realisation of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others. Indeed, it is because this is their situation that men place such immense value upon the freedom to choose; for if they had assurance that in some perfect state, realisable by men on earth, no ends pursued by them would ever be in conflict, the necessity and agony of choice would disappear, and with it the central importance of the freedom to choose. Any method of bringing this final state nearer would then seem fully justified, no matter how much freedom were sacrificed to forward its advance.
It is, I have no doubt, some such dogmatic certainty that has been responsible for the deep, serene, unshakeable conviction in the minds of some of the most merciless tyrants and persecutors in history that what they did was fully justified by its purpose. I do not say that the ideal of self-perfection - whether for individuals or nations or Churches or classes - is to be condemned in itself, or that the language which was used in its defence was in all cases the result of a confused or fraudulent use of words, or of moral or intellectual perversity. Indeed, I have tried to show that it is the notion of freedom in its 'positive' sense that is at the heart of the demands for national or social self-direction which animate the most powerful and morally just public movements of our time, and that not to recognise this is to misunderstand the most vital facts and ideas of our age. But equally it seems to me that the belief that some single formula can in principle be found whereby all the diverse ends of men can be harmoniously realised is demonstrably false. If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict - and of tragedy - can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Acton conceived of it - as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out of our confused notions and irrational and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea could one day put right.
I do not wish to say that individual freedom is, even in the most liberal societies, the sole, or even the dominant, criterion of social action. We compel children to be educated, and we forbid public executions. These are certainly curbs to freedom. We justify them on the ground that ignorance, or a barbarian upbringing, or cruel pleasures and excitements are worse for us than the amount of restraint needed to repress them. This judgement in turn depends on how we determine good and evil, that is to say, on our moral, religious, intellectual, economic and aesthetic values; which are, in their turn, bound up with our conception of man, and of the basic demands of his nature. In other words, our solution of such problems is based on our vision, by which we are consciously or unconsciously guided, of what constitutes a fulfilled human life, as contrasted with Mill's 'cramped and dwarfed', 'pinched and hidebound' natures.[86] To protest against the laws governing censorship or personal morals as intolerable infringements of personal libeny presupposes a belief that the activities which such laws forbid are fundamental needs of men as men, in a good (or, indeed, any) society. To defend such laws is to hold that these needs are not essential, or that they cannot be satisfied without sacrificing other values which come higher - satisfy deeper needs - than individual freedom, determined by some standard that is not merely subjective, a standard for which some objective status - empirical or a priori - is claimed.
The extent of a man's, or a people's, liberty to choose to live as he or they desire must be weighed against the claims of many other values, of which equality, or justice, or happiness, or security, or public order are perhaps the most obvious examples. For this reason, it cannot be unlimited. We are rightly reminded by R. H. Tawney that the liberty of the strong, whether their strength is physical or economic, must be restrained. This maxim claims respect, not as a consequence of some a priori rule, whereby the respect for the liberty of one man logically entails respect for the liberty of others like him; but simply because respect for the principles of justice, or shame at gross inequality of treatment, is as basic in men as the desire for liberty. That we cannot have everything is a necessary, not a contingent, truth. Burke's plea for the constant need to compensate, to reconcile, to balance; Mill's plea for novel 'experiments in living'2 with their permanent possibility of error - the knowledge that it is not merely in practice but in principle impossible to reach clear-cut and certain answers, even in an ideal world of wholly good and rational men and wholly clear ideas - may madden those who seek for final solutions and single, all-embracing systems, guaranteed to be eternal. Nevertheless, it is a conclusion that cannot be escaped by those who, with
Kant, have learnt the truth that 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.'[87]
There is little need to stress the fact that monism, and faith in a single criterion, has always proved a deep source of satisfaction both to the intellect and to the emotions. Whether the standard of judgement derives from the vision of some future perfection, as in the minds of the philosophes in the eighteenth century and their technocratic successors in our own day, or is rooted in the past - La terre et les morts - as maintained by German historicists or French theocrats, or neo-Conservatives in English-speaking countries, it is bound, provided it is inflexible enough, to encounter some unforeseen and unforeseeable human development, which it will not fit; and will then be used to justify the a priori barbarities of Procrustes - the vivisection of actual human societies into some fixed pattern dictated by our fallible understanding of a largely imaginary past or a wholly imaginary future. To preserve our absolute categories or ideals at the expense of human lives offends equally against the principles of science and of history; it is an attitude found in equal measure on the right and left wings in our days, and is not reconcilable with the principles accepted by those who respect the facts.
Pluralism, with the measure of 'negative' liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of 'positive' self-mastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind. It is truer, because it does, at least, recognise the fact that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another. To assume that all values can be graded on one scale, so that it is a mere matter of inspection to determine the highest, seems to me to falsify our knowledge that men are free agents, to represent moral decision as an operation which a slide-rule could, in principle, perform. To say that in some ultimate, all-reconciling yet realisable synthesis duty is interest, or individual freedom is pure democracy or an authoritarian State, is to throw a metaphysical blanket over either self-deceit or deliberate hypocrisy. It is more humane because it does not (as the system- builders do) deprive men, in the name of some remote, or incoherent, ideal, of much that they have found to be indispensable to their life as unpredictably self-transforming human beings.1 In the end, men choose between ultimate values; they choose as they do because their life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories and concepts that are, at any rate over large stretches of time and space, and whatever their ultimate origins, a part of their being and thought and sense of their own identity; part of what makes them human.
It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilisation: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognised, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. This may be so; but no sceptical conclusions seem to me to follow. Principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. 'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions', said an admirable writer of our time, 'and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.'2 To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow such a need to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity.
' On this also Bentham seems to me to have spoken well: 'Individual interests are the only real interests . . . Can it be conceived that there are men so absurd as to ... prefer the man who is not, to him who is; to torment the living, under pretence of promoting the happiness of those who are not born, and who may never be born?' op. cit. (p. 194 above, note 3), p. pi. This is one of the infrequent occasions when Burke agrees with Bentham; for this passage is at the heart of the empirical, as against the metaphysical, view of politics.
2 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London, 1943), p. 243-
JOHN STUART MILL AND THE ENDS OF LIFE
... the importance, to man and society ... of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions.
J. S. Mill, Autobiography
In a world in which human rights were never trampled on, and men did not persecute each other for what they believed or what they were, the cause of toleration would not need to be defended. This, however, is not our world. We are a good deal remoter from this desirable condition than some of our more civilised ancestors, and, in this respect, unfortunately conform only too well to the common pattern of human experience. The periods and societies in which civil liberties were respected, and variety of opinion and faith tolerated, have been very few and far between - oases in the desert of human uniformity, intolerance and oppression. Among the great Victorian preachers, Carlyle and Marx have turned out to be better prophets than Macaulay and the Whigs, but not necessarily better friends to mankind; sceptical, to put it at its lowest, of the principles on which toleration rests. Their greatest champion, the man who formulated these principles most clearly and thereby founded modern liberalism, was, as everyone knows, the author of the essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill. This book - this 'great short book', as R. W. Livingstone has justly called it[88] - was published one hundred years ago.[89]
The subject was then in the forefront of discussion. The year 1859 saw the death of the two best-known champions of individual liberty in Europe, Macaulay and Tocqueville. It marked the centenary of the birth of Friedrich Schiller, who was acclaimed as the poet of the free and creative personality fighting against great odds. The individual was seen by some as the victim of, by others as rising to his apotheosis in, the new and triumphant forces of nationalism and industrialism which exalted the power and the glory of great disciplined human masses that were transforming the world in factories or battlefields or political assemblies. The predicament of the individual versus the State or the nation or the industrial organisation or the social or political group was becoming an acute personal and public problem. In the same year there appeared Darwin's The Origin of Species, probably the most influential work of science of its century, which at once did much to destroy the ancient accumulation of dogma and prejudice, and, in its misapplication to psychology, ethics and politics, was used to justify violent imperialism and naked competition. Almost simultaneously with it there appeared an essay, written by an obscure economist expounding a doctrine which has had a decisive influence on mankind. The author was Karl Marx, the book was A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the preface to which contained the clearest statement of the materialist interpretation of history - the heart of all that goes under the name of Marxism today. But the impact made upon political thought by Mill's treatise was more immediate, and perhaps no less permanent. It superseded earlier formulations of the case for individualism and toleration, from Milton and Locke to Montesquieu and Voltaire, and, despite its outdated psychology and lack of logical cogency, it remains the classic statement of the case for individual liberty. We are sometimes told that a man's behaviour is a more genuine expression of his beliefs than his words. In Mill's case there is no conflict. His life embodied his beliefs. His single-minded devotion to the cause of toleration and reason was unique even among the dedicated lives of the nineteenth century.
unaffected by the new romantic currents of the time in which he lived. Like his teacher Bentham and the French philosophical materialists, he saw man as a natural object and considered that a systematic study of the human species - conducted on lines similar to those of zoology or botany or physics - could and should be established on firm empirical foundations. He believed himself to have grasped the principles of the new science of man, and was firmly convinced that any man educated in the light of it, brought up as a rational being by other rational beings, would thereby be preserved from ignorance and weakness, the two great sources of unreason in thought and action, which was alone responsible for the miseries and vices of mankind. He brought up his son, John Stuart, in isolation from other - less rationally educated - children; his own brothers and sisters were virtually his only companions. The boy knew Greek by the age of five, algebra and Latin by the age of nine. He was fed on a carefully distilled intellectual diet, prepared by his father, compounded by natural science and the classical literatures. No religion, no metaphysics, little poetry - nothing that Bentham had stigmatised as the accumulation of human idiocy and error - were permitted to reach him. Music, perhaps because it was supposed that it could not easily misrepresent the real world, was the only an in which he could indulge himself freely. The experiment was, in a sense, an appalling success. John Mill, by the time he reached the age of twelve, possessed the learning of an exceptionally erudite man of thirty. In his own sober, clear, literal-minded, painfully honest account of himself, he says that his emotions were starved while his mind was violently overdeveloped. His father had no doubt of the value of his experiment. He had succeeded in producing an excellently informed and perfectly rational being. The truth of Bentham's views on education had been thoroughly vindicated.
The results of such treatment will astonish no one in our psychologically less naive age. In his early manhood John Mill went through his first agonising crisis. He felt lack of purpose, a paralysis of the will, and terrible despair. With his well-trained and, indeed, ineradicable habit of reducing emotional dissatisfaction to a clearly formulated problem, he asked himself a simple question: supposing that the noble Benthamite ideal of universal happiness which he had been taught to believe, and to the best of his ability did believe, were realised, would this, in fact, fulfil all his desires? He admitted to himself, to his horror, that it would not. What, then, was the true end of life? He saw no purpose in existence: everything in his world now seemed dry and bleak. He tried to analyse his condition. Was he perhaps totally devoid of feeling - was he a monster with a large part of normal human nature atrophied? He felt that he had no motives for continuing to live, and wished for death.
One day, as he was reading a pathetic story in the memoirs of the now almost forgotten French writer Marmontel, he was suddenly moved to tears. This convinced him that he was capable of emotion, and with this his recovery began. It took the form of a revolt, slow, concealed, reluctant, but profound and irresistible, against the view of life inculcated by his father and the Benthamites. He read the poetry of Wordsworth, he read and met Coleridge; his view of the nature of man, his history and his destiny, was transformed. John Mill was not by temperament rebellious. He loved and deeply admired his father, and was convinced of the validity of his main philosophical tenets. He stood with Bentham against dogmatism, transcendentalism, obscurantism, all that resisted the march of reason, analysis and empirical science. To these beliefs he held firmly all his life. Nevertheless his conception of man, and therefore of much else, suffered a great change. He became not so much an open heretic from the original Utilitarian movement, as a disciple who quietly left the fold, preserving what he thought true or valuable, but feeling bound by none of the rules and principles of the movement. He continued to profess that happiness was the sole end of human existence, but his conception of what contributed to it changed into something very different from that of his mentors, for what he came to value most was neither rationality nor contentment, but diversity, versatility, fullness of life - the unaccountable leap of individual genius, the spontaneity and uniqueness of a man, a group, a civilisation. What he hated and feared was narrowness, uniformity, the crippling effect of persecution, the crushing of individuals by the weight of authority or of custom or of public opinion; he set himself against the worship of order or tidiness, or even peace, if they were bought at the price of obliterating the variety and colour of untamed human beings with unextinguished passions and untrammelled imaginations. This was, perhaps, a natural enough compensation for his own drilled, emotionally shrivelled, warped childhood and adolescence.
By the time he was seventeen he was mentally fully formed. John
Mill's intellectual equipment was probably unique in that or any other age. He was clear-headed, candid, highly articulate, intensely serious, and without any trace of fear, vanity or humour. During the next ten years he wrote articles and reviews, with all the weight of the official heir presumptive of the whole Utilitarian movement upon his shoulders; and although his articles made him a great name, and he grew to be a formidable publicist and a source of pride to his mentors and allies, yet the note of his writings is not theirs. He praised what his father had praised - rationality, empirical method, democracy, equality - and he attacked what the Utilitarians attacked - religion, belief in intuitive and undemon- strable truths and their dogmatic consequences, which, in their view and in his, led to the abandonment of reason, hierarchical societies, vested interests, intolerance of free criticism, prejudice, reaction, injustice, despotism, misery. Yet the emphasis had shifted. James Mill and Bentham had wanted literally nothing but pleasure, obtained by whatever means were the most effective. If someone had offered them a medicine which could scientifically be shown to put those who took it into a state of permanent contentment, their premisses would have bound them to accept this as the panacea for all that they thought evil. Provided that the largest number of men receive lasting happiness, or even freedom from pain, it should not matter how this is achieved. Bentham and James Mill believed in education and legislation as the roads to happiness. But if a shorter way had been discovered, in the form of pills to swallow, techniques of subliminal suggestion or other means of conditioning human beings, in which our century has made such strides, then, being men of fanatical consistency, they might well have accepted this as a better, because more effective and perhaps less costly, alternative than the means that they had advocated. John Stuart Mill, as he made plain both by his life and by his writings, would have rejected with both hands any such solution. He would have condemned it as degrading the nature of man. For him man differs from animals primarily neither as the possessor of reason, nor as an inventor of tools and methods, but as a being capable of choice, one who is most himself in choosing and not being chosen for; the rider and not the horse; the seeker of ends, and not merely of means, ends that he pursues, each in his own fashion: with the corollary that the more various these fashions, the richer the lives of men become; the larger the field of interplay between individuals, the greater the opportunities of the new and the unexpected; the more numerous the possibilities for altering his own character in some fresh or unexplored direction, the more paths will open before each individual, and the wider will be his freedom of action and thought.
In the last analysis, all appearances to the contrary, this is what Mill seems to me to have cared about most of all. He is officially committed to the exclusive pursuit of happiness. He believes deeply in justice, but his voice is most his own when he describes the glories of individual freedom, or denounces whatever seeks to curtail or extinguish it. Bentham, too, unlike his French predecessors who trusted in moral and scientific experts, had laid it down that each man is the best judge of his own happiness. Nevertheless, his principle would remain valid for Bentham even after every living man had swallowed the happiness-inducing pill and society was thereby lifted or reduced to a condition of unbroken and uniform bliss. For Bentham individualism is a psychological datum; for Mill it is an ideal. Mill likes dissent, independence, solitary thinkers, those who defy the establishment. In an article published when he was eighteen years old (demanding toleration for a now almost forgotten atheist named Richard Carlile), he strikes a note which sounds and resounds in his writings through the rest of his life: 'Christians, whose reformers perished in the dungeon or at the stake as heretics, apostates and blasphemers; Christians, whose religion breathes charity, liberty, and mercy in every line; that they having gained the power to which so long they were victims, should employ it in the self-same way . . . [in] vindictive persecution, is most monstrous.'[90] He remained the champion of heretics, apostates, the blasphemers, of liberty and mercy, for the rest of his life.
His acts were in harmony with his professions. The public policies with which Mill's name was associated as a journalist, a reformer and a politician, were seldom connected with the typically Utilitarian projects advocated by Bentham and successfully realised by many of his disciples: great industrial, financial, educational schemes, reforms of public health or the organisation of labour or leisure. The issues to which Mill was dedicated, whether in his published views or his actions, were concerned with something different: the extension of individual freedom, especially freedom of speech: seldom with anything else. When Mill declared that war was better than oppression, or that a revolution that would kill all men with an income of more than £500 per annum might improve things greatly, or that the Emperor Napoleon III of France was the vilest man alive; when he expressed delight at Palmerston's fall over the Bill that sought to make conspiracy against foreign despots a criminal offence in England; when he denounced the Southern States in the American Civil War, or made himself violently unpopular by speaking in the House of Commons in defence of Fenian assassins (and thereby probably saving their lives), or for the rights of women, or of workers, or of colonial peoples, and thereby made himself the most passionate and best-known champion in England of the insulted and the oppressed, it is difficult to suppose that it was not liberty and justice (at whatever cost) but utility (which counts the cost) that were uppermost in his mind. His articles and his political support saved Durham and his Report, when both were in danger of being defeated by the combination of right- and left-wing adversaries, and thereby did much to ensure self-government in the British Commonwealth. He helped to destroy the reputation of Governor Eyre, who had perpetrated brutalities in Jamaica. He saved the right of public meeting and of free speech in Hyde Park, against a Government that wished to destroy it. He wrote and spoke for proportional representation because this alone, in his view, would allow minorities (not necessarily virtuous or rational ones) to make their voices heard. When, to the surprise of radicals, he opposed the dissolution of the East India Company, for which he, like his father before him, had worked so devotedly, he did this because he feared the dead hand of the Government more than the paternalist and not inhumane rule of the Company's officials. On the other hand he did not oppose State intervention as such; he welcomed it in education or labour legislation because he thought that without it the weakest would be enslaved and crushed; and because it would increase the range of choices for the great majority of men, even if it restrained some. What is common to all these causes is not any direct connection they might have with the 'greatest happiness' principle[91] but the fact that they turn on the issue of human rights - that is to say, of liberty and toleration.
I do not, of course, mean to suggest that there was no such connection in Mill's own mind. He often seems to advocate freedom on the ground that without it the truth cannot be discovered - we cannot perform those experiments either in thought or 'in living'[92] which alone reveal to us new, unthought-of ways of maximising pleasure and minimising pain - the only ultimate source of value. Freedom, then, is valuable as a means, not as an end. But when we ask what Mill meant either by pleasure or by happiness, the answer is far from clear. Whatever happiness may be, it is, according to Mill, not what Bentham took it to be: for his conception of human nature is pronounced too narrow and altogether inadequate; he has no imaginative grasp of history or society or individual psychology; he does not understand either what holds, or what should hold, society together - common ideals, loyalties, national character; he is not aware of honour, dignity, self-culture, or the love of beauty, order, power, action; he understands only the 'business' aspects of life.[93] Are these goals, which Mill rightly regards as central, so many means to a single universal goal - happiness? Or are they species of it? Mill never clearly tells us. He says that happiness - or utility - is of no use as a criterion of conduct - destroying at one blow the proudest claim, and indeed the central doctrine, of the Benthamite system. 'We think', he says in his essay on Bentham (published only after his father's death), 'utility, or happiness, much too complex or indefin- nite an end to be sought except through the medium of various secondary ends, concerning which there may be, and often is, agreement among persons who differ in their ultimate standard.'[94]This is simple and definite enough in Bentham; but Mill rejects his formula because it rests on a false view of human nature. It is 'complex' and 'indefinite' in Mill because he packs into it the many diverse (and, perhaps, not always compatible) ends which men in fact pursue for their own sake, and which Bentham had either ignored or falsely classified under the head of pleasure: love, hatred, desire for justice, for action, for freedom, for power, for beauty, for knowledge, for self-sacrifice. In J. S. Mill's writings 'happiness' comes to mean something very like 'realisation of one's wishes', whatever they may be. This stretches its meaning to the point of vacuity. The letter remains; but the spirit - the old, tough- minded Benthamite view for which happiness, if it was not a clear and concrete criterion of action, was nothing at all, as worthless as the 'transcendental' intuitionist moonshine it was meant to replace - the true Utilitarian spirit - has fled. Mill does indeed add that 'when two or more of the secondary principles conflict ... a direct appeal to some first principle becomes necessary'.2 This principle is utility; but he gives no indication how this notion, drained of its old, materialistic but intelligible, content, is to be applied.
It is this tendency of Mill's to escape into what Bentham called 'vague generalities'[95] that leads one to ask what, in fact, was Mill's real scale of values as shown in his writings and action. If his life and the causes he advocated are any evidence, then it seems clear that in public life the highest values for him - whether or not he calls them 'secondary ends'[96] - were individual libeny, variety and justice. If challenged about variety Mill would have defended it on the ground that without a sufficient degree of it many, at present wholly unforeseeable, forms of human happiness (or satisfaction, or fulfilment, or higher levels of life - however the degrees of these were to be determined and compared) would be left unknown, untried, unrealised; among them happier lives than any yet experienced. This is his thesis and he chooses to call it Utilitarianism. But if anyone were to argue that a given, actual or attainable, social arrangement yielded enough happiness - that given the virtually impassable limitations of the nature of men and their environment (for example, the very high improbability of men's becoming immortal or growing as tall as Everest), it was better to concentrate on the best that we have, since change would, in all empirical likelihood, lead to lowering of general happiness, and should therefore be avoided, we may be sure that Mill would have rejected this argument out of hand. He was committed to the answer that we can never tell (until we have tried) where greater truth or happiness (or any other form of experience) may lie. Finality is therefore in principle impossible: all solutions must be tentative and provisional. This is the voice of a disciple of both Saint-Simon and Constant or Humboldt. It runs directly counter to traditional - that is, eighteenth-century - Utilitarianism, which rested on the view that there exists an unalterable nature of things, and that answers to social, as to other, problems, can, at least in principle, be scientifically discovered once and for all. It is this, perhaps, that, despite his fear of ignorant and irrational democracy and consequent craving for government by the enlightened and the expert (and insistence, early and late in his life, on the importance of objects of common, even uncritical, worship) checked his Saint- Simonism, turned him against Comte, and preserved him from the elitist tendency of his Fabian disciples.
There was a spontaneous and uncalculating idealism in his mind and his actions that was wholly alien to the dispassionate and penetrating irony of Bentham, or the vain and stubborn rationalism of James Mill. He tells us that his father's educational methods had turned him into a desiccated calculating machine, not too far removed from the popular image of the inhuman Utilitarian philosopher; his very awareness of this makes one wonder whether it can ever have been wholly true. Despite the solemn bald head, the black clothes, the grave expression, the measured phrases, the total lack of humour, Mill's life is an unceasing revolt against his father's outlook and ideals, the greater for being subterranean and unacknowledged.
Mill had scarcely any prophetic gift. Unlike his contemporaries Marx, Burckhardt, Tocqueville he had no vision of what the twentieth century would bring, neither of the political and social consequences of industrialisation, nor of the discovery of the strength of irrational and unconscious factors in human behaviour, nor of the terrifying techniques to which this knowledge has led and is leading. The transformation of society which has resulted - the rise of dominant secular ideologies and the wars between them, the awakening of Africa and Asia, the peculiar combination of nationalism and socialism in our day - these were outside Mill's horizon. But if he was not sensitive to the contours of the future, he was acutely aware of the destructive factors at work in his own world. He detested and feared standardisation. He perceived that in the name of philanthropy, democracy and equality a society was being created in which human objectives were artificially made narrower and smaller and the majority of men were being converted, to use his admired friend Tocqueville's image, into mere industrious sheep/ in which, in his own words, 'collective mediocrity'[97] was gradually strangling originality and individual gifts. He was against what have been called 'organisation men', a class of persons to whom Bentham could have had in principle no rational objection. He knew, feared and hated timidity, mildness, natural conformity, lack of interest in human issues. This was common ground between him and his friend, his suspicious and disloyal friend, Thomas Carlyle. Above all he was on his guard against those who, for the sake of being left in peace to cultivate their gardens, were ready to sell their fundamental human right to self-government in the public spheres of life. These characteristics of our lives today he would have recognised with horror. He took human solidarity for granted, perhaps altogether too much for granted. He did not fear the isolation of individuals or groups, the factors that make for the alienation and disintegration of individuals and societies. He was preoccupied with the opposite evils of socialisation and uniformity.[98] He longed for the widest variety of human life and character. He saw that this could not be obtained without protecting individuals from each other, and above all, from the terrible weight of social pressure; this led to his insistent and persistent demands for toleration.
Toleration, Herbert Butterfield has told us, implies a certain disrespect.1 I tolerate your absurd beliefs and your foolish acts, though I know them to be absurd and foolish. Mill would, I think, have agreed. He believed that to hold an opinion deeply is to throw our feelings into it. He once declared that when we deeply care, we must dislike those who hold the opposite views/ He preferred this to cold temperaments and opinions. He asked us not necessarily to respect the views of others - very far from it - only to try to understand and tolerate them; only tolerate; disapprove, think ill of, if need be mock or despise, but tolerate; for without conviction, without some antipathetic feeling, there was, he thought, no deep conviction; and without deep conviction there were no ends of life, and then the awful abyss on the edge of which he had himself once stood would yawn before us. But without tolerance the conditions for rational criticism, rational condemnation, are destroyed. He therefore pleads for reason and toleration at all costs. To understand is not necessarily to forgive. We may argue, attack, reject, condemn with passion and hatred. But we may not suppress or stifle: for that is to destroy the bad and the good, and is tantamount to collective moral and intellectual suicide. Sceptical respect for the opinions of our opponents seems to him preferable to indifference or cynicism. But even these attitudes are less harmful than intolerance, or an imposed orthodoxy that kills rational discussion.
This is Mill's faith. It obtained its classical formulation in the tract On Liberty, which he began writing in i 8 55 in collaboration with his wife, who, after his father, was the dominant figure in his life. Until his dying day he believed her to be endowed with a genius vastly superior to his own. He published the essay after her death in i 8 59 without those improvements which he was sure that her unique gifts would have brought to it.
(not to speak of Marx) appears to have regarded him even as a fellow-traveller. He was to them the very embodiment of a mild reformist liberal or bourgeois radical. Only the Fabians claimed him as an ancestor.
Historical Development of the Principle of Toleration m British Life, Robert Waley Cohen Memorial Lecture 1956 (London, 1957), p. 16.
Autobiography, chapter 2: CW i 51, 53.
II
I shall not give a full abstract of Mill's argument, but rather recapitulate only those salient ideas to which Mill attached the greatest importance - beliefs which his opponents attacked in his lifetime, and attack even more vehemently today. These propositions are still far from self-evident; time has not turned them to platitudes; they are not even now undisputed assumptions of a civilised outlook. Let me attempt to consider them briefly.
Men want to curtail the liberties of other men, either (a) because they wish to impose their power on others; or (b) because they want conformity - they do not wish to think differently from others, or others to think differently from themselves; or, finally, (c) because they believe that to the question of how one should live there can be (as with any genuine question) one true answer and one only: this answer is discoverable by means of reason, or intuition, or direct revelation, or a form of life or 'unity of theory and practice';1 its authority is identifiable with one of these avenues to final knowledge; all deviation from it is error that
1 For this fundamental Marxist formula (not apparently expressed in exactly these terms by Marx himself, nor by Engels) see Georg Lukacs, 'What is Orthodox Marxism?' (1919): pp. 2-3 in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics [1923], trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1971). Leszek Kolakowski offers as a gloss 'the understanding and transformation of reality are not two separate processes, but one and the same phenomenon': Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution (Oxford, 1978: Oxford University Press), vol. 3, The Breakdown, p. 270. For Soviet philosophy, in which it is repeated ad nauseam, it meant roughly 'Physical sciences should work for Soviet industry; social and human sciences are instruments of political propaganda.' Similar locutions (which should not, however, be regarded as equivalent in meaning, even mutatis mutandis) are used by Marx's contemporaries. For example, Mill himself attributes the 'union of theory and practice' to the ancient Greeks in 'On Genius' (1832) at CW i 336; there are also references by Auguste Comte to 'harmonie entre la theorie et la pratique' ('harmony between theory and practice') in Systeme de politique positive (see p. 81 above, note 1), vol. 4 (1854), pp. 7, 172. More generally, of course, discussion of the relationship of theory and practice goes back to antiquity, perhaps originating in Socrates' doctrine that virtue is knowledge; see also Diogenes Laertius 7.125 on the Stoic view that 'the virtuous man is both a theorist, and a practitioner of things doable'. Especially well known is Leibniz's recommendation in 1700 'Theoriam cum praxi zu vereinigen' ('to combine theory with practice') in his proposal to establish a Brandenburg Academy in Berlin: see Hans-Stephan Brather, Leibniz und seme Akademie: Ausgewiihlte Quellen zur Geschichte der Berliner Sozietiit der Wissen- schaften 1697-1716 (Berlin, 1993), p. 72. Ed.
imperils human salvation; this justifies legislation against, or even extirpation of, those who lead away from the truth, whatever their character or intentions.
Mill dismisses the first two motives as being irrational, since they stake out no intellectually argued claim, and are therefore incapable of being answered by rational argument. The only motive which he is prepared to take seriously is the last, namely, that if the true ends of life can be discovered, those who oppose these truths are spreading pernicious falsehood, and must be repressed. To this he replies that men are not infallible; that the supposedly pernicious view might turn out to be true after all; that those who killed Socrates and Christ sincerely believed them to be purveyors of wicked falsehoods, and were themselves men as worthy of respect as any to be found today; that Marcus Aurelius, 'the gentlest and most amiable of philosophers and rulers',1 known as the most enlightened man of his time and one of the noblest, nevertheless authorised the persecution of Christianity as a moral and social danger, and that no argument ever used by any other persecutor had not been equally open to him. We cannot suppose that persecution never kills the truth. 'It is a piece of idle sentimentality', Mill observes, 'that truth, merely as truth, has an inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.'2 Persecution is historically only too effective.
To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dolcino was put down. Savonarola was put down. The Albigeois were put down. The Vaudois were put down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put down ... In Spain, Italy, Flanders, the Austrian empire, Protestantism was rooted out; and, most likely, would have been so in England, had Queen Mary lived, or Queen Elizabeth died . . . No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman Empire.3
And what if it be said against this that, just because we have erred in the past, it is mere cowardice to refrain from striking down evil when we see it in the present in case we may be mistaken again; or, to put it in another way, that, even if we are not infallible, yet, if we are to live at all, we must make decisions and act, and must do so on nothing better than probability, according to our lights, with constant risk of error; for all living involves risk, and what alternative have we? Mill answers that 'There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.'[99] You can indeed stop 'bad men' from perverting society with 'false and pernicious' views/ but only if you give men liberty to deny that what you yourself call bad, or pernicious, or perverted, or false, is such; otherwise your conviction is founded on mere dogma and is not rational, and cannot be analysed or altered in the light of any new facts and ideas. Without infallibility how can truth emerge save in discussion? There is no a priori road towards it; a new experience, a new argument, can in principle always alter our views, no matter how strongly held. To shut doors is to blind yourself to the truth deliberately, to condemn yourself to incorrigible error.
Mill had a strong and subtle brain and his arguments are never negligible. But it is, in this case, plain that his conclusion only follows from premisses which he does not make explicit. He was an empiricist; that is, he believed that no truths are - or could be - rationally established, except on the evidence of observation. New observations could in principle always upset a conclusion founded on earlier ones. He believed this rule to be true of the laws of physics, even of the laws of logic and mathematics; how much more, therefore, in 'ideological' fields where no scientific certainty prevailed - in ethics, politics, religion, history, the entire field of human affairs, where only probability reigns; here, unless full liberty of opinion and argument is permitted, nothing can ever be rationally established. But those who disagree with him, and believe in intuited truths, in principle not corrigible by experience, will disregard this argument. Mill can write them off as obscurantists, dogmatists, irrationalists. Yet something more is needed than mere contemptuous dismissal if their views, more powerful today, perhaps, than even in Mill's own century, are to be rationally contested. Again, it may well be that without full freedom of discussion the truth cannot emerge. But this may be only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition of its discovery; the truth may, for all our efforts, remain at the bottom of a well, and in the meantime the worse cause may win, and do enormous damage to mankind. Is it so clear that we must permit opinions advocating, say, race hatred to be uttered freely, because Milton has said that 'though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth . . . who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?" These are brave and optimistic judgements, but how good is the empirical evidence for them today? Are demagogues and liars, scoundrels and blind fanatics always, in liberal societies, stopped in time, or refuted in the end? How high a price is it right to pay for the great boon of freedom of discussion? A very high one, no doubt; but is it limitless? And if not, who shall say what sacrifice is, or is not, too great? Mill goes on to say that an opinion believed to be false may yet be partially true; for there is no absolute truth, only different roads towards it; the suppression of an apparent falsehood may also suppress what is true in it, to the loss of mankind. This argument, again, will not tell with those who believe that absolute truth is discoverable once and for all, whether by metaphysical or theological argument, or by some direct insight, or by leading a certain kind of life, or, as Mill's own mentors believed, by scientific or empirical methods.
His argument is plausible only on the assumption which, whether he knew it or not, Mill all too obviously made, that human knowledge was in principle never complete, and always fallible; that there was no single, universally visible, truth; that each man, each nation, each civilisation might take its own road towards its own goal, not necessarily harmonious with those of others; that men are altered, and the truths in which they believe are altered, by new experiences and their own actions - what he calls 'experiments in living;'[100] that consequently the conviction, common to Aristotelians and a good many Christian scholastics and atheistical materialists alike, that there exists a basic knowable human nature, one and the same, at all times, in all places, in all men - a static, unchanging substance underneath the altering appearances, with permanent needs, dictated by a single, discoverable goal, or pattern of goals, the same for all mankind - is mistaken; and so, too, is the notion that is bound up with it, of a single true doctrine carrying salvation to all men everywhere, contained in natural law, or the revelation of a sacred book, or the insight of a man of genius, or the natural wisdom of ordinary men, or the calculations made by an elite of Utilitarian scientists set up to govern mankind.
Mill - bravely for a professed Utilitarian - observes that the human (that is the social) sciences are too confused and uncertain to be properly called sciences at all. There are in them no valid generalisations, no laws, and therefore no predictions or rules of action can properly be deduced from them. He honoured the memory of his father, whose whole philosophy was based on the opposite assumption; he respected August Comte, and subsidised Herbert Spencer, both of whom claimed to have laid the foundations for just such a science of society. Yet his own half-aniculate assumption contradicts this. Mill believes that man is spontaneous, that he has freedom of choice, that he moulds his own character, that as a result of the interplay of men with nature and with other men something novel continually arises, and that this novelty is precisely what is most characteristic and most human in men. Because Mill's entire view of human nature turns out to rest not on the notion of the repetition of an identical pattern, but on his perception of human lives as subject to perpetual incompleteness, self-transformation and novelty, his words are today alive and relevant to our own problems; whereas the works of James Mill, and of Buckle and Comte and Spencer, remain huge half-forgotten hulks in the river of nineteenth-century thought. He does not demand or predict ideal conditions for the final solution of human problems or for obtaining universal agreement on all crucial issues. He assumes that finality is impossible, and implies that it is undesirable too. He does not demonstrate this. Rigour in argument is not among his accomplishments. Yet it is this belief, which undermines the foundations on which Helvetius, Bentham and James Mill built their doctrines - a system never formally repudiated by him - that gives his case both its plausibility and its humanity.
His remaining arguments are weaker still. He says that unless it is contested, truth is liable to degenerate into dogma or prejudice; men would no longer feel it as a living truth; opposition is needed to keep it alive. 'Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field', overcome as they are by ' "the deep slumber of a decided opinion" V So deeply did Mill believe this, that he declared that if there were no genuine dissenters, we had an obligation to invent arguments against ourselves, in order to keep ourselves in a state of intellectual fitness. This resembles nothing so much as Hegel's argument for war as keeping human society from stagnation. Yet if the truth about human affairs were in principle demonstrable, as it is, say, in arithmetic, the invention of false propositions in order for them to be knocked down would scarcely be needed to preserve our understanding of it. What Mill seems really to be asking for is diversity of opinion for its own sake. He speaks of the need for 'fair play to all sides of the truth'[101] - a phrase that a man would scarcely employ if he believed in simple, complete truths as the earlier Utilitarians did; and he makes use of bad arguments to conceal this scepticism, perhaps even from himself. '[l]n an imperfect state of the human mind,' he says, 'the interests of truth require a diversity of opinions.'3 And he asks whether we are 'willing to adopt the logic of persecutors, and to say that we may persecute others because we are right, and that they must not persecute us because they are wrong'.4 Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims have all justified persecution by this argument in their day; and on their premisses there may be nothing logically amiss with it.
It is these premisses that Mill rejects, and rejects not, it seems to me, as a result of a chain of reasoning, but because he believes - even if he never, so far as I know, admits this explicitly - that there are no final truths not corrigible by experience, at any rate in what is now called the ideological sphere - that of value judgements and of general outlook and attitude to life. Yet within this framework of ideas and values, despite all the stress on the value of 'experiments in living' and what they may reveal, Mill is ready to stake a very great deal on the truth of his convictions about what he thinks to be the deepest and most permanent interests of men. Although his reasons are drawn from experience and not from a priori knowledge, the propositions themselves are very like those defended on metaphysical grounds by the traditional upholders of the doctrine of natural rights. Mill believes in liberty, that is, the rigid limitation of the right to coerce, because he is sure that men cannot develop and flourish and become fully human unless they are left free from interference by other men within a certain minimum area of their lives, which he regards as - or wishes to make - inviolable. This is his view of what men are, and therefore of their basic moral and intellectual needs, and he formulates his conclusions in the celebrated maxims according to which 'the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself',1 and 'the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear .. . because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.'2 This is Mill's profession of faith, and the ultimate basis of political liberalism, and therefore the proper target of attack - both on psychological and moral (and social) grounds - by its opponents during Mill's lifetime and after. Carlyle reacted with characteristic fury in a letter to his brother Alexander: 'As if it were a sin to control, or coerce into better methods, human swine in any way ... Ach Gott im HimmelГъ
Milder and more rational critics have not failed to point out that the limits of the private and public domains are difficult to demarcate; that anything a man does could, in principle, frustrate others; that no man is an island; that the social and the individual aspects of human beings often cannot, in practice, be disentangled. Mill was told that when men look upon forms of worship in which other men persist as being not merely 'abominable'4 in themselves, but as an offence to them or to their God, they may be irrational and bigoted, but they are not necessarily lying; and that when he asks rhetorically why Muslims should not forbid the eating of pork to everyone, since they are genuinely disgusted by it, the answer, on Utilitarian premisses, is by no means self-evident. It might be argued that there is no a priori reason for supposing that most men would not be happier - if that is the goal - in a wholly socialised world where private life and personal freedom are reduced to vanishing-point than in Mill's individualist order; and that whether this is so or not is a matter for experimental
' L 5/292. 2 L 1/233-4.
' Letter of 4 May i 8 59 (No 287), New Letters of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Alexander Carlyle (London and New York, 1904), vol. 2, p. 196.
4 L 4/283.
verification. Mill constantly protests against the fact that social and legal rules are too often determined merely by the 'likings and dislikings of society',[102] and correctly points out that these are often irrational or are founded on ignorance. But if damage to others is what concerns him most (as he professes), then the fact that their resistance to this or that belief is instinctive, or intuitive, or founded on no rational ground, does not make it the less painful, and, to that extent, damaging to them. Why should rational men be entitled to the satisfaction of their ends more than the irrational? Why not the irrational, if the greatest happiness of the greatest number (and the greatest number are seldom rational) is the sole justified purpose of action? Only a competent social psychologist can tell what will make a given society happiest. If happiness is the sole criterion, then human sacrifice, or the burning of witches, at times when such practices had strong public feeling behind them, did doubtless, in their day, contribute to the happiness of the majority. If there is no other moral criterion, then the question whether a higher balance of happiness was yielded by the slaughter of innocent old women (together with the ignorance and prejudice which made this acceptable), or by the advance in knowledge and rationality which ended such abominations but robbed men of comforting illusions, is to be answered by mere actuarial calculation.
Mill paid no attention to such considerations: nothing could go more violently against all that he felt and believed. At the centre of Mill's thought and feeling lies, not his Utilitarianism, nor the concern about enlightenment, nor about dividing the private from the public domain - for he himself at times concedes that the State may invade the private domain, in order to promote education, hygiene, or social security or justice - but his passionate belief that men are made human by their capacity for choice - choice of evil and good equally. Fallibility, the right to err, as a corollary of the capacity for self-improvement; distrust of symmetry and finality as enemies of freedom - these are the principles which Mill never abandons. He is acutely aware of the many-sidedness of the truth and of the irreducible complexity of life, which rules out the very possibility of any simple solution, or the idea of a final answer to any concrete problem. Greatly daring, and without looking back at the stern intellectual puritanism in which he was brought up, he preaches the necessity of understanding and gaining illumination
' L 1/222.
from doctrines that are incompatible with one another - say those of Coleridge and Bentham; he explained in his autobiography, and in his essays on these two writers, the need to understand and learn from both.
III
Kant once remarked that 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made." Mill believed this deeply. This, and his almost Hegelian refusal to trust simple models and cut and dried formulae to cover complex, contradictory and changing situations, made him a very hesitant and uncertain adherent of organised parties and programmes. Despite his father's advocacy, despite Harriet Taylor's passionate faith in the ultimate solution of all social evils by some great institutional change (in her case that of socialism), he could not rest in the notion of a clearly discernible final goal, because he saw that men differed and evolved, not merely as a result of natural causes, but also because of what they themselves did to alter their own characters, at times in unintended ways. This alone makes their conduct unpredictable, and renders laws or theories, whether inspired by analogies with mechanics or with biology, nevertheless incapable of embracing the complexity and qualitative properties of even an individual character, let alone of a group of men. Hence the imposition of any such construction upon a living society is bound, in his favourite words of warning, to 'dwarf', 'maim', 'cramp', 'wither' human faculties.2
His greatest break with his father was brought about by this conviction: by his belief (which he never explicitly admitted) that particular predicaments required each its own specific treatment; that the application of correct judgement in curing a social malady mattered at least as much as knowledge of the laws of anatomy or pharmacology. He was a British empiricist and not a French rationalist, or a German metaphysician, sensitive to day-to-day play of circumstances, differences of 'climate'/ as well as to the individual nature of each case, as Helvetius or Saint-Simon or Fichte, concerned as they were with the grandes lignes of development, were not. Hence his increasing anxiety, as great as Tocque- ville's and greater than Montesquieu's, to preserve variety, to keep doors open to change, to resist the dangers of social pressure; and above all his hatred of the human pack in full cry against a victim, his desire to protect dissidents and heretics as such. The whole burden of his charge against the progressives (he means Utilitarians and perhaps socialists) is that, as a rule, they do no more than try to alter social opinion in order to make it more favourable to this or that scheme or reform, instead of assailing the monstrous principle itself which says that social opinion 'should be a law to individuals' .'
Mill's overmastering desire for variety and individuality for their own sakes emerges in many shapes. He notes that 'Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest' - an apparent 'truism' which nevertheless, he declares, 'stands . . . opposed to the general tendency of existing opinion and practice'.2 At other times he speaks in sharper terms. He remarks that it is the habit of his time to impose conformity to an 'approved standard', namely 'to desire nothing strongly. Its ideal of character is to be without any marked character; to maim by compression, like a Chinese lady's foot, every part of human nature which stands out prominently, and tends to make the person markedly dissimilar in outline to commonplace humanity.'3 And again, 'The greatness of England is now all collective: individually small, we only appear capable of anything great by our habit of combining; and with this our moral and religious philanthropists are perfectly contented. But it was men of another stamp than this that made England what it has been; and men of another stamp will be needed to prevent its decline.'4
The tone of this, if not the content, would have shocked Bentham; so indeed would this bitter echo of Tocqueville: 'Comparatively speaking, they now read the same things, listen to the same things, see the same things, go to the same places, have their hopes and fears directed to the same objects, have the same rights and liberties, and the same means of asserting them . .. All the political changes of the age promote [this assimilation], since they all tend to raise the low and to lower the high. Every extension of education promotes it, because education brings people under common influences . .. Improvements in the means of communication promote it', as does 'the ascendancy of public opinion'. There is 'so great a mass of influences hostile to Individuality' that 'In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.'[103] We have come to such a pass that mere differences, resistance for its own sake, protest as such, is now enough. Conformity, and the intolerance which is its offensive and defensive arm, are for Mill always detestable, and peculiarly horrifying in an age which thinks itself enlightened; in which, nevertheless, a man can be sent to prison for twenty-one months for atheism; jurymen are rejected and foreigners denied justice because they hold no recognised religious beliefs; no public money is given for Hindu or Muslim schools because an 'imbecile display'2 is made by an Under-Secretary who declares that toleration is desirable only among Christians but not for unbelievers. It is no better when workers employ 'a moral police'3 to prevent some members of their trade union being paid higher wages earned by superior skill or industry than the wages paid to those who lack these attributes.
Such conduct is even more loathsome when it interferes with private relations between individuals. He declared that 'what any persons may freely do with respect to sexual relations should be deemed to be an unimportant and purely private matter, which concerns no one but themselves'; that 'to have held any human being responsible to other people and to the world for the fact itself' (apart from such of its consequences as the birth of children, which clearly created duties which should be socially enforced) 'will one day be thought one of the superstitions and barbarisms of the infancy of the human race'.4 The same seemed to him to apply to the enforcement of temperance or Sabbath observance, or any of the matters on which 'intrusively pious members of society' should be told 'to mind their own business'.5 No doubt the gossip to which Mill was exposed during his relationship with Harriet Taylor before his marriage to her - the relationship which Carlyle mocked as platonic - made him peculiarly sensitive to this form of social persecution. But what he was to say about it is of a piece with his deepest and most permanent convictions.
Mill's suspicion of democracy as the only just, and yet potentially the most oppressive, form of government springs from the same roots. He wondered uneasily whether centralisation of authority and the inevitable dependence of each on all and 'surveillance of each by all' would not end by grinding all down into 'a tame uniformity of thought, dealings and actions'/ and produce 'automatons in human form'[104] and Hiberticide'/ Tocque- ville had written pessimistically about the moral and intellectual effects of democracy in America: 'Such a power does not destroy,' to quote the passage alluded to earlier, 'but it prevents existence . . . it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people'; and turns it into 'a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd'.[105] Mill agreed. Yet the only cure for this, as Tocqueville himself maintained (it may be a little halfheartedly), is more democracy,[106] which can alone educate a sufficient number of individuals to independence, resistance and strength. Men's disposition to impose their own views on others is so strong that, in Mill's view, only want of power restricts it; this power is growing; hence unless further barriers are erected it will increase, leading to a proliferation of 'conformers', 'time-servers',[107]hypocrites, created by silencing opinion/ and finally to a society where timidity has killed independent thought, and men confine themselves to safe subjects.
Yet if we make the barriers too high, and do not interfere with opinion at all, will this not end, as Burke or the Hegelians have warned, in the dissolution of the social texture, atomisation of society - anarchy? To this Mill replies that the 'inconvenience' arising from 'conduct which neither violates any specific duty to the public, nor occasions perceptible hurt to any assignable individual except himself ... is one which society can afford to bear, for the sake of the greater good of human freedom'.8 This is tantamount to saying that if society, despite the need for social cohesion, has itself failed to educate its citizens to be civilised men, it has no right to punish them for irritating others, or being misfits, or not conforming to some standard which the majority accepts. A smooth and harmonious society could perhaps be created, at any rate for a time, but it would be purchased at too high a price. Plato saw correctly that if a frictionless society is to emerge the poets must be driven out; what horrifies those who revolt against this policy is not so much the expulsion of the fantasy-mongering poets as such, but the underlying desire for an end to variety, movement, individuality of any kind; a craving for a fixed pattern of life and thought, timeless, changeless and uniform. Without the right of protest, and the capacity for it, there is for Mill no justice, there are no ends worth pursuing. 'If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.'1
In his lecture in this series, to which I have already referred, R. W. Livingstone, whose sympathy with Mill is not in doubt, charges him with attributing too much rationality to human beings: the ideal of untrammelled freedom may be the right of those who have reached the maturity of their faculties, but of how many men today, or at most times, is this true? Surely Mill asks far too much and is far too optimistic?2 There is certainly an important sense in which Livingstone is right: Mill was no prophet. Many social developments caused him grief, but he had no inkling of the mounting strength of the irrational forces that have moulded the history of the twentieth century. Burckhardt and Marx, Pareto and Freud were more sensitive to the deeper currents of their own times, and saw a good deal more deeply into the springs of individual and social behaviour. But I know of rio evidence that Mill overestimated the enlightenment of his own age, or that he supposed that the majority of men of his own time were mature or rational or likely soon to become so. What he did see before him was the spectacle of some men, civilised by any standards, who were kept down, or discriminated against, or persecuted by prejudice, stupidity, 'collective mediocrity';3 he saw such men deprived of what he regarded as their most essential rights, and he protested. He believed that all human progress, all human greatness and virtue and freedom, depended chiefly on the preservation of such men and the clearing of paths before them. But he did not want them appointed Platonic Guardians.4 He thought that
' L 2/229.
op. cit. (p. 2 i 8 above, note 3), pp. 8-9.
L 3/268.
This is the line which divides him from Saint-Simon and Comte, and from H. G. Wells and the technocrats.
others like them could be educated, and, when they were educated, would be entitled to make choices, and that these choices must not, within certain limits, be blocked or directed by others. He did not merely advocate education and forget the freedom to which it would entitle the educated (as Communists have), or press for total freedom of choice, and forget that without adequate education it would lead to chaos and, as a reaction to it, a new slavery (as anarchists do). He demanded both. But he did not think that this process would be rapid, or easy, or universal: he was on the whole a pessimistic man, and consequently at once defended and distrusted democracy, for which he has been duly attacked, and is still sharply criticised.
Livingstone observed that Mill was acutely conscious of the circumstances of his age, and saw no further than that. This seems to me a just comment. The disease of Victorian England was claustrophobia - there was a sense of suffocation, and the best and most gifted men of the period, Mill and Carlyle, Nietzsche and Ibsen, men both of the left and of the right - demanded more air and more light. The mass neurosis of our age is agoraphobia; men are terrified of disintegration and of too little direction: they ask, like Hobbes's masterless men in a state of nature, for walls to keep out the raging ocean, for order, security, organisation, clear and recognisable authority, and are alarmed by the prospect of too much freedom, which leaves them lost in a vast, friendless vacuum, a desert without paths or landmarks or goals. Our situation is different from that of the nineteenth century, and so are our problems: the area of irrationality is seen to be vaster and more complex than any that Mill had dreamed of. Mill's psychology has become antiquated and grows more so with every discovery that is made. He is justly criticised for paying too much attention to purely spiritual obstacles to the fruitful use of freedom - lack of moral and intellectual light - and too little (although nothing like as little as his detractors have maintained) to poverty, disease and their causes, and to the common sources and the interaction of both; and for concentrating too narrowly on freedom of thought and expression. All this is true. Yet what solutions have we found, with all our new technological and psychological knowledge and great new powers, save the ancient prescription advocated by the creators of humanism - Erasmus and Spinoza, Locke and Montesquieu, Lessing and Diderot - reason, education, self-knowledge, 244 LIBERTY
responsibility; above all, self-knowledge? What other hope is there for men, or has there ever been?
IV
Mill's ideal is not original. It is an attempt to fuse rationalism and romanticism: the aim of Goethe and Wilhelm Humboldt; a rich, spontaneous, many-sided, fearless, free, and yet rational, self- directed character. Mill notes that Europeans owe much to 'plurality of paths'.1 From sheer differences and disagreements sprang toleration, variety, humanity. In a sudden outburst of anti-egalitarian feeling he praises the Middle Ages because men were then more individual and more responsible: men died for ideas, and women were equal to men. He quotes Michelet with approval: 'The poor Middle Ages, its Papacy, its chivalry, its feudality, under what hands did they perish? Under those of the attorney, the fraudulent bankrupt, the false coiner. '2 This is the language not of a philosophical radical, but of Burke, or Carlyle, or Chesterton. In his passion for the colour and the texture of life Mill has forgotten his list of martyrs, he has forgotten the teachings of his father, of Bentham, or Condorcet. He remembers only Coleridge, only the horrors of a levelling, middle-class society - the grey, conformist congregation that worships the wicked principle that 'it is the absolute social right of every individual, that every other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought'/ or, worse still, 'that it is one man's duty that another should be religious', for 'God not only abominates the act of the misbeliever, but will not hold us guiltless if we leave him unmolested'.4 These are the shibboleths of Victorian England, and if that is its conception of social justice, it were better dead. In a similar, earlier, moment of acute indignation with the self-righteous defences of the exploitation of the poor, Mill had expressed his enthusiasm for revolution and slaughter, since justice was more precious than life.5 He was
' L 3/274.
2 Translated by Mill from Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, vols 1-5 (Paris, 1833-41), book 5, chapter 3 (vol. 3, p. 32), in Mill's review of these volumes: CW xx 252.
' L 4/289. ' ibid.
5 Probably a reference to remarks in a letter to John Sterling, 2o-22 October 1831: CW xii 84. These remarks are referred to more directly on p. 224 above: 'a twenty-five years old when he wrote that. A quarter of a century later, he declared that a civilisation which had not the inner strength to resist barbarism had better succumb/ This may not be the voice of Kant, but it is not that of Utilitarianism; rather that of Rousseau or Mazzini.
But Mill seldom continues in this tone. His solution is not revolutionary. If human life is to be made tolerable, information must be centralised and power disseminated. If everyone knows as much as possible, and has not too much power, then we may yet avoid a State which 'dwarfs its men'/ in which there is 'the absolute rule of the head of the executive over a congregation of isolated individuals, all equals but all slaves';3 'with small men no great thing can really be accomplished'.4 There is a terrible danger in creeds and forms of life which 'cramp', 'stunt', 'dwarf' men.5 The acute consciousness in our day of the dehumanising effect of mass culture; of the destruction of genuine purposes, both individual and communal, by the treatment of men as irrational creatures to be deluded and manipulated by the media of mass advertising and mass communication - and so 'alienated' from the basic purposes of human beings by being left exposed to the play of the forces of nature interacting with human ignorance, vice, stupidity, tradition, and above all self-deception and institutional blindness - all this was as deeply and painfully felt by Mill as by Ruskin or William Morris. In this matter he differs from them only in his clearer awareness of the dilemma created by the simultaneous needs for individual self-expression and for human community. It is on this theme that the tract on liberty was composed. 'And it is to be feared', Mill added gloomily, that the 'teachings' of his essay 'will retain [their] value a long timeV
Bertrand Russell - Mill's godson - once remarked that the deepest convictions of philosophers are seldom contained in their formal arguments; fundamental beliefs, comprehensive views of life
revolution that would kill all men with an income of more than £500 per annum might improve things greatly'. Ed.
' L 4/291. 2 L 5/310.
з Autobiography, chapter 6: CW i 201.
• L 5/3 io.
5 L 3/266, except 'stunt', which is in Autobiography, chapter 7 (CW i 260), and Considerations on Representative Government, chapter 3 (CW xix 400).
' Autobiography, chapter 7: CW i 260.
are like citadels which must be guarded against the enemy.[108]Philosophers expend their intellectual power in arguments against actual and possible objections to their doctrines, and although the reasons they find, and the logic that they use, may be complex, ingenious and formidable, they are defensive weapons; the inner fortress itself - the vision of life for the sake of which the war is being waged - will, as a rule, turn out to be relatively simple and unsophisticated. Mill's defence of his position in the tract on liberty is not, as has often been pointed out, of the highest intellectual quality: most of his arguments can be turned against him; certainly none is conclusive, or such as would convince a determined or unsympathetic opponent. From the days of James Stephen, whose powerful attack on Mill's position appeared in the year of Mill's death, to the conservatives and socialists and authoritarians and totalitarians of our day, the critics of Mill have, on the whole, exceeded the number of his defenders. Nevertheless, the inner citadel - the central thesis - has stood the test. It may need elaboration or qualification, but it is still the clearest, most candid, persuasive, and moving exposition of the point of view of those who desire an open and tolerant society. The reason for this is not merely the honesty of Mill's mind, or the moral and intellectual charm of his prose, but the fact that he is saying something true and important about some of the most fundamental characteristics and aspirations of human beings.
Mill is not merely uttering a string of clear propositions (each of which, viewed by itself, is of doubtful plausibility) connected by such logical links as he can supply. He perceived something profound and essential about the destructive effect of man's most successful efforts at self-improvement in modern society; about the unintended consequences of modern democracy, and the fallaciousness and practical dangers of the theories by which some of the worst of these consequences were (and still are) defended. That is why, despite the weakness of the argument, the loose ends, the dated examples, the touch of the finishing governess that Disraeli so maliciously noted, despite the total lack of that boldness of conception which only men of original genius possess, his essay educated his generation, and is controversial still. Mill's central propositions are not truisms, they are not at all self-evident. They are statements of a position which has been resisted and rejected by the modern descendants of his most notable contemporaries, Marx, Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Newman, Comte, and they are still assailed because they are still contemporary. On Liberty deals with specific social issues in terms of examples drawn from genuine and disturbing issues of its day, and its principles and conclusions are alive in part because they spring from acute moral crises in a man's life, and thereafter from a life spent in working for concrete causes and taking genuine - and therefore at times dangerous - decisions. Mill looked at the questions that puzzled him directly, and not through spectacles provided by any orthodoxy. His revolt against his father's education, his bold avowal of the values of Coleridge and the romantics, was the liberating act that dashed these spectacles to the ground. From these half-truths, too, he liberated himself in turn, and became a thinker in his own right. For this reason, while Spencer and Comte, Taine and Buckle, even Carlyle and Ruskin - figures who loomed very large in their generation - are fast receding into (or have been swallowed by) the shadows of the past, Mill himself remains real.
One of the symptoms of this kind of three-dimensional, rounded, authentic quality is that we feel sure that we can tell where he would have stood on the issues of our own day. Can anyone doubt what position he would have taken on the Dreyfus case, or the Boer War, or Fascism, or Communism? Or, for that matter, on Munich, or Suez, or Budapest, or apartheid, or colonialism, or the Wolfenden report? Can we be so certain with regard to other eminent Victorian moralists? Carlyle or Ruskin or Dickens? Or even Kingsley or Wilberforce or Newman? Surely that alone is some evidence of the permanence of the issues with which Mill dealt and the degree of his insight into them.
v
Mill is usually represented as a just and high-souled Victorian schoolmaster, honourable, sensitive, humane, but 'sober, censorious and sad';' something of a goose, something of a prig; a good and noble man, but bleak, sententious and desiccated; a waxwork among other waxworks in an age now dead and gone and stiff with such effigies. His autobiography - one of the most moving accounts of a human life - modifies this impression. Mill was certainly an intellectual, and was well aware, and not at all ashamed, of this fact. He knew that his main interest lay in general ideas in a society largely distrustful of them: 'Englishmen', he wrote to his friend Gustave d'Eichthal, 'habitually distrust the most obvious truths, if the person who advances them is suspected of having any general views.'[109] He was excited by ideas and wanted them to be as interesting as possible. He admired the French for respecting intellectuals as the English did not. He noted that there was a good deal of talk in England about the march of intellect at home, but he remained sceptical. He wondered whether 'our "march of intellect" be not rather a march towards doing without intellect, and supplying our deficiency of giants by the united efforts of a constantly increasing multitude of dwarfs'.2 The word 'dwarf', and the fear of smallness, pervades all his writings.
Because he believed in the importance of ideas, he was prepared to change his own if others could convince him of their inadequacy, or when a new vision was revealed to him, as it was by Coleridge or Saint-Simon, or, as he believed, by the transcendent genius of Harriet Taylor. He liked criticism for its own sake. He detested adulation, even praise of his own work. He attacked dogmatism in others and was genuinely free from it himself. Despite the efforts of his father and his mentors, he retained an unusually open mind, and his 'still and even cold appearance' and 'a head that reasons as a great Steam-Engine works' were united (to quote his friend Sterling) with 'a warm, upright and really lofty soul'3 and a touching and pure-hearted readiness to learn from anyone, at any time. He lacked vanity and cared little for his reputation, and therefore did not cling to consistency for its own sake, nor to his own personal dignity, if a human issue was at stake. He was loyal to movements, to causes and to parties, but could not
' Letter of 9 February 1830: CW xii 48.
'On Genius' (1832): CW i 330. [Mill's 'On Genius' is a reply to an anonymous two-part article in the Monthly Repository NS 6 ( 1 8 32 ), 556-64, 627-34, where the notion of an 'onward march' (556) of intellect is omnipresent. The exact phrase 'march of intellect' does not appear, but 'march of mind' does (557; cf. 558).]
Letter from John Sterling to his son Edward, 29 July 1 844, quoted in Anne Kimball Tuell, John Sterling: A Representative Victorian (New York, 1941), p. 69 [where 'reasons' is followed by '(?)', perhaps to indicate uncertainty on Tuell's part as to her reading of the preceding word].
be prevailed upon to support them at the price of saying what he did not think to be true.
A characteristic instance of this is his attitude to religion. His father brought him up in the strictest and narrowest atheist dogma. He rebelled against it. He embraced no recognised faith, but he did not dismiss religion, as the French encyclopaedists or the Benthamites had done, as a tissue of childish fantasies and emotions, comforting illusions, mystical gibberish and deliberate lies. He held that the existence of God was possible, indeed probable, .but unproven, but that if God was good he could not be omnipotent, since he permitted evil to exist. He would not hear of a being at once wholly good and omnipotent whose nature defied the canons of human logic, since he rejected belief in mysteries as mere attempts to evade agonising issues. If he did not understand (this must have happened often), he did not pretend to understand. Although he was prepared to fight for the rights of others to hold a faith detached from logic, he rejected it himself. He revered Christ as the best man who ever lived, and regarded theism as a noble, though to him unintelligible, set of beliefs. He regarded immortality as possible, but rated its probability very low. He was in fact, a Victorian agnostic who was uncomfortable with atheism and regarded religion as something that was exclusively the individual's own affair. When he was invited to stand for Parliament, to which he was duly elected, he declared that he was prepared to answer any questions that the electors of Westminster might choose to put to him, save those on his religious views. This was not cowardice - his behaviour throughout the election was so candid and imprudently fearless that someone remarked that on Mill's platform God Almighty himself could not expect to be elected. His reason was that a man had an indefeasible right to keep his private life to himself and to fight for this right, if need be. When, at a later date, his stepdaughter Helen Taylor and others upbraided him for not aligning himself more firmly with the atheists, and accused him of temporising and shilly-shallying, he remained unshaken. His doubts were his own property: no one was entitled to extort a confession of faith from him, unless it could be shown that his silence harmed others; since this could not be shown, he saw no reason for publicly committing himself. Like Acton after him, he regarded liberty and religious toleration as the indispensable protection of all true religion, and the distinction made by the Church between spiritual and temporal realms as one of the great achievements of Christianity, inasmuch as it had made possible freedom of opinion. This last he valued beyond all things, and he defended Bradlaugh passionately, although, and because, he did not agree with his opinions.
He was the teacher of a generation, of a nation, but still no more than a teacher, not a creator or an innovator. He is known for no lasting discovery or invention. He made scarcely any significant advance in logic or philosophy or economics or political thought. Yet his range and his capacity for applying ideas to fields in which they would bear fruit were unexampled. He was not original, yet he transformed the structure of the human knowledge of his age.
Because he had an exceptionally honest, open and civilised mind, which found natural expression in lucid and admirable prose; because he combined an unswerving pursuit of the truth with the belief that its house had many mansions, so that even 'one-eyed men' like Bentham might see what men with normal vision would not;[110] because, despite his inhibited emotions and his overdeveloped intellect, despite his humourless, cerebral, solemn character, his conception of man was deeper, and his vision of history and life wider and less simple, than that of his Utilitarian predecessors or liberal followers, he has emerged as a major political thinker in our own day. He broke with the pseudo-scientific model, inherited from the classical world and the age of reason, of a determined human nature, endowed at all times, everywhere, with the same unaltering needs, emotions, motives, responding differently only to differences of situation and stimulus, or evolving according to some unaltering pattern. For this he substituted (not altogether consciously) the image of man as creative, incapable of self-completion, and therefore never wholly predictable: fallible, a complex combination of opposites, some reconcilable, others incapable of being resolved or harmonised; unable to cease from his search for truth, happiness, novelty, freedom, but with no guarantee, theological or logical or scientific, of being able to attain them; a free, imperfect being, capable of determining his own destiny in circumstances favourable to the development of his reason and his gifts. He was tormented by the problem of free will, and found no better solution for it than anyone else, although at times he thought he had solved it. He believed that it is neither rational thought, nor domination over nature, but freedom to choose and to experiment that distinguishes men from the rest of nature; of all his ideas it is this view that has ensured his lasting fame.1 By freedom he meant a condition in which men were not prevented from choosing both the object and the manner of their worship. For him only a society in which this condition was realised could be called fully human. Its realisation was an ideal which Mill regarded as more precious than life itself.
1 It will be seen from the general tenor of this essay that I am not in agreement with those who wish to represent Mill as favouring some kind of hegemony of right-minded intellectuals. I do not see how this can be regarded as Mill's considered conclusion; not merely in view of the considerations that I have urged, but of his own warnings against Comtian despotism, which contemplated precisely such a hierarchy. At the same time, he was, in common with a good many other liberals in the nineteenth century both in England and elsewhere, not merely hostile to the influence of uncriticised traditionalism, or the sheer power of inertia, but apprehensive of the rule of the uneducated democratic majority; consequently he tried to insert into his system some guarantees against the vices of uncontrolled democracy, plainly hoping that, at any rate while ignorance and irrationality were still widespread (he was not over-optimistic about the rate of the growth of education), authority would tend to be exercised by the more rational, just and well-informed persons in the community. It is, however, one thing to say that Mill was nervous of majorities as such, and another to accuse him of authoritarian tendencies, of favouring the rule of a rational elite, whatever the Fabians may or may not have derived from him. He was not responsible for the views of his disciples, particularly of those whom he himself had not chosen and never knew. Mill was the last man to be guilty of advocating what Bakunin, in the course of an attack on Marx, described as la pedantocratie, the government by professors, which he regarded as one of the most oppressive of all forms of despotism.
[It was in fact Mill who coined the term 'pedantocratie', in a letter of 25 February i 842 to Auguste Comte: CW xiii 502. Comte liked it and adopted it, with Mill's approval (xiii 5 24): see for example Catechisme postttviste (Paris, 1852), p. 377. Mill used the term again later, in English, at L 5/308 and in Considerations on Representattve Government, chapter 6: CW xix 439. I have not yet found the term in Bakunin, though he does say in Gosudarstvennost' t anarkhiya: ^To be the slaves of pedants - what a fate for humanity!' See p. I 12 in Archives Bakounine, vol. 3, Etatisme et anarchie, /873 (Leiden, 1967), and p. 134 in Michael Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, ed. and trans. Marshall Shatz (Cambridge etc., 1990). Ed.]
FROM HOPE AND FEAR SET FREE
where the frontier dividing the external world of matter and non- rational creatures from active agents is to be found. Some thinkers have supposed that such fulfilment was (or had once been, or would one day be) possible on earth, others have denied this. Some maintained that the ends of men were objective and capable of being discovered by special methods of enquiry, but disagreed on what these were: empirical or a priori; intuitive or discursive; scientific or purely reflective; public or private; confined to specially gifted or fortunate enquirers, or in principle open to any man. Others believed that such ends were subjective, or determined by physical or psychological or social factors, which differed widely. Again, Aristotle, for example, supposed that if external conditions were too unfavourable - if a man suffered Priam's misfortunes - this made self-fulfilment, the proper realisation of one's nature, impossible. On the other hand the Stoics and Epicureans held that complete rational self-control could be achieved by a man whatever his external circumstances, since all that he needed was a sufficient degree of detachment from human society and the external world; to this they added the optimistic belief that the degree sufficient for self-fulfilment was in principle perfectly attainable by anyone who consciously sought independence and autonomy, that is, escape from being the plaything of external forces which he could not control.
Among the assumptions that are common to all these views are:
that things and persons possess natures - definite structures independent of whether or not they are known;
that these natures or structures are governed by universal and unalterable laws;
that these structures and laws are, at least in principle, all knowable; and that knowledge of them will automatically keep men from stumbling in the dark and dissipating effort on policies which, given the facts - the nature of things and persons and the laws that govern them - are doomed to failure.
According to this doctrine men are not self-directed and therefore not free when their behaviour is caused by misdirected emotions - for example, fears of non-existent entities, or hatreds due not to a rational perception of the true state of affairs but to illusions, fantasies, results of unconscious memories and forgotten wounds. Rationalisations and ideologies, on this view, are false explanations of behaviour the true roots of which are unknown or ignored or misunderstood; and these in their turn breed further illusions, fantasies and forms of irrational and compulsive behaviour. True liberty consists, therefore, in self-direction: a man is free to the degree that the true explanation of his activity lies in the intentions and motives of which he is conscious, and not in some hidden psychological or physiological condition that would have produced the same effect, that is, the same behaviour (posing as choice), whatever explanation or justification the agent attempted to produce. A rational man is free if his behaviour is not mechanical, and springs from motives and is intended to fulfil purposes of which he is, or can at will be, aware; so that it is true to say that having these intentions and purposes is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for his behaviour. The unfree man is like someone who is drugged or hypnotised: whatever explanations he may himself advance for his behaviour, it remains unaltered by any change in his ostensible, overt motives and policies; we consider him to be in the grip of forces over which he has no control, not free, when it is plain that his behaviour will be predictably the same whatever reasons he advances for it.
To put matters in this way is to identify rationality and freedom, or at least to go a long way towards it. Rational thought is thought the content or, at least, the conclusions of which obey rules and principles and are not merely items in a causal or random sequence; rational behaviour is behaviour which (at least in principle) can be explained by the actor or observer in terms of motives, intentions, choices, reasons, rules, and not solely of natural laws - causal or statistical, or 'organic' or others of the same logical type (whether explanations in terms of motives, reasons and the like and those in terms of causes, probabilities and so on are 'categorially' different and cannot in principle clash or indeed be relevant to one another is of course a crucial question; but I do not wish to raise it here). To call a man a thief is pro tanto to attribute rationality to him: to call him a kleptomaniac is to deny it of him. If degrees of a man's freedom directly depend on (or are identical with) the extent of his knowledge of the roots of his behaviour, then a kleptomaniac who knows himself to be one is, to that extent, free; he may be unable to stop stealing or even to try to do so; but his recognition of this, because he is now - so it is maintained - in a position to choose whether to try to resist this compulsion (even if he is bound to fail) or to let it take its course, renders him not merely more rational (which seems indisputable), but more free.
But is this always so? Is awareness of a disposition or causal characteristic on my part identical with - or does it necessarily provide me with - the power to manipulate or alter it? There is, of course, a clear but platitudinous sense in which all knowledge increases freedom in some respect: if I know that I am liable to epileptic fits, or feelings of class consciousness, or the spellbinding effect of certain kinds of music, I can - in some sense of 'can' - plan my life accordingly; whereas if I do not know this, I cannot do so; I gain some increase in power and, to that extent, in freedom. But this knowledge may also decrease my power in some other respect: if I anticipate an epileptic fit or the onset of some painful, or even agreeable, emotion, I may be inhibited from some other free exercise of my power, or be precluded from some other experience - I may be unable to continue to write poetry, or understand the Greek text which I am reading, or think about philosophy, or get up from my chair: I may, in other words, pay for an increase of power and freedom in one region by a loss of them in another. (I propose to return to this point later, in a slightly different context.)[111] Nor am I necessarily rendered able to control my fits of epilepsy or of class consciousness or addiction to Indian music by recognising their incidence. If by knowledge is meant what the classical authors meant by it - knowledge of facts (not knowledge of 'what to do', which may be a disguised way of stating not that something is the case, but a commitment to certain ends or values, or of expressing, not describing, a decision to act in a certain fashion); if, in other words, I claim to have the kind of knowledge about myself that I might have about others, then even though my sources may be better or my certainty greater, such self- knowledge, it seems to me, may or may not add to the sum total of my freedom. The question is empirical: and the answer depends on specific circumstances. From the fact that every gain in knowledge liberates me in some respect, it does not follow, for the reasons given above, that it will necessarily add to the total sum of freedom that I enjoy: it may, by taking with one hand more than it gives with the other, decrease it. But there is a more radical criticism of this view to be considered. To say that one is free only if one understands oneself (even if this is not a sufficient condition of freedom) presupposes that we have a self to be understood - that there is a structure correctly described as human nature which is what it is, obeys the laws that it does, and is an object of natural study. This has itself been questioned, notably by certain existentialist philosophers. By these it is maintained that far more is a matter of human choice than has usually and complacently been supposed. Since choice involves responsibility, and some human beings at most times, and most human beings at some times, wish to avoid this burden, there is a tendency to look for excuses and alibis. For this reason men tend to attribute too much to the unavoidable operations of natural or social laws - for instance, to the workings of the unconscious mind, or unalterable psychological reflexes, or the laws of social evolution. Critics who belong to this school (which owes much both to Hegel and Marx and to Kierkegaard) say that some notorious impediments to liberty - say, the social pressures of which J. S. Mill made so much - are not objective forces the existence and effects of which are independent of human wishes or activities or alterable only by means not open to isolated individuals - by revolutions or radical reforms that cannot be engineered at the individual's will. What is maintained is the contrary: that I need not be bullied by others or pressed into conformity by schoolmasters or friends or parents; need never be affected in some way that I cannot help by what priests or colleagues or critics or social groups or classes think or do. If I am so affected, it is because I choose it. I am insulted when I am mocked as a hunchback, a Jew, a black, or unnerved by the feeling that I am suspected of being a traitor, only if I choose to accept the opinion - the valuation - of hunchbacks or race or treason of those by whose views and attitudes I am dominated. But I can always choose to ignore or resist this - to snap my fingers at such views and codes and outlooks; and then I am free.
This is the very doctrine, though built on different premisses, of those who drew the portrait of the Stoic sage. If I choose to knuckle under to public sentiment or the values of this or that group or person, the responsibility is mine and not that of outside forces - forces, personal or impersonal, to whose allegedly irresistible influence I attribute my behaviour, attribute it only too eagerly in order to escape blame or self-blame. My behaviour, my character, my personality, according to these critics, is not a mysterious substance or the referent of a pattern of hypothetical general (causal) propositions, but a pattern of choices or of failures to choose which themselves represent a kind of choice to let events take their course, not to assert myself as an active agent. If I am self-critical and face the facts, I may find that I shuffle off my responsibilities too easily.
This applies both in the realms of theory and in those of practical affairs. Thus, if I am a historian, my view of the factors significant in history may well be profoundly affected by my desire to glorify or detract from the reputation of individuals or classes - an act, so it is argued, of free valuation on my part. Once I am aware of this, I can select and judge as I will: 'the facts' never speak - only I, the chooser, the evaluator, the judge, can do so, and do so according to my own sweet will, in accordance with principles, rules, ideals, prejudices, feelings which I can freely view, examine, accept, reject. If I minimise the human cost of a given political or economic policy, in the past or present or future, I shall upon examination often find that I do so because I disapprove of or bear a grudge against the critics or opponents of those who conduct the policy. If I seek to explain away, whether to others or to myself, some unworthy act on my part, on the ground that something - the political or military situation, or my emotion or inner state - was 'too much for me', then I am cheating myself, or others, or both. Action is choice; choice is free commitment to this or that way of behaving, living, and so on; the possibilities are never fewer than two: to do or not to do; be or not be. Hence, to attribute conduct to the unalterable laws of nature is to misdescribe reality: it is not true to experience, verifiably false; and to perpetrate such falsification - as most philosophers and ordinary men have done and are constantly doing - is to choose to evade responsibility for making choices or failing to make them, to choose to deny that to drift down a current of accepted opinion and behave semi-mechanically is itself a kind of choice - a free act of surrender; this is so because it is always possible, though sometimes painful, to ask myself what it is that I really believe, want, value, what it is that I am doing, living for; and having answered as well as I am able, to continue to act in a given fashion or alter my behaviour.
I do not wish to deny that all this needs saying: that to look on the future as already structured, solid with future facts, is conceptually fallacious; that the tendency to account both for the whole of our own behaviour and that of others in terms of forces regarded as being too powerful to resist is empirically mistaken, in that it goes beyond what is warranted by the facts. In its extreme form this doctrine does away with determination at one blow: I am determined by my own choices; to believe otherwise - say, in determinism or fatalism or chance - is itself a choice, and a particularly craven one at that. Yet it is surely arguable that this very tendency itself is a symptom of man's specific nature. Such tendencies as looking on the future as unalterable - a symmetrical analogue of the past - or the quest for excuses, escapist fantasies, flights from responsibility, are themselves psychological data. To be self- deceived is ex hypothesi something that I cannot have chosen consciously, although I may have consciously chosen to act in a manner likely to produce this result, without shrinking from this consequence. There is a difference between choices and compulsive behaviour, even if the compulsion is itself the result of an earlier uncompelled choice. The illusions from which I suffer determine the field of my choice; self-knowledge - destruction of the illusions - will alter this field, make it more possible for me to choose genuinely rather than suppose that I have chosen something when, in fact, it has (as it were) chosen me. But in the course of distinguishing between true and counterfeit acts of choice (however this is done - however I discover that I have seen through illusions), I nevertheless discover that I have an ineluctable nature. There are certain things that I cannot do. I cannot (logically) remain rational or sane and believe no general propositions, or remain sane and use no general terms; I cannot retain a body and cease to gravitate. I can perhaps in some sense try to do these things, but to be rational entails knowing that I shall fail. My knowledge of my own nature and that of other things and persons, and of the laws that govern them and me, saves my energies from dissipation or misapplication; it exposes bogus claims and excuses; it fixes responsibilities where they belong and dismisses false pleas of impotence as well as false charges against the truly innocent; but it cannot widen the scope of my liberty beyond frontiers determined by factors genuinely and permanently outside my control. To explain these factors is not to explain them away. Increase of knowledge will increase my rationality, and infinite knowledge would make me infinitely rational; it might increase my powers and my freedom: but it cannot make me infinitely free.
To return to the main theme: How does knowledge liberate me? Let me state the traditional position once again. On the view that I am trying to examine, the classical view which descends to us from Aristotle, from the Stoics, from a great part of Christian theology, and finds its rationalist formulation in the doctrines of Spinoza and his followers both among the German idealists and modern psychologists, knowledge, by uncovering little-recognised and therefore uncontrolled forces that affect my conduct, emancipates me from their despotic force, the greater when they have been concealed and therefore misinterpreted. Why is this so? Because once I have uncovered them, I can seek to direct them, or resist them, or create conditions in which they will be canalised into harmless channels, or turned to use - that is, for the fulfilment of my purposes. Freedom is self-government - whether in politics or in individual life - and anything that increases the control of the self over forces external to it contributes to liberty. Although the frontiers that divide self and personality from 'external' forces, whether in the individual-moral or in the public-social field, are still exceedingly vague - perhaps necessarily so - this Baconian thesis seems valid enough so far as it goes. But its claims are too great. In its classical form it is called the doctrine of self-determination. According to this, freedom consists in playing a part in determining one's own conduct; the greater this part, the greater the freedom. Servitude, or lack of freedom, is being determined by 'external' forces - whether these be physical or psychological; the greater the part played by these forces, the smaller the freedom of the individual. So far, so good. But if it be asked whether the part that I play - my choices, purposes, intentions - might not themselves be determined - caused - to be as they are by 'external' causes, the classical reply seems to be that this does not greatly matter; I am free if and only if I can do as I intended. Whether my state of mind is itself the causal product of something else - physical or psychological, of climate, or blood pressure, or my character - is neither here nor there; it may or may not be so: this, if it is so, may be known or unknown; all that matters, all that those worried about whether a man's acts are free or not wish to know, is whether my behaviour has as a necessary condition my own conscious choice. If it has, I am free in the only sense that any rational being can ask for: whether the choice itself - like the rest of me - is caused or uncaused is not what is at stake; even if it is wholly caused by natural factors, I am no less free.
Ami-determinists have naturally retorted that this merely pushed the problem a step backwards: the 'self' played its part, indeed, but was itself hopelessly 'determined'. It may be worth going back to the origins of this controversy, for, as often happens, its earliest form is also the clearest. It came up, so far as I can tell, as a consequence of the interest taken by the early Greek Stoics in two, at first unconnected, ideas: that of causation, that is, the conception, new in the fourth century bc, of unbreakable chains of events in which each earlier event acts as a necessary and sufficient cause of the later; and the much older notion of individual moral responsibility. It was perceived as early as the beginning of the next century that there was something paradoxical, and indeed incoherent, in maintaining that men's states of mind, feeling and will as well as their actions were links in unbreakable causal chains, and at the same time that men were responsible, that is, that they could have acted otherwise than in fact they did.
Chrysippus was the first thinker to face this dilemma, which did not seem to trouble Plato or Aristotle, and he invented the solution known as self-determination - the view that so long as men were conceived of as being acted upon by outside forces without being able to resist them, they were as stocks and stones, unfree, and the concept of responsibility was plainly inapplicable to them; if, however, among the factors that determined behaviour was the bending of the will to certain purposes, and if, moreover, such a bending of the will was a necessary (whether or not it was a sufficient) condition of a given action, then they were free: for the act depended on the occurrence of a volition and could not happen without it. Men's acts of will and the characters and dispositions from which, whether or not they were fully aware of it, such acts issued, were intrinsic to action: this is what being free meant.
Critics of this position, Epicureans and sceptics, were not slow to point out that this was but a half-solution. We are told that they maintained that although it might be that the operations of the will were a necessary condition of what could properly be called acts, yet if these operations were themselves links in causal chains, themselves effects of causes 'external' to the choices, decisions and so on, then the notion of responsibility remained as inapplicable as before. One critic1 called such modified determination hemidoulia - 'half-slavery'. I am only half free if I can correctly maintain that I should not have done x if I had not chosen it, but add that I could not have chosen differently. Given that I have decided on x, my action has a motive and not merely a cause; my 'volition' is itself among the causes - indeed, one of the necessary conditions - of my
The Cynic Oenamaus.
behaviour, and it is this that is meant by calling me or it free. But if the choice or decision is itself determined, and cannot, causally, be other than what it is, then the chain of causality remains unbroken, and, the critics asserted, I should be no more truly free than I am on the most rigidly determinist assumptions.
It is over this issue that the immense discussion about free will that has preoccupied philosophers ever since originally arose. Chrysippus' answer, that all that I can reasonably ask for is that my own character should be among the factors influencing behaviour, is the central core of the classical doctrine of freedom as self- determination. Its proponents stretch in unbroken line from Chrysippus and Cicero to Aquinas, Spinoza, Locke and Leibniz, Hume, Mill, Schopenhauer, Russell, Schlick, Ayer, Nowell-Smith and the majority of the contributors to the subject in our own day. Thus when a recent writer in this chronological order, Richard Hare, in one of his books1 distinguishes free acts from mere behaviour by saying that a pointer to whether I am free to do x is provided by asking myself whether it makes sense to ask 'Shall I do x?' or 'Ought I to do x?', he is restating the classical thesis. Hare correctly says that one can ask 'Will I make a mistake?' or 'Will I be wrecked on the sea-shore?' but not 'Shall I make a mistake?' or 'Ought I to be wrecked?'; for to be wrecked or make a mistake cannot be part of a conscious choice or purpose - cannot, in the logical or conceptual sense of the word. And from this he concludes that we distinguish free from unfree behaviour by the presence or absence of whatever it is that makes it intelligible to ask 'Shall I climb the mountain?' but not 'Shall I misunderstand you?' But if, following Carneades, I were to say 'I can indeed ask "Shall I climb the mountain?", but if the answer - and the action - are determined by factors beyond my control, then how does the fact that I pursue purposes, make decisions and so forth liberate me from the causal chain?', this would be regarded as a misconceived enquiry by the Stoics and the entire classical tradition. For if my choice is indispensable to the production of a given effect, then I am not causally determined as, say, a stone or a tree that has no purposes and makes no choices is determined, and that is all that any libertarian can wish to establish.
But no libertarian can in fact accept this. No one genuinely
' R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 1963), chapter 4.
concerned by the problem constituted by the prima facie incompatibility between determinism and freedom to choose between alternatives will settle for saying 'I can do what I choose, but I cannot choose otherwise than as I do.' Self-determination is clearly not the same as mechanical determination. If the determinists are right (and it may well be that they are) then the sort of determination in terms of which human behaviour should be described is not behaviouristic, but precisely Chrysippus' hemidoulia. But half a loaf is not the bread that libertarians crave. For if my decisions are wholly determined by antecedent causes, then the mere fact that they are decisions, and the fact that my acts have motives and not only antecedents, do not of themselves provide that line of demarcation between freedom and necessitation, or freedom and its absence, which the ordinary notion of responsibility seems, at least for libertarians, so clearly to entail. It is in this sense that Bacon's followers claim too much.
This may be seen from another angle which will bring us back to the relations of knowledge and liberty. The growth of knowledge increases the range of predictable events, and predictability - inductive or intuitive - despite all that has been said against this position, does not seem compatible with liberty of choice. I may be told that if I say to someone 'I always knew that you would behave with wonderful courage in this situation' the person so complimented will not suppose that his capacity for freedom of choice is being impugned. But that seems to be so only because the word 'knew' is being used, as it were, in a conventionally exaggerated way. When one man says to another 'I know you well: you simply cannot help behaving generously; you could not help it if you tried', the man so addressed may be thought susceptible to flattery, because of the element of complimentary hyperbole in the words 'cannot help' and 'could not ... if you tried'. If the words were intended to be taken literally - if the flatterer meant to be understood as saying 'You can no more help being generous than being old, or ugly, or thinking in English and not in Chinese' - the notion of merit or desert would evaporate, and the compliment would be transformed from a moral into a quasi-aesthetic one.
This may be made clearer if we take a pejorative example: if I were to say of x, 'x can no more help being cruel and malicious than a volcano can help erupting - one should not blame him, only deplore his existence or seek to tame him or restrain him as one would a dangerous animal', x might well feel more deeply insulted than ifwe lectured him on his habits on the assumption that he was free to choose between acting and refraining from acting as he did, free to choose to listen to our homily or pay no attention to it. The mere fact that it is my character that determines my choices and actions does not, if my character itself and its effects are due to ineluctable causes, render me free in the sense that appears to be required by the notions of responsibility or of moral praise and blame. Knowledge of the causes and conditions that determine my choice - knowledge, indeed, that there are such conditions and causes, knowledge that choice is not free (without analysis of this proposition), knowledge that shows that the notion of moral responsibility is wholly compatible with rigorous determinism, and exposes libertarianism as a confusion due to ignorance or error - that kind of knowledge would assimilate our moral views to aesthetic ones, and would lead us to look on heroism or honesty or justice as we now do on beauty or kindness or strength or genius: we praise or congratulate the possessors of the latter qualities with no implication that they could have chosen to own a different set of characteristics.
This world view, if it became generally accepted, would mark a radical shift of categories. If this ever occurs, it will tend to make us think of much of our present moral and legal outlook, and of a great deal of our penal legislation, as so much barbarism founded on ignorance; it will enlarge the scope and depth of our sympathy; it will substitute knowledge and understanding for attribution of responsibility; it will render indignation, and the kind of admiration that is its opposite, irrational and obsolete; it will expose such notions as desert, merit, responsibility, remorse, and perhaps right and wrong too, as incoherent or, at the very least, inapplicable; it will turn praise and blame into purely corrective or educational instruments, or confine them to aesthetic approval or disapproval. All this it will do, and if truth is on its side, it will benefit mankind thereby. But it will not increase the range of our freedom. Knowledge will render us freer only if in fact there is freedom of choice - if on the basis of our knowledge we can behave differently from the way in which we would have behaved without it - can, not must or do - if, that is to say, we can and do behave differently on the basis of our new knowledge, but need not. Where there is no antecedent freedom - and no possibility of it - it cannot be increased. Our new knowledge will increase our rationality, our grasp of truth will deepen our understanding, add to our power, inner harmony, wisdom, effectiveness, but not, necessarily, to our liberty. If we are free to choose, then an increase in our knowledge may tell us what are the limits of this freedom and what expands or contracts it. But only to know that there are facts and laws that I cannot alter does not itself render me able to alter anything: if I have no freedom to begin with, knowledge will not increase it. If everything is governed by natural laws, then it is difficult to see what could be meant by saying that I can 'use' them better on the basis of my knowledge, unless 'can' is not the 'can' of choice - not the 'can' which applies only to situations in which I am correctly described as being able to choose between alternatives, and am not rigorously determined to choose one rather than the other. In other words, if classical determinism is a true view (and the fact that it does not square with our present usage is no argument against it), knowledge of it will not increase liberty - if liberty does not exist, the discovery that it does not exist will not create it. This goes for self-determinism no less than for its most full-blown mechanistic-behaviourist variety.
The clearest exposition of classical self-determinism is probably that given in his Ethics by Spinoza. Stuart Hampshire represents him,' it seems to me correctly, as maintaining that the fully rational man does not choose his ends, for his ends are given. The better he understands the nature of men and of the world, the more harmonious and successful will his actions be, but no serious problem of choice between equally acceptable alternatives can ever present itself to him, any more than to a mathematician reasoning correctly from true premisses to logically unavoidable conclusions. His freedom consists in the fact that he will not be acted upon by causes whose existence he does not know or the nature of whose influence he does not correctly understand. But that is all. Given Spinoza's premisses - that the universe is a rational order, and that to understand the rationality of a proposition or an act or an order is, for a rational being, equivalent to accepting or identifying oneself with it (as in the old Stoic notion) - the notion of choice itself turns out to depend upon the deficiencies of knowledge, the degree of ignorance. There is only one correct answer to any problem of conduct, as to any problem of theory. The correct answer having been discovered, the rational man logically cannot but act in accordance with it: the notion of free choice between alternatives no longer has application. He who understands everything understands the reasons which make it as it is and not otherwise, and being rational cannot wish it to be otherwise than as it is. This may be an unattainable (and perhaps even, when thought through, an incoherent) ideal, but it is this conception that underlies the notion that an increase in knowledge is eo ipso always an increase in freedom, that is, an escape from being at the mercy of what is not understood. Once something is understood or known (and only then), it is, on this view, conceptually impossible to describe oneself as being at the mercy of it. Unless this maximal rationalist assumption is made, it does not seem to me to follow that more knowledge necessarily entails an increase in the total sum of freedom; it may or may not - this, as I hope to show, is largely an empirical question. To discover that I cannot do what I once believed that I could will render me more rational - I shall not beat my head against stone walls - but it will not necessarily make me freer; there may be stone walls wherever I look; I may myself be a portion of one; a stone myself, only dreaming of being free.
There are two further points to be noted with regard to the relationship of freedom and knowledge:
(a) There is the well-known objection, urged principally by Karl Popper, that the idea of total self-knowledge is in principle incoherent, because if I can predict what I shall do in the future, this knowledge itself is an added factor in the situation that may cause me to alter my behaviour accordingly; and the knowledge that this is so is itself an added factor, which may cause me to alter that, and so on ad infinitum. Therefore total self-prediction is logically impossible. This may be so: but it is not an argument against determinism as such (nor does Popper so represent it) - only against self-prediction. If x can predict the total behaviour of y, and y predict the total behaviour of x (and they do not impart their prophecies to one another), that is all that determinism needs. I cannot be self-consciously spontaneous; therefore I cannot be self-consciously aware of all my states if spontaneity is among them. It does not follow that I can never be spontaneous; nor that, if I am, this state cannot be known to exist while it is occurring, although it cannot be so known to me. For this reason I conclude that, in principle, Popper's argument does not (and is not meant to) refute determinism.
(b) Stuart Hampshire, in the course of some recent remarks,' advances the view that self-prediction is (logically) impossible. When I say 'I know that I shall do x' (as against, for instance, 'x will happen to me', or 'You will do x'), I am not contemplating myself, as I might someone else, and giving tongue to a conjecture about myself and my future acts, as I might be doing about someone else or about the behaviour of an animal - for that would be tantamount (if I understand him rightly) to looking upon myself from outside, as it were, and treating my own acts as mere caused events. In saying that I know that I shall do x, I am, on this view, saying that I have decided to do x: for to predict that I shall in certain circumstances in fact do x or decide to do x, with no reference to whether or not I have already decided to do it - to say 'I can tell you now that I shall in fact act in manner x, although I am, as a matter of fact, determined to do the very opposite' - does not make sense. Any man who says 'I know myself too well to believe that, whatever I now decide, I shall do anything other than x when the circumstances actually arise' is in fact, if I interpret Hampshire's views correctly, saying that he does not really, that is, seriously, propose to set himself against doing x, that he does not propose even to try to act otherwise, that he has in fact decided to let events take their course. For no man who has truly decided to try to avoid x can, in good faith, predict his own failure to act as he has decided. He may fail to avoid x, and he may predict this; but he cannot both decide to try to avoid x and predict that he will not even try to do this; for he can always try; and he knows this: he knows that this is what distinguishes him from non-human creatures in nature. To say that he will fail even to try is tantamount to saying that he has decided not to try. In this sense 'I know' means 'I have decided' and cannot in principle be predictive.
That, if I have understood it, is Hampshire's position, and I have a good deal of sympathy with it, for I can see that self-prediction is often an evasive way of disclaiming responsibility for difficult decisions, while deciding in fact to let events take their course, disguising this by attributing responsibility for what occurs to my own allegedly unalterable nature. But I agree with Hampshire's critics in the debate, whom I take to be maintaining that, although
' Iris Murdoch, S. N. Hampshire, P. L. Gardiner and D. F. Pears, 'Freedom and Knowledge', in D. F. Pears (ed.), Freedom and the Will (London, 1963), pp. 8o-io4.
the situation he describes may often occur, yet circumstances may exist in which it is possible for me both to say that I am, at this moment, resolved not to do x, and at the same time to predict that I shall do x, because I am not hopeful that, when the time comes, I shall in fact even so much as try to resist doing x. I can, in effect, say 'I know myself well. When the crisis comes, do not rely on me to help you. I may well run away; although I am at this moment genuinely resolved not to be cowardly and to do all I can to stay at your side. My prediction that my resolution will not in fact hold up is based on knowledge of my own character, and not on my present state of mind; my prophecy is not a symptom of bad faith (for I am not, at this moment, vacillating) but, on the contrary, of good faith, of a wish to face the facts. I assure you in all sincerity that my present intention is to be brave and resist. Yet you would run a great risk if you relied too much on my present decision; it would not be fair to conceal my past failures of nerve from you.' I can say this about others, despite the most sincere resolutions on their part, for I can foretell how in fact they will behave; they can equally predict this about me. Despite Hampshire's plausible and tempting argument, I believe that such objective self-knowledge is possible and occurs; and his argument does not therefore appear to me to lessen the force of the determinist thesis. It seems to me that I can, at times, though perhaps not always, place myself, as it were, at an outside vantage-point, and contemplate myself as if I were another human being, and calculate the chances of my sticking to my present resolution with almost the same degree of detachment and reliability as I should have if I were judging the case of someone else with all the impartiality that I could muster. If this is so, then 'I know how I shall act' is not necessarily a statement of decision: it can be purely descriptive. Self-prediction of this kind, provided that it does not claim to be too exact or infallible, and meets Popper's objection, cited above, by remaining tentative, allowing for possible alterations of conduct as a result of the self- prediction itself - seems possible and compatible with determinism.
In other words, I see no reason to suppose that a deterministic doctrine, whether about one's own behaviour or that of others, is in principle incoherent, or incompatible with making choices, provided that these choices are regarded as being themselves no less determined than other phenomena. Such knowledge, or well- founded belief, seems to me to increase the degree of rationality, efficiency, power; the only freedom to which it necessarily contributes is freedom from illusions. But this is not the basic sense of the term about which controversy has been boiling for twenty-two centuries.
I have no wish to enter into the waters of the freewill problem more deeply than I already have. But I should like to repeat what I have indeed said elsewhere, and for which I have been severely taken to task by determinists: that if a great advance were made in psychophysiology; if, let us suppose, a scientific expert were to hand me a sealed envelope, and ask me to note all my experiences - both introspective and others - for a limited period - say half-an- hour - and write them down as accurately as I could; and if I then did this to the best of my ability, and after this opened the envelope and read the account, which turned out to tally to a striking degree with my log-book of my experience during the last half-hour, I should certainly be shaken; and so I think would others. We should then have to admit, with or without pleasure, that aspects of human behaviour which had been believed to be within the area of the agent's free choice turned out to be subject to discovered causal laws. Our recognition of this might itself alter our behaviour, perhaps for the happier and more harmonious; but this welcome result itself would be a causal product of our new awareness. I cannot see why such discoveries should be considered impossible, or even particularly improbable; they would bring about a major transformation of psychology and sociology; after all, great revolutions have occurred in other sciences in our own day.
The principal difference, however, between previous advances and this imaginary breakthrough (and it is with this surmise that most of my critics have disagreed) is that besides effecting a vast alteration in our empirical knowledge, it would alter our conceptual framework far more radically than the discoveries of the physicists of the seventeenth or twentieth century, or of the biologists of the nineteenth, have changed it. Such a break with the past, in psychology alone, would do great violence to our present concepts and usages. The entire vocabulary of human relations would suffer radical change. Such expressions as 'I should not have done x', 'How could you have chosen x ?' and so on, indeed the entire language of the criticism and assessment of one's own and others' conduct, would undergo a sharp transformation, and the expressions we needed both for descriptive and for practical - corrective, deterrent, hortatory - purposes (what others would be open to a consistent determinist?) would necessarily be vastly different from the language which we now use.
It seems to me that we should be unwise to underestimate the effect of robbing praise, blame, a good many counterfactual propositions, and the entire network of concepts concerned with freedom, choice, responsibility of much of their present function and meaning. But it is equally important to insist that the fact that such a transformation could occur - or would, at any rate, be required - does not, of course, have any tendency to show that determinism is either true or false; it is merely a consequence which those who accept it as true tend not to recognise sufficiently. I only wish to add that the further issue, whether the truth of determinism is or is not an empirical question, is itself unclear. If so revolutionary an advance in psychophysiological knowledge were achieved, the need of new concepts to formulate it, and of the consequent modification (to say the least) of concepts in other fields, would itself demonstrate the relative vagueness of the frontiers between the empirical and the conceptual. If these empirical discoveries were made, they might mark a greater revolution in human thought than any that has gone before.
It is idle to speculate on the transformation of language - or of ideas (these are but alternative ways of saying the same thing) - that would be brought about by the triumph of exact knowledge in this field. But would such an advance in knowledge necessarily constitute an overall increase in freedom? Freedom from error, from illusion, fantasy, misdirection of emotions - certainly all these. But is this the central meaning of the word as we commonly use it in philosophy or common speech?
remains obscure. Moreover, it seems doubtful whether we should describe a man as being free if his conduct displayed unswerving regularities, issuing (however this is established) from his own thoughts, feelings, acts of will, so that we should be inclined to say that he could not behave otherwise than as he did. Predictability may or may not entail determinism; but if we were in a position to be so well acquainted with a man's character, reactions, outlook that, given a specific situation, we felt sure that we could predict how he would act, better perhaps than he could himself, should we be tempted to describe him as being a typical example of a man morally - or otherwise - free? Should we not think that a phrase used by Patrick Gardiner, a 'prisoner of his personality', described him better?i So aptly, indeed, that he might, in certain cases, come to accept it - with regret or satisfaction - himself? A man so hidebound by his own habits and outlook is not the paradigm of human freedom.
The central assumption of common thought and speech seems to me to be that freedom is the principal characteristic that distinguishes man from all that is non-human; that there are degrees of freedom, degrees constituted by the absence of obstacles to the exercise of choice; the choice being regarded as not itself determined by antecedent conditions, at least not as being wholly so determined. It may be that common sense is mistaken in this matter, as in others; but the onus of refutation is on those who disagree. Common sense may not be too well aware of the full variety of such obstacles: they may be physical or psychical, 'inner' and 'outer', or complexes compounded of both elements, difficult and perhaps conceptually impossible to unravel, due to social factors and/or individual ones. Common opinion may oversimplify the issue; but it seems to me to be right about its essence: freedom is to do with the absence of obstacles to action. These obstacles may consist of physical power, whether of nature or of men, that prevents our intentions from being realised: geographical conditions or prison walls, armed men or the threat (deliberately used as a weapon or unintended) of lack of food or shelter or other necessities of life; or again they may be psychological: fears and 'complexes', ignorance, error, prejudice, illusions, fantasies, compulsions, neuroses and psychoses - irrational factors of many kinds. Moral freedom - rational self-control - knowledge of what is at stake, and of what is one's motive in acting as one does; independence of the unrecognised influence of other persons or of one's known personal past or that of one's group or culture; destruction of hopes, fears, desires, loves, hatreds, ideals, which will be seen to be groundless once they are inspected and rationally examined - these indeed bring liberation from obstacles, some of the most formidable and insidious in the path of human beings; their full effect, despite the acute but scattered insights of moralists from Plato to Marx and Schopenhauer, is beginning to be understood adequately only in the present century, with the rise of psychoanalysis and the perception of its philosophical implications. It would be absurd to deny the validity of this sense of the concept of freedom, or of its intimate logical dependence on rationality and knowledge. Like all freedom it consists of, or depends on, the removal of obstacles, in this case of psychological impediments to the full use of human powers to whatever ends men choose; but these constitute only one category of such obstacles, however important and hitherto inadequately analysed. To emphasise these to the exclusion of other classes of obstacles, and other better recognised forms of freedom, leads to distortion. Yet it is this, it seems to me, that has been done by those who, from the Stoics to Spinoza, Bradley and Stuart Hampshire, have confined freedom to self-determination.
To be free is to be able to make an unforced choice; and choice entails competing possibilities - at the very least two 'open', unimpeded alternatives. And this, in its turn, may well depend on external circumstances which leave only some paths unblocked. When we speak of the extent of freedom enjoyed by a man or a society, we have in mind, it seems to me, the width or extent of the paths before them, the number of open doors, as it were, and the extent to which they are open. The metaphor is imperfect, for 'number' and 'extent' will not really do. Some doors are much more important than others - the goods to which they lead are far more central in an individual's or society's life. Some doors lead to other open doors, some to closed ones; there is actual and there is potential freedom - depending on how easily some closed doors can be opened, given existing or potential resources, physical or mental. How is one to measure one situation against another? How is one to decide whether a man who is obstructed neither by other persons nor by circumstances from, let us say, the acquisition of adequate security or of material necessities and comforts, but is debarred from free speech and association, is less or more free than one who finds it impossible, because of, let us say, the economic policies of his government, to obtain more than the necessities of life, but who possesses greater opportunities of education or of free communication or association with others? Problems of this type will always arise - they are familiar enough in Utilitarian literature, and indeed in all forms of non-totalitarian practical politics. Even if no hard and fast rule can be provided, it still remains the case that the measure of the liberty of a man or a group is, to a large degree, determined by the range of choosable possibilities.
If a man's area of choice, whether 'physical' or 'mental', is narrow, then however contented with it he may be, and however true it may be that the more rational a man is, the clearer the one and only rational path will be to him and the less likely will he be to vacillate between alternatives (a proposition which seems to me to be fallacious), neither of these situations will necessarily make him more free than a man whose range of choice is wider. To remove obstacles by removing desire to enter upon, or even awareness of, the path on which the obstacles lie, may contribute to serenity, contentment, perhaps even wisdom, but not to liberty. Independence of mind - sanity and integration of personality, health and inner harmony - are highly desirable conditions, and they entail the removal of a sufficient number of obstacles to qualify for being regarded, for that reason alone, as a species of freedom - but only one species among others. Someone may say that it is at least unique in this: that this kind of freedom is a necessary condition for all other kinds of freedom - for if I am ignorant, obsessed, irrational, I am thereby blinded to the facts, and a man so blinded is, in effect, as unfree as a man whose possibilities are objectively blocked. But this does not seem to me to be true. If I am ignorant of my rights, or too neurotic (or too poor) to benefit by them, that makes them useless to me; but it does not make them non-existent; a door is closed to a path that leads to other, open, doors. To destroy or lack a condition for freedom (knowledge, money) is not to destroy that freedom itself; for its essence does not lie in its accessibility, although its value may do so. The more avenues men can enter, the broader those avenues, the more avenues that each opens into, the freer they are; the better men know what avenues lie before them, and how open they are, the freer they will know themselves to be. To be free without knowing it may be a bitter irony, but if a man subsequently discovers that doors were open although he did not know it, he will reflect bitterly not about his lack of freedom but about his ignorance. The extent of freedom depends on opportunities of action, not on knowledge of them, although such knowledge may well be an indispensable condition for the use of freedom, and although impediments in the path to it are themselves a deprivation of freedom - of freedom to know. Ignorance blocks paths, and knowledge opens them. But this truism does not entail that freedom implies awareness of freedom, still less that they are identical.
It is worth noting that it is the actual doors that are open that determine the extent of someone's freedom, and not his own preferences. A man is not free merely when there are no obstacles, psychological or otherwise, in the way of his wishes - when he can do as he likes - for in that case a man might be rendered free by altering not his opportunities of action, but his desires and dispositions. If a master can condition his slaves to love their chains he does not thereby prima facie increase their liberty, although he may increase their contentment or at least decrease their misery. Some unscrupulous managers of men have, in the course of history, used religious teachings to make men less discontented with brutal and iniquitous treatment. If such measures work, and there is reason to think that they do so only too often, and if the victims have learnt not to mind their pains and indignities (like Epictetus, for example), then some despotic systems should presumably be described as creators of liberty; for by eliminating distracting temptations, and 'enslaving' wishes and passions, they create (on these assumptions) more liberty than institutions that expand the area of individual or democratic choice and thereby produce the worrying need to select, to determine oneself in one direction rather than another - the terrible burden of the embarras de choix (which has itself been taken to be a symptom of irrationality by some thinkers in the rationalist tradition). This ancient fallacy is by now too familiar to need refutation. I only cite it in order to emphasise the crucial distinction between the definition of liberty as nothing but the absence of obstacles to doing as I like (which could presumably be compatible with a very narrow life, narrowed by the influence upon me of personal or impersonal forces, education or law, friend or foe, religious teacher or parent, or even consciously contracted by myself), and liberty as a range of objectively open possibilities, whether these are desired or not, even though it is difficult or impossible to give rules for measuring or comparing degrees of it, or for assessing different situations with regard to it.
There is, of course, a sense, with which all moral philosophers are well acquainted, in which the slave Epictetus is more free than his master or the Emperor who forced him to die in exile; or that in which stone walls do not a prison make. Nevertheless, such statements derive their rhetorical force from the fact that there is a more familiar sense in which a slave is the least free of men, and stone walls and iron bars are serious impediments to freedom; nor are moral and physical or political or legal freedoms mere homonyms. Unless some kernel of common meaning - whether a single common characteristic or a 'family resemblance' - is kept in mind, there is the danger that one or other of these senses will be represented as fundamental, and the others will be tortured into conformity with it, or dismissed as trivial or superficial. The most notorious examples of this process are the sophistries whereby various types of compulsion and thought-control are represented as means to, or even as constitutive of, 'true' freedom, or, conversely, liberal political or legal systems are regarded as sufficient means of ensuring not only the freedom of, but opportunities for the use of such freedom by, persons who are too irrational or immature, owing to lack of education or other means of mental development, to understand or benefit by such rules or laws. It is therefore the central meaning of the term, if there is one, that it is important to establish.
There is yet another consideration regarding knowledge and liberty to which I should like to return.' It is true that knowledge always, of necessity, opens some doors, but does it never close others? If I am a poet, may it not be that some forms of knowledge will curtail my powers and thereby my liberty too? Let us suppose that I require as a stimulus to my imagination illusions and myths of a certain kind which are provided by the religion in which I have been brought up or to which I have been converted. Let us assume that some honourable rationalist refutes these beliefs, shatters my illusions, dissipates the myths; may it not be that my clear gain in knowledge and rationality is paid for by the diminution or destruction of my powers as a poet? It is easy enough to say that what I have lost is a power that fed on illusions or irrational states and attitudes which the advance of knowledge has destroyed; that some powers are undesirable (like the power of self-deception) and that, in any case, powers are powers and not liberties. It may be said that an increase in knowledge cannot (this would, I think, be claimed as an analytic truth) diminish my freedom; for to know the roots of my activity is to be rescued from servitude to the unknown - from stumbling in a darkness populated with figments which breed fears and irrational conduct. Moreover, it will be said that as a result of the destruction of my idols I have clearly gained in freedom of self-determination; for I can now give a rational justification of my beliefs, and the motives of my actions are clearer to me. But if I am less free to write the kind of poetry that I used to write, is there not now a new obstacle before me? Have not some doors been closed by the opening of others? Whether ignorance is or is not bliss in these circumstances is another question. The question I wish to ask - and one to which I do not know the answer - is whether such absence of knowledge may not be a necessary condition for certain states of mind or emotion in which alone certain impediments to some forms of creative labour are absent. This is an empirical question, but on the answer to it the answer to a larger question depends: whether knowledge never impedes, always increases, the sum total of human freedom.
Again, if I am a singer, self-consciousness - the child of knowledge - may inhibit the spontaneity that may be a necessary condition of my performance, as the growth of culture was thought by Rousseau and others to inhibit the joys of barbarian innocence. It does not matter greatly whether this particular belief is true; the simple uncivilised savage may have known fewer joys than Rousseau supposed; barbarism may not be a state of innocence at all. It is enough to allow that there are certain forms of knowledge that have the psychological effect of preventing kinds of self-expression which, on any showing, must be considered as forms of free activity. Reflection may ruin my painting if this depends on not thinking; my knowledge that a disease, for which no cure has been discovered, is destroying me or my friend, may well sap my particular creative capacity, and inhibit me in this or that way; and to be inhibited - whatever its long-term advantages - is not to be rendered more free. It may be replied to this that if I am suffering from a disease and do not know it, I am less free than one who knows, and can at least try to take steps to check it, even if the disease has so far proved to be incurable; that not to diagnose it will certainly lead to dissipation of effort in mistaken directions, and will curtail my freedom by putting me at the mercy of natural forces the character of which, because I do not recognise it, I cannot rationally discount or cope with. This is indeed so. Such knowledge cannot decrease my freedom as a rational being, but it may finish me as an artist. One door opens, and as a result of this another shuts.
Let me take another example. Resistance against vast odds may work only if the odds are not fully known; otherwise it may seem irrational to fight against what, even if it is not known to be irresistible, can be believed with a high degree of probability to be so. For it may be my very ignorance of the odds that creates a situation in which alone I resist successfully. If David had known more about Goliath, if the majority of the inhabitants of Britain had known more about Germany in i 940, if historical probabilities could be reduced to something approaching a reliable guide to action, some achievements might never have taken place. I discover that I suffer from a fatal disease. This discovery makes it possible for me to try to find a cure - which was not possible so long as I was ignorant of the causes of my condition. But supposing that I satisfy myself that the weight of probability is against the discovery of an antidote, that once the poison has entered into the system death must follow; that the pollution of the atmosphere as the result of the discharge of a nuclear weapon cannot be undone. Then what is it that I am now more free to do? I may seek to reconcile myself to what has occurred, not kick against the pricks, arrange my affairs, make my will, refrain from a display of sorrow or indignation inappropriate when facing the inevitable - this is what 'stoicism' or 'taking things philosophically' has historically come to mean. But even if I believe that reality is a rational whole (whatever this may mean), and that any other view of it - for instance, as being equally capable of realising various incompatible possibilities - is an error caused by ignorance, and if I therefore regard everything in it as being necessitated by reason - what I myself should necessarily will it to be as a wholly rational being - the discovery of its structure will not increase my freedom of choice. It will merely set me beyond hope and fear - for these are symptoms of ignorance or fantasy - and beyond choices too, since choosing entails the reality of at least two alternatives, say action and inaction. We are told that the Stoic Posidonius said to the pain that was tormenting him 'Do your worst, pain; no matter what you do, you cannot make me hate you.'[112] But Posidonius was a rationalistic determinist: whatever truly is, is as it should be; to wish it to be otherwise is a sign of irrationality; rationality implies that choice - and the freedom defined in terms of its possibility - is an illusion, not widened but killed by true knowledge.
Knowledge increases autonomy both in the sense of Kant, and in that of Spinoza and his followers. I should like to ask once more: is all liberty just that? The advance of knowledge stops men from wasting their resources upon delusive projects. It has stopped us from burning witches or flogging lunatics or predicting the future by listening to oracles or looking at the entrails of animals or the flight of birds. It may yet render many institutions and decisions of the present - legal, political, moral, social - obsolete, by showing them to be as cruel and stupid and incompatible with the pursuit of justice or reason or happiness or truth as we now think the burning of widows or eating the flesh of an enemy to acquire skills. If our powers of prediction, and so our knowledge of the future, become much greater, then, even if they are never complete, this may radically alter our view of what constitutes a person, an act, a choice; and eo ipso our language and our picture of the world. This may make our conduct more rational, perhaps more tolerant, charitable, civilised, it may improve it in many ways, but will it increase the area of free choice? For individuals or groups? It will certainly kill some realms of the imagination founded upon non- rational beliefs, and for this it may compensate us by making some of our ends more easily or harmoniously attainable. But who shall say if the balance will necessarily be on the side of wider freedom? Unless one establishes logical equivalences between the notions of freedom, self-determination and self-knowledge in some a priori fashion - as Spinoza and Hegel and their modern followers seek to do - why need this be true? Stuart Hampshire and E. F. Carritt, in dealing with the topic, maintain that, faced with any situation, one can always choose at least between trying to do something and letting things take their course. Always? If it makes sense to say that there is an external world, then to know it, in the descriptive sense of 'know', is not to alter it. As for the other sense of 'know' - the pragmatic, in which 'I know what I shall do' is akin to 'I know what to do', and registers not a piece of information but a decision to alter things in a certain way - would it not wither if psycho- physiology advanced far enough? For, in that event, may not my resolution to act or not to act resemble more and more the recommendation of Canute's courtiers?
Knowledge, we are told, extends the boundaries of freedom, and this is an a priori proposition. Is it inconceivable that the growth of knowledge will tend more and more successfully to establish the determinist thesis as an empirical truth, and explain our thoughts and feelings, wishes and decisions, our actions and choices, in terms of invariant, regular, natural successions, to seek to alter which will seem almost as irrational as entertaining a logical fallacy? This was, after all, the programme and the belief of many respected philosophers, as different in their outlooks as Spinoza, Holbach, Schopenhauer, Comte, the behaviourists. Would such a consummation extend the area of freedom? In what sense? Would it not rather render this notion, for want of a contrasting one, altogether otiose, and would not this constitute a novel situation? The 'dissolution' of the concept of freedom would be accompanied by the demise of that sense of 'know' in which we speak not of knowing that, but of knowing what to do, to which Hampshire and Hart have drawn attention;[113] for if all is determined, there is nothing to choose between, and so nothing to decide. Perhaps those who have said of freedom that it is the recognition of necessity were contemplating this very situation. If so, their notion of freedom is radically different from those who define it in terms of conscious choice and decision.
I wish to make no judgement of value: only to suggest that to say that knowledge is a good is one thing; to say that it is necessarily, in all situations, compatible with, still more that it is on terms of mutual entailment with (or even, as some seem to suppose, is literally identical with), freedom, in most of the senses in which this word is used, is something very different. Perhaps the second assertion is rooted in the optimistic view - which seems to be at the heart of much metaphysical rationalism - that all good things must be compatible, and that therefore freedom, order, knowledge, happiness, a closed future (and an open one?) must be at least compatible, and perhaps even entail one another in a systematic fashion. But this proposition is not self-evidently true, if only on empirical grounds. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the least plausible beliefs ever entertained by profound and influential thinkers.
OTHER WRITINGS ON LIBERTY
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Berlin's notes for 'My Intellectual Path'
LIBERTY
What is political liberty? In the ancient world, particularly among the Greeks, to be free was to be able to participate in the government of one's city. The laws were valid only if one had had the right to take part in making and unmaking them. To be free was not to be forced to obey laws made by others for one, but not by one. This kind of democracy entailed that government and laws could penetrate into every province of life. Man was not free, nor did he claim freedom, from such supervision. All democrats claimed was that every man was equally liable to criticism, investigation, and if need be arraignment before the laws, or other arrangements, in the establishing and maintaining of which all the citizens had the right to participate.
In the modern world, a new idea - most clearly formulated by Benjamin Constant - makes itself felt, namely that there is a province of life - private life - with which it is thought undesirable, save in exceptional circumstances, for public authority to interfere. The central question posed by the ancient world is 'Who shall govern me?' Some said a monarch, some said the best, or the richest, or the bravest, or the majority, or the law courts, or the unanimous vote of all. In the modern world, an equally important question is 'How much government should there be?' The ancient world assumed that life was one, and that laws and the government covered the whole of it - there was no reason to protect any corner of it from such supervision. In the modern world, whether historically because of struggles of the Churches against intervention by the secular State, or of the State against the Church, or as a result of the growth of private enterprise, industry, commerce, and its desire for protection against State interference, or for whatever reason, we proceed on the assumption that there is a frontier between public and private life; and that, however small the private sphere may be, within it I can do as I please - live as I like, believe what I want, say what I please - provided this does not interfere with the similar rights of others, or undermine the order which makes this kind of arrangement possible. This is the classical liberal view, in whole or part expressed in various declarations of the rights of man in America and France, and in the writings of men like Locke, Voltaire, Tom Paine, Constant and John Stuart Mill. When we speak of civil liberties or civilised values, this is part of what is meant.
The assumption that men need protection against each other and against the government is something which has never been fully accepted in any part of the world, and what I have called the ancient Greek or classical point of view comes back in the form of arguments such as this: 'You say that an individual has the right to choose the kind of life he prefers. But does this apply to everyone? If the individual is ignorant, immature, uneducated, mentally crippled, denied adequate opportunities of health and development, he will not know how to choose. Such a person will never truly know what it is he really wants. If there are people who understand what human nature is and what it craves, and if they do for others, perhaps by some measure of control, what these others would be doing for themselves if they were wiser, better informed, maturer, more developed, are they curtailing their freedom? They are interfering with people as they are, but only in order to enable them to do what they would do if they knew enough, or were always at their best, instead of yielding to irrational motives, or behaving childishly, or allowing the animal side of their nature the upper hand. Is this then interference at all? If parents or teachers compel unwilling children to go to school or to work hard, in the name of what those children must really want, even though they may not know it, since that is what all men as such must want because they are human, then are they curtailing the liberty of the children? Surely not. Teachers and parents are bringing out their submerged or real selves, and catering to their needs, as against the transient demands of the more superficial self which greater maturity will slough off like a skin.'
If you substitute for parents a Church or a Party or a State, you get a theory on which much modern authority is based. We are told that to obey these institutions is but to obey ourselves, and therefore no slavery, for these institutions embody ourselves at our best and wisest, and self-restraint is not restraint, self-control is not slavery.
The battle between these two views, in all kinds of versions, has been one of the cardinal political issues of modern times. One side says that to put the bottle beyond the dipsomaniac's reach is not to curtail his liberties; if he is prevented from drinking, even by force, he will be healthier and therefore better capable of playing his part as man and citizen, will be more himself, and therefore freer, than if he reaches the bottle and destroys his health and sanity. The fact that he does not know this is merely a symptom of his disease, or ignorance of his own true wishes. The other side does not deny that anti-social behaviour must be restrained, or that there is a case for preventing men from harming themselves or from harming the welfare of their children or of others, but denies that such a restraint, though justified, is liberty. Liberty may have to be curtailed to make room for other good things, security or peace or health; or liberty today may have to be curtailed to make possible wider liberty tomorrow; but to curtail freedom is not to provide it, and compulsion, no matter how well justified, is compulsion and not liberty. Freedom, such people say, is only one value among many, and if it is an obstacle to the securing of other equally important ends, or interferes with other people's opportunities of reaching these ends, it must make way.
To this the other side replies that this presupposes a division of life into private and public - it assumes that men may wish in their private lives to do what others may not like, and therefore need protection from these others - but that this view of human nature rests on a fundamental mistake. The human being is one, and in the ideal society, when everyone's faculties are developed, nobody will ever want to do anything that others may resent or wish to stop. The proper purpose of reformers and revolutionaries is to knock down walls between men, bring everything into the open, make men live together without partitions, so that what one wants all want. The desire to be left alone, to be allowed to do what one wishes without needing to account for it to some tribunal - one's family or one's employers, or one's party, or one's government, or indeed the whole of one's society - this desire is a symptom of maladjustment. To ask for freedom from society is to ask for freedom from oneself. This must be cured by altering property relations as socialists desire to do, or by eliminating critical reason as some religious sects and, for that matter, Communist and Fascist regimes seek to do.
In one view - which might be called organic - all separateness is bad, and the notion of human rights which must not be trampled on is that of dams - walls demanded by human beings to separate them from one another, needed perhaps in a bad society, but with no place in a justly organised world in which all human streams flow into one undivided human river. On the second or liberal view, human rights, and the idea of a private sphere in which I am free from scrutiny, is indispensable to that minimum of independence which everyone needs if he is to develop, each on his own lines; for variety is of the essence of the human race, not a passing condition. Proponents of this view think that destruction of such rights in order to build one universal self-directing human society - of everyone marching towards the same rational ends - destroys that area for individual choice, however small, without which life does not seem worth living.
In a crude and, some have maintained, a distorted form, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes have stood for one of these views: while liberal democracies incline to the other. And, of course, varieties and combinations of these views, and compromises between them, are possible. They are the two cardinal ideas that have faced one another and dominated the world since, say, the Renaissance.
THE BIRTH OF GREEK INDIVIDUALISM
A Turning-Point in the History of Political Thought
i
Preliminary platitudes
I ought first to say something about what I consider a turning- point to be. I do not know how it is in the natural sciences - empirical ones like physics and biology, or formal ones like logic and mathematics. There, perhaps, revolutions occur when a central hypothesis or system of hypotheses is undermined or exploded by a discovery that leads to new hypotheses or laws which account for the new discovery and are incompatible with the central doctrines of the old system. The method is one of clean refutation: Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, Einstein, Planck and perhaps Bertrand Russell and Freud literally refuted earlier theories, made them obsolete, altered the methods by which new knowledge was gained, so that the interest of the superseded methods and theories is now largely historical, and those who persist in adhering to them are regarded as eccentric and are left out of account in serious circles of recognised experts.
This is conspicuously not the case in the great fields of imprecise knowledge - history, philosophy, scholarship, criticism - ideas about the arts and about the lives of men. Plato's physics or his mathematics may be obsolete, but both Plato's and Aristotle's moral and political ideas are still capable of stirring men to violent partisanship. Karl Popper would not attack Plato's social theories with such fury and indignation if these ideas had no more life to them than, say, Plato's conception of the sun and the fixed stars, or Aristotle's doctrine that some bodies have weight and other bodies have lightness. I know of no one who feels outraged by medieval notions of cosmology or chemistry, or Descartes' physics, or phlogiston theory. But St Augustine's views on the treatment of heretics or on slavery, or St Thomas's view of political authority, or the doctrines of Rousseau or Hegel cause violent reactions, intellectual and emotional, in those who look on the empirical or logical theories of these thinkers with comparative equanimity.
There is obviously some sense in which the criteria of truth and falsehood, tenability and untenability, operate in the case of certain disciplines, and do not operate so obviously or gain such universal assent in the case of other regions of thought. There is a sense in which some studies, such as the empirical sciences and mathematics and logic, progress by parricide, by killing off their ancestors to general satisfaction, and in which some subjects do not progress, at least in the same sense, so that it is difficult to enumerate, say, philosophical propositions or systems which are by universal consensus either dead beyond recall or established on firm foundations, at any rate so far as modern knowledge is concerned.
This is a paradox which I cannot investigate more deeply at present - it is a crucial and obscure subject in itself and deserves greater attention than has been lavished upon it. But I should like to say something about these imprecise disciplines, where we are dealing not so much with specific propositions, or great systems of them, as with what nowadays are called ideologies: attitudes, more exactly conceptual systems, frameworks that consist of interrelated categories through which and by means of which we judge periods. Perhaps it is best to describe them as central models, models drawn from some field that seems to a thinker clear and well-established, and which he applies in a manner which seems to him to explain and illuminate a field that is less clear. Bertrand Russell once observed that to understand a thinker one must understand and grasp the basic pattern, the central idea which he is defending.[114]The thinker's cleverness is usually expended in inventing arguments with which to fortify this central idea, or, still more, to repel attacks, refute objections; but to understand all this reasoning, however cogent and ingenious, will not lead one to grasp the thought of a philosopher, a historian, a critic unless one penetrates through these sophisticated defences upon his bastions to what he is really defending - the inner citadel itself, which is usually comparatively simple, a fundamental perception which dominates his thought and has formed his view of the world. Plato's application of a geometrical pattern to the life of society, eternal a priori axioms obtained by intuitive means from which all knowledge and all rules of life can be deduced; Aristotle's biological model of every entity as developing towards its own perfection and inner goal, in terms of which alone it can be defined or understood; the great medieval pyramid that stretches from God to the lowest amoeba; the mechanical structure of Hobbes; the image of the family and its natural relationships that runs through the political structures of Bodin, Burke, the Christian socialists of the West, and the Russian Slavophils; the genetic, biological and physical patterns that are the heart of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sociological doctrines; the legal notion of the social contract: these central models are not refuted by mere aspects of experience which are altered by some historical change or intellectual discovery. New models appear, throw light over dark areas, liberate men from the chains of the old constricting framework, and either extrude them completely or sometimes half blend with them into a new pattern. These new models in their turn fail to explain and answer questions which they themselves bring into being. The concept of man as an atom at first offered liberation from a constricting a priori theocratic model, and then in its turn proved inadequate. Man as an organic cell, man as a creator, man as a producer, as a creature seeking union with nature, or as a Promethean hero-martyr seeking to subdue her - these are all models that obscure and illuminate.
these thinkers, and that this naturally reduces the value of these hypotheses in my eyes. I do not wish to condemn those who answer their own questions for failing to answer mine, but I cannot help having a certain prejudice in favour of those writers who are more modest and cautious, whose reflections attempt a good deal less and, whether or not for this reason, achieve, for me, a good deal more. History, Tolstoy once remarked, is like a deaf man who answers questions no one has asked. I do not think that this is true of historical writers, but it may not be entirely unjust about a good many philosophers of history who, in the name of science, seek to squeeze the multiplicity of phenomena into one simple cosmic scheme - the 'terrible simplifiers' in matters of both theory and practice against whom Montesquieu warned us more than two centuries ago.[115]
III
The three crises in Western political theory, when at least one central category was transformed beyond redemption, so that all subsequent thought was altered, occurred in the fourth century bc, during the Renaissance in Italy, and towards the end of the eighteenth century in Germany.
Classical Western political theory may be likened to a tripod - that is, it rests on three central assumptions. These, of course, do not represent the totality of beliefs on which this central tradition rests, but they are amongst its most powerful pillars, so that the collapse or weakening of any of them is bound to affect the tradition and, indeed, change it to a considerable degree.
1. The first assumption is that questions about values, about ends or worth, about the rightness or desirability of human action, including political action, are genuine questions; genuine questions being those to which true answers exist, whether they are known or not. These answers are objective, universal, eternally valid and in principle knowable. To every genuine question only one answer can be true, all the other answers being necessarily false - either false in varying degrees, at various distances from the truth, or false absolutely, according to the logical doctrine adopted. The route to the truth has historically been a subject on which there have been the most profound disagreements among men. Some have believed that solutions were to be discovered by reason, others by faith or revelation, or empirical observation, or metaphysical intuition. Some have thought that the truth was, at least in principle, open to all if only they pursued the correct method - by reading sacred books, or communion with nature, or rational calculation, or looking within their own innermost heart; others have thought that only experts could discover the answer, or persons in certain privileged states of mind, or at certain times and in certain places. Some have thought that these truths could be discovered in this world; to others they would be revealed fully only in some future life. Some have supposed that these truths were known in a golden age in the remote past, or would be known in a golden age in the future; according to some they are timeless, according to others revealed progressively; according to some they can in principle be known to men, according to others to God alone.
Profound though these differences are, and the source at times of violent conflict, not only intellectual but social and political, they are differences within the agreed belief that the questions are genuine questions, and the answers to them, like hidden treasure, exist whether they have been found or not; so that the problem is not whether these answers exist at all, but only what is the best means of finding them. Values may differ from facts or from necessary truths in the way that Aristotle or the Fathers of the Church, or Hume or Kant or Mill, thought that they differed; but the propositions that assert or describe them are no less objective, and obey a logical structure no less coherent and rigorous, than propositions asserting facts - whether empirical or a priori or logical - and mathematical truths. This is the first and deepest assumption that underlies the classical form of political theory.
2. The second assumption is that the answers, if they are true, to the various questions raised in political theory do not clash. This follows from the simple logical rule that one truth cannot be incompatible with another. Many questions of value are bound to arise in the course of political enquiry: questions such as 'What is justice and should it be pursued?', 'Is liberty an end to be sought after for its own sake?', 'What are rights, and under what circumstances may they be ignored or, to the contrary, asserted against the claims of utility or security or truth or happiness?' The answers to these questions, if they are true, cannot collide with each other. According to some views they harmonise with one another; according to other views they form an interrelated single whole, and mutually entail and are entailed by one another, so that denial of any one of them leads to incoherence or contradictions within the system. Whichever of these views is correct, the minimum assumption is that one truth cannot possibly logically conflict with another. Hence it follows that, if all our questions were answered, the collection or pattern or logically connected system of the true answers would constitute a total solution of all problems of value - of the questions of what to do, how to live, what to believe. This would be, in short, the description of the ideal state of which all actual human conditions fall short.
This may be called the jigsaw-puzzle view of ethics and politics and aesthetics. Since all true answers fit with one another, the problem is merely to arrange the fragments with which we are presented in everyday experience, or in moments of illumination, or at the end of some strenuous, but successful, intellectual investigation - to arrange these fragments in the unique way in which they compose the total pattern that is the answer to all our wants and perplexities.
Again the problem arises whether any man can do this, or only some - the experts or the spiritually privileged or those who happen to be in the right place for the completion of the solution to the puzzle. Is the answer vouchsafed to any man who uses correct methods, or only to a particular group in a peculiar favourable position - a particular Church or culture or class? Is the answer static, unaltered wherever and whenever it may be discovered, or dynamic - that is, once it is discovered by the progressive, perfecting searcher after the truth, who has made every serious effort to find it, then although it may not be final in the form in which he gives it, does it facilitate the process of transformation required by the continuing search for the final solution? The assumption here is that there is a final solution, that if all the answers to all the questions could per impossibile be found and properly related to one another, this would be a total answer - the necessary acceptance of which by those who had found it would solve all questions, both of theory and of practice, once and for all. Whether this answer is discoverable on earth or not, all attempts to answer such questions can then be represented as being so many paths towards this central totality, adequate or inadequate, in direct proportion to the inner coherence and the comprehensiveness of the answers proposed.
3. The third assumption is that man has a discoverable, describ- able nature, and that this nature is essentially, and not merely contingently, social. There are certain attributes which belong to man as such, for example, the capacity for thought or communication; for a creature who does not think or communicate could not be called a man. Communication is by definition a relationship with others, and therefore relationship with other men of a systematic kind is not merely a contingent fact about men, but part of what we mean by men, a part of the definition of human beings as a species. If this is so, then political theory, which is the theory of how men do or should behave towards one another, and especially why anyone should obey anyone else rather than do as he likes (this raises all the questions of authority and sovereignty, of types of government and the foundations of obligation - these questions are necessarily raised whenever any questions about the nature or purposes of men are brought up) - political theory is not a doctrine or a particular technique that men can use or not use, like the theory of navigation (men need not, after all, use ships if they do not wish to), but rather more like theories of thinking (which they cannot help doing), or theories of growth or history, or theories that deal with other inalienable attributes of human beings. Hence the traditional divisions of philosophy which deal with permanent, irremovable characteristics of human life: logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics.
Each of these pillars on which political theory rests has been attacked. They have been attacked, historically, in order of mounting importance, in the reverse order from that in which I have stated them. The view of man as an intrinsically social being, and of political theory as consisting of questions that penetrate to the heart of what human beings are, was attacked at the end of the fourth century. The proposition that all values are compatible with one another, and that in principle there is a total solution of human problems, if only we could discover it - there must, at any rate, be a method of searching for it - was questioned by Machiavelli, questioned to such effect that the old confidence which had lasted for more than two thousand years never returned. The proposition that there may, in principle, exist no final solution to human problems, and that some values may be incompatible with others, entails considerations which few men are capable of facing without growing altogether too upset. Finally, the claim that questions of value are genuine questions and capable of solution, at least in principle, and that politics is a branch of intellectual enquiry capable of yielding propositions which can be true or false, was compromised by the German romantics toward the end of the eighteenth century with results of a very violent, revolutionary kind. The consequences are with us still; they have destroyed the foundations of the old beliefs and, whether as causes or as symptoms, they mark the most violent political and moral upheavals of our own day.
I shall discuss these three great crises one by one.[116] I begin with the first - the question of man as a social being.
IV
It is by now a well-worn commonplace that the Greeks of the classical period, and in particular Athens and Sparta in the fifth century bc, conceived of human beings in essentially social terms. The evidence for this need scarcely be adduced. Attic tragedy and comedy in the fifth century, and the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, take for granted that the natural life of men is the institutionalised life of the polis. The notion of resistance to it - in the name of individual liberty or even peaceful retreat from the market-place into private life - is scarcely conceived. Idiotes means just 'private citizen', but in so far as such a person is concerned with his own private affairs at the expense of those of the city, it can be a pejorative term, like the modern word etymologically related to it. As for the philosophers - those who consciously examined the presuppositions of commonly accepted notions and enquired about the ends of life - if we are to take the two great masters whose works dominate Greek, and all subsequent, thought - Plato and Aristotle - the emphasis on social values is overwhelming in their works. 'One should say not that a citizen belongs to himself,' says Aristotle, 'but that all belong to the polis: for the individual is a part of the polis'1
This simple statement could stand as a formula that summarises the attitude of all major thinkers of classical Athens. Aristotle cautiously qualifies this thesis: there can be such a thing as too much uniformity in the city. The citizens must not be crushed, differences of character and attitude must always be given adequate room in which to realise themselves. The virtues that Aristotle discusses are largely the characteristics of human beings in their intercourse with each other within a social context: the ideal figure of the generous, distinguished, rich, public-spirited man with a wide liberal outlook, great dignity and sweep, raised above the heads of the ordinary middle-class citizen, is not conceivable save in terms of a well-organised, ordered society. 'Man has been created by nature to live in a polis.' This sentiment is central in the classical texts of Greek art and thought that have survived. No argument seems needed to establish this proposition, for it is evidently something that all sane men believe without question, it is part of the general notion of man. Solitude can be endured only by a god or a beast: it is subhuman or superhuman.
This too is the general attitude of Plato, for all his disgust with Athenian democracy. Some Platonists suppose him to be more interested in the well-ordered individual soul or mind than in social and political organisation. Occasionally he makes remarks to the effect that 'no evil can befall a good man either in his lifetime or after his death'2 - and this is, in effect, repeated in the Republic? Both Plato and Aristotle speak of the contemplative life as the highest that a man can lead. Their vision is of the ultimate goal which all things seek, the answer to the question why things are as they are and seek to be what they seek to be: that is the fulfilment of the quest for truth, both in theory and practice. To return to the cave and the world of illusion, where men pursue false ends, and struggle and squabble and fret and lead foolish and vicious lives - this return is to be viewed only with extreme reluctance. Still, return they must. Why? Because they must create a society in which the wise man - Socrates - will not be put to death? Or because only the State can give that education which makes men capable of virtue and wisdom, and the grasp of reality which alone gives moral and intellectual security and satisfaction? These are different answers and not consistent with one another: but what they have in common is the view that men cannot and should not live outside the State.
It is true that Socrates kept out of things, on the whole: he obeyed the laws and performed his military service with exceptional distinction, but he kept out of politics, if we are to believe those who wrote about him, because Athenian democracy was too corrupt and no man who knew where the truth lay would seek the
' Politics 12533.-3. 2 Apology 4idi. 3 613a.
tawdry prizes which a vicious society offered. Nevertheless, one of the charges against him was that he was too close to Critias, chief of the tyrants who seized power and instituted a reign of terror and butchered a good many democrats. Socrates was accused not of turning his back upon civic life, but of 'corrupting the young men'[117]and of sowing scepticism about the values that preserved the social texture, and, no doubt, of being a friend of Alcibiades, who was a traitor, and of other young men of good birth who looked down upon the grocers and tanners who formed the bulk of the Athenian electorate; in other words, of preaching doctrines which made for the rule by an elite, a rational elite perhaps, but still, superior persons raised above the ordinary citizenry, oligarchs who believed in their own superior values and not in equality or majority votes.
This is not political detachment but active subversion of a particular type of political life. In the Crito, where the laws are speaking to Socrates before his approaching death, they tell him that he is a child and slave of the laws. He was among those who passed the laws. Once they are set up it is the duty of the citizen to obey - there is no question of opting out of such a commitment. The citizen owes more to the laws than to his physical parents.2 Socrates takes this for granted; he does not dispute it: morality integrates you into society, and above all you must not destroy the laws by disobeying them because they are unjust, because you suffer unjustly under them. The claims of the social texture are supreme. The proposition that Plato was interested solely or even principally in creating conditions in which the minority gifted enough to discover the truth would have conditions in which they could pursue their studies is not really tenable. However the Republic may be interpreted, the Politicus is a treatise not about means, but about ends - how the only life which, according to him, men can lead while remaining men, namely the life of the city, should be conducted by those who are responsible. Virtue for Plato is the fruit of State-directed education. A bad State must be reformed or abolished, but not in favour of a loose association of individuals. There is nothing which Plato is more bitterly opposed to than 'a society in which men are allowed to do whatever they like'.3 The most violent statement of this is in the famous passage in the Laws where, after earlier criticising Sparta as a militarist State - a mere 'army camp'[118] - he declares, a good many pages later:
the principal thing is that none, man or woman, should ever be without an officer set over him, and that none should get the mental habit of taking any step, whether in earnest or jest, on his own individual responsibility. In peace and in war he must live always with his eye on his superior officer, following his lead and guided by him in his smallest actions ... In a word, he must train the mind not even to consider acting as an individual or to know how to do it.2
No doubt this was written in his embittered old age, after the failure of the Sicilian experiment, when his passionate belief in human reason may have been weakened by his experience of human vice and folly. Still, in a milder version, this is the note struck by Plato whenever the question of political organisation arises. The reduction of social life to a single rigorous pattern inspired by logic or mathematics may argue a latent hatred of human association as such and of the problems of reconciling the variety of men and purposes, or blending them into some viable form of life worthy of human beings, in which the art or science of politics may be held to consist. Be that as it may, Plato clearly thinks of men in a social context. In his image man is among other men. His morality is a social morality, even though not to the extent of Aristotle's - for whom morals were deducible from politics. We discover what men should do by asking ourselves what functions nature has designed them to perform in the pattern for which they were created. The Greek city is derived from this pattern. Where the association is too big, as, say, in Persia, or too crude, as it is among the barbarians, or does not exist at all - when disintegration sets in and men find themselves on their own - that causes degeneration, abnormality. The norm is the equilibrium of forces and characteristics embodied in the city. The worst and most corrosive of vices - injustice - is the upsetting of this equilibrium. The best constitutions are those which keep things in balance, preserve the pattern, and create the framework within which men can socially - and, therefore, morally and intellectually - reali1e themselves. Men's characters are defined in terms of the kind of society for which they were created by nature. There are the democratic, the oligarchic, the plutocratic man: bricks defined in terms of the building into which they naturally fit. This is a celebrated Greek ideal of life at its most articulate.
Is there no opposition to this? What about Antigone, who defied the laws of the State in order to bury her brother? She defies Creon's laws, but not in the name of some individual conviction or the values of private life: she appeals to the unwritten laws, not of today or yesterday, to which all mankind is subject, laws valid for any human society, but not for individuals unrelated by social links. It is an appeal from one social morality to another, not from a social morality to an individual one.
And the Sophists? Here we reach an important, but unfortunately insoluble, problem. For we do not know too much about what the Sophists taught. Perhaps they did not write books on any large scale; or perhaps what they wrote perished - for we know at least some titles of books by the opponents of Socrates and Plato that have not survived. But our main authority for what Protagoras, Prodicus, Hippias, Thrasymachus believed is what Plato and Aristotle tell us. We know a little more about other figures, for example Antiphon. But the bulk of what we know comes from enemy sources, the caricatures of a man who hated them as much as Aristophanes - except that Aristophanes included Socrates as well - and painted satirical portraits of genius. The true facts about those he described are for ever obliterated. To this point I intend to revert later, for it is highly relevant to my entire argument. But for the moment let me say only that the Sophists, like the orators and the dramatists, give evidence of sharp disagreements about what kind of State is the best, but not of opposition to the supremacy of the social institutions.
Lycophron thought that the division into classes was artificial, a work not of nature but of the human will or prejudice. Alcidamas (and in some degree Euripides) thought the institution of slavery artificial, for nature meant all men to be alike - and likewise the distinction between Greeks and barbarians. Antiphon said: 'None of us is by definition barbarian or Greek, for we all breathe out into the air by mouth and nostrils.'[119] Being barbarian or Greek is a human arrangement which, presumably, humans could at will undo. Archelaus thought the distinctions between justice and crookedness were the results of human arrangements, not of nature; Phaleas thought this about the qualities of property. Critias thought God an invention for the purpose of keeping men in order, for unless they were taught that there was an ever-watchful eye upon them, even when no men saw them, marking their conduct and prepared to punish for transgressions, they would behave badly when they thought no one was looking, and society would be subverted.
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