Mill & Rousseau

“Liberalism as the historical demand for liberty and justice has taken many forms, depending on the social and political circumstances in which it has arisen. As a perplexing question confronting most of the leading political theorists and philosophers in recorded history, it has been one of the basic issues at the heart of the world’s major political philosophies such as the natural-rights philosophy, English utilitarianism, the philosophy of the Enlightenment and modern liberalism.”1

John Stuart Mill and Jean Jacques Rousseau were two political philosophers intimately concerned with liberty and its meaning, although both carried its essential postulates to different directions. Separated in time by over a century, the two men viewed liberty in different ways. Mill saw liberty as a freedom of will in a collective situation. He was concerned with the developing of man’s moral character through a social, psychological and political freedom. “For Mill, freedom of thought and investigation, freedom of discussion and the freedom of self-controlled moral judgment and action were goods in their own right. Brought up during the great legislative success of Philosophical Radicalism which had produced a reaction against: the social effects of unregulated industrialism.”2 Mill believed as a matter of course that intellectual and political freedom are in general beneficial both to the society that permits them and to t

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ich the community has over all. In the community men first gain civil liberty, which is a moral right and is not merely the natural liberty which by a figure of speech might be attributed to a solitary animal.”9 It is on this matter of the general will and its ramifications that Mill and Rousseau begin to sharply differ. Thinkers of Rousseau’s persuasion argue somewhat as follows: “A” yields to a temptation to steal a watch. This is his actual will. In a cool moment, however, he is certain that he prefers living in a world where his own watch is protected from thieves. This is his real will. The state punishes theft, and in doing so expresses “A’s” real will. As a member of the state “A” shares in that will, and may in some sense be said to decree his own punishment when his actual will makes him a thief. Rousseau had meant something like this when he said that any individual who refuses to obey the general will may be constrained by the whole body of citizens. This means nothing more than that such an individual will be forced to be free. Mill did not approve of this theory or the practical consequences which may be expected to flow from it. According to Mill, the state, which from Rousseau’s point of view would embo
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Approximate Word count = 2955
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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