John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill is usually considered the greatest of the Victorian Liberal thinkers. Utilitarianism was his creation. As a defender of individual liberty against the interference of both society and state, and as an early advocate of women's equality, Mill continues to be of major significance especially as we continue to wrestle with the ideals and the constraints of personal liberty versus government rights. In On Liberty, Mill develops the principle that only self-protection can justify either the state's tampering with the liberty of the individual or any personal interference with another's freedom û He sees the struggle between liberty and Authority to be the most conspicuous one in history. It seems, in further reading On Liberty, that Mill is not in favor of unbridled liberty, but liberty with some control, particularly with respect to freedom of thought and discussion. He explains that the only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part that merely concerns him, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

And yet, there are limits to that personal sovereignty. The U.S. Constitution developed the idea of a separation of powers, so that there can be no single "sovereign" to rule the government with the consent of the others. Still, Mill is concerned with what we call the "tyranny of th

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in the U.S. who believe that the tyranny of the majority infects both parties against the independent voters). For example, Mill states that "a party of order or stability and a party of progress or reform are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political lifeà" (Mill 289) In a sense he is describing the differences between the Republicans and the Democrats. If one can quibble with some of Mill's examples, it is his frequent reliance on what he calls "Christian morality" (p. 290) Given that he was British, and Great Britain has an established "national" church, it would make sense that he refer to Christianity. However, the American Constitution is not (despite the claims of Pat Robertson, et al) a Christian document. Freedom of religion and religious thought, and, indeed, the separation of church and state is one of the strong and often-debated pillars of our Constitution. One has to wonder how pragmatic intellectually, Mill's argument that Christian morality is merely a reaction to paganism. The fact that more lives have been shed in the name of or the hatred of religion in the history of the world is convincing enough proof that paganism in the form of intolerance exists in the Christian, as well as most
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