart Mill: On Liberty

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In Chapter 1 of On Liberty, Mill is concerned with “the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.” Historically, when the struggle was between subjects and rulers, “liberty” meant protection against the tyranny of rulers. Liberty took two forms: first, the recognition of political rights, which the ruler was bound by duty not to infringe, and, second, constitutional checks, by which the consent of the community or its representative body were made necessary for important acts of the governing power. The time came, however, when the existence of government as an independent power was no longer thought necessary. The ruling power came to be understood as emanating from the citizenry. As a result, some came to believe that too much importance had been attached to the limitation of power as such. Attention shifted from limiting power to ensuring that the rulers were identified with the people.

Government by the people, however, exposed the potential for abuse of power by the people themselves. Mill notes that the “self-government” of modern democracy does not mean government of each person by himself or herself; it means government “of each by all the rest.” So the potential for abuse of power is undiminished, and the need to protect against abuse is as important as ever. “The tyranny of the majority” is one of the evils against which society must be on guard. Where society itself is the tyrant, tyranny can take the form of “the prevailing opinion and feeling.” Those concerned with civil liberty have to protect against “the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.” Central to Mill's argument is the assertion that “there is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”

The practical question of where to place the limit is a difficult one, but it is “the principal question in human affairs.” The practical principle that guides people's opinions on the regulation of human conduct is “the feeling in each person's mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathizes, would like them to act.” When there is “an ascendant class,” much of the morality of a country “emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority.” Rules laid down for general observance, subject to penalty of law or opinion, are almost entirely determined by the likes and dislikes of the most powerful portion of a society. Mill cites the struggle for religious liberty as an instance.

Mill asserts the absolute sovereignty of the individual over his or her own body and mind and maintains that the only part of individual conduct for which one is answerable to society is that which concerns others. He acknowledges that both inaction and action may cause evil to others, so social regulation of the individual may require action as well as prohibit it on the basis of “permanent interests.” But there is a sphere of action in which society has no more than an indirect interest, and that is the region of human liberty: liberty of conscience, liberty of thought and feeling, absolute freedom of opinion on all subjects, and freedom of association. The tendency in the world at large is to expand the power of society over the individual, both by opinion and by law, so this is not an evil that is likely to spontaneously disappear.