Mill's Principles in His Work On Liberty

Mill's Principles in His Work On Liberty

John Stuart Mill was born in London in 1806, the son of the

philosopher James Mill. James Mill was a close friend of Jeremy

Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism (the theory that states that

the right course of action is the course which generates the most

happiness). Bentham and James Mill educated J. S. Mill rigorously, to

such an extent that he began reading Ancient Greek at age 3. He was

reading Plato's Dialogues at age 13 - in their original form. His

father trained him in political economy, philosophy, the classics and

many other intellectual subject areas.

Mill was an active philosopher. He was a member of the philosophical

radicals (a group of utilitarian philosophers) and worked for the East

India Company. But his education took its toll. At the age of 21, J.

S. Mill had a mental breakdown. His father and Bentham had educated

him to be the perfect utilitarian - i.e. the perfect rational being,

but Mill began to develop his own emotions and his own opinions. He

felt that his "habit of analysis" had destroyed all his capacity for

emotion - he had no spontaneous and natural feeling. When this period

of depression was over, Mill entered a new era, which produced his

book On Liberty.

One of the main arguments that Mill propounds in On Liberty deals with

his liberty principle (LP). This, apparently, is "one very simple

principle" which defines "the nature and limits of the power which can

legitimately be exercised by society over the individual". According

to Mill, liberty is what defines the legitimacy of a society - "any

society that fails to honour the liberty of the individual ...

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...approach is dialectical. He claims

that there are "stages" of history where there have been two classes -

one class with more power than the other. In each stage there has been

a struggle between each class, and the ruling class is eventually

overthrown by the lower class. The lower class then become the ruling

class, and history progresses into the next stage. This is dialectical

because it shows how two opposing sides collide and allow history to

progress.

[4] It is interesting to note that Marx's communist vision of the

future has never actually materialised. There have been attempts

(Soviet Russia and China) but they have been based on revised Marxist

ideas and never the actually ideas of Marx himself. According to Mill,

Marx is not infallible and so made a mistake is forming a definite

theory for the future.