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Mill & Rousseau

A Comparison of Their Ideas of Liberty

“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 the individual that enjoys them.

When he said that all mankind has no right to silence one dissenter, he was really affirming that freedom of judgment, the right to be convinced rather than coerced, is an inherent quality of a morally mature personality that a liberal society is one which both acknowledges that right and shapes its institutions in such a way that the right is realized. To permit individuality and private judgment, as if they were tolerated vices, is ...

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Mill & Rousseau. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 00:44, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1685956.html