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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
John Stuart Mill is one of the very few philosophical representatives of the liberal political tradition to have given a detailed and sympathetic examination of the socialist critique of private property. While endorsing many of the extreme criticisms of the existing property system that serve as premises in arguments for socialism, Mill is definitely opposed to recommending socialism as an expedient for the present and inclined to be skeptical of the idea that at some future time socialism will be the right form of social organization. Prominent among the various reasons which incline Mill to this skepticism is a concern that socialism poses a threat to individual liberty. That concern I propose to examine in this essay.
1 Mill, John Stuart, “Chapters on Socialism,” in Collected Works, Vol. 10,Google Scholar ed. by J. M. Robson (Toronto, 1967), 737.
2 Ibid., 739. See also Principles of Political Economy, Collected Works, Vol. 2, Bk. 2, ch. 1, section 2, 202-203.
3 For the purposes of this paper, Mill's usage of the terms “liberty” and “freedom” will have to be left unanalyzed. Here I limit myself to calling attention to the fact that for Mill, unlike many theorists of liberty, poverty and a lack of means can count as restrictions on liberty. This is evident from his comments on freedom under private property towards the end of section 3 of the “Of Property” chapter of his Principles of Political Economy, and from corresponding passages in the posthumous “Chapters on Socialism,” e.g. 710. In chapter V of On Liberty, Mill remarks that “liberty consists in doing what one desires,” but the context shows Mill specifically concerned to deny that blocking a person from acting on non-deliberate, easily remedied ignorance of plain fact constitutes a violation of On Liberty's anit-paternalist principle. It is not clear that Mill intends to give a general characterization. But supposing this hint to be followed up, it should not be imagined that analyzing liberty in terms of the availability of the agent of opportunities to satisfy his desires will collapse the distinction between the goal of maximizing freedom and the goal of maximizing utility. For freedom has to do with the agent's desires regarding his own actions only. In a famous footnote to his essay, “Two Concepts of liberty” Isaiah Berlin proposes that the extent of a person's freedom seems to depend upon — among other things — ”.what value not merely the agent, but the general sentiment of the society in which he lives, puts on the various possibilities.” Mill, I suspect, would decline this gambit. Mill wants to preserve the freedom of the eccentric, the nonconformist, the minority dissident. Presumably then he would wish to say that how free an eccentric is depends on his own evaluation of the alternatives available to him, not on the evaluations that happen to be prevalent in society. To make this line of thought plausible it will be necessary to incorporate into the analysis higher-order desires (perhaps the agent is indifferent to chess but does prize having the opportunity to choose chess), maybe the future desires of the agent, and certainly conditionals concerning the effect on a person's desires of making a certain alternative available to him. Since Mill never really takes up this analysis, imagining what he might have said is bound to be inconclusive. Given this, I would be content to describe the result of my paper in this way: Mill does not possess a conception of freedom sufficiently determinate to generate a freedom-regarding preference for private over public ownership schemes.
4 Principles of Political Economy, 208-209. This is quoted from the third edition, which is more sanguine about the advantages of socialism than anything Mill wrote before or later. The same sentence occurs in earlier editions, followed by the remark: “The [communist] scheme which we are considering (at least as it is commonly understood) abrogates this freedom entirely, and places every action of every member of the community under command.“ See Collected Works, Vol. 2, 978. There may be a confusion here between being dependent on the will of another, and being unfree because the other actually exerts his will restrictively. Mill also writes on the same page,” … it is surely a vast advantage on the side of the individual system, that it is compatible with a far greater degree of personal liberty.“
5 “Chapters on Socialism,” 745. Mill in this passage explicitly limits himself to a consideration of Communism, but the same objection would in fact be equally valid against any form of socialism, if it were valid at all. libertyregarding reasons for restricting the duties of government to a necessary minimum are given in Principles of Political Economy, Bk. 5, ch. 11, sections 3 and 4.
6 Mill's own strategies for holding tyranny of the majority in check ignore the possibilities of erecting constitutional protections of special freedoms, such as freedom of speech and of assembly. Instead of seeking to preserve freedom by devices which hedge the power of the majority while increasing the power of already privileged minorities, as Mill does, a more traditional strategy is to insulate certain issues from the day-to-day political process altogether, by hard-to-alter constitutional guarantees. Mill would doubtless point out that such institutional remedies will have little effect apart from a principled consensus among the citizenry in favor of the freedoms the constitution attempts to protect, but (a) the constitutional guarantees may themselves direct popular attention to the arguments for freedom and so help build the needed consensus, and (b) legal safeguards while never fool-proof are not completely inefficacious either. Needless to say, a socialist society can avail itself of a Bill of Rights as readily as a capitalist society.
7 Principles of Political Economy, Bk. 2, ch. 1, section 3, 209. Cf. the comparable phrasing in earlier editions, 978-979.
8 For Mill, that is. See note 3.
9 Cf. Principles of Political Economy, 956-960.
10 Mill's vagueness on this score is noted by Robbins, Lionel, in The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy (London, 1961), 159.Google Scholar See Mill, , Principles of Political Economy, Bk. 4,Google Scholar ch. 7, sections 4-7, 766-796.
11 Cf. On Liberty (library of liberal Arts edition, 1956), 6.
12 Principles of Political Economy, Bk. 5, ch. 11, section 12,956-960, and sections 15-16, 968-971.
13 Being in the majority does not strictly guarantee that one's strongest desire is realized. For one may be voting for a lesser evil, having calculated that one's real preferences cannot gain majority support. But similarly on a market the preferences I act on may not be my “real” preferences, but those lessfavored preferences that I believe are feasible given the likely actions of others.
14 Here I have in mind the argument on behalf of the liberty of the small businessman put forward by the character Guillermo in Five Families by Oscar Lewis. The argument is reasonable, but rests on a factual premise Mill cannot accept.
15 “Chapters on Socialism,” 746. See also Mill's enthusiasm for experiments in producer cooperatives, expressed in Principles of Political Economy, 766- 794. Workers can Join with like-minded fellow workers in a cooperative, and need not be harnessed to the projects favored by the generality of the populace.
16 Principles of Political Economy, Bk. 2, ch. 1, section 3.
17 I owe this suggestion to Eve Browning.
18 That is to say, fewer people would accept their own coercive assignment to Job slots in exchange for the economic benefits of coercive assignment of others to Job slots than would accept the loss of income they could gain from market trading in exchange for the gain to them from denying everybody else the full income that would result from market trading.
19 Principles of Political Economy, Bk. 2, ch. 1, section 3, 209.
20 Principles of Political Economy, Bk. 4, ch. 7, section 4, 768.
21 In addition to worries about freedom, a consideration of the efficiency of competition may have inclined Mill to this preference.
22 “Chapters on Socialism,” 745-746.
23 Mill develops this idea most thoroughly in Considerations on Representative Government (Library of Liberal Arts edition, 1958), chs. 6-8.
24 This phrase occurs in On Liberty, 13.
25 The proviso about “parading the avoidance” is noticed by Alan Ryan, in J. 5. Mill (London, 1974), 146.
26 Considerations on Representative Government, 94
27 One answer is this: Mill repeatedly notes that under minority rule dissenting views can find support in the countervailing power of majority public opinion, but when majority public opinion rules there is no place in society where dissident opinion can take shelter. On the face of it, this is a curious argument, for one wonders why dissident views cannot take shelter in minority opinion. If majority rule threatens to become an overbearing force in society, squelching all dissent, one can expect that minorities of all stripes will adopt the strategy of banding together to struggle for greater tolerance. The inventor of a new opinion suspiciously regarded by the authorities would, in this situation, reasonably look to the holders of other disfavored opinions for protection. Mill himself observes in another context, “Let it once be generally understood that minorities will fight, and majorities will be shy of provoking them.“ Another argument can be extrapolated from Considerations on Representative Government, ch. 2. Public institutions might pose altogether too many public-spirited questions for its citizens, thus encouraging an obsessive focus on the quality of community life and eventually a censorious concern for the conduct of one's neighbors.
28 Among these later proposals are the plural-vote scheme in Representative Government and the idea put forward in Bk. 2, ch. 2 of Principles of Political Economy, that proper bequest and inheritance laws will issue in a modestly endowed leisure class.
