This is a lucid, powerful, and extremely influential defense of individual liberty. It's short, too, less than 150 paperback pages, very accessible and worth knowing whatever your beliefs. After all, as Mill himself says, if something is true, we should learn it--if something is false, it can still illuminate truth through its errors. Although I think there are some fatal defects, I also find much that is persuasive and wise. I like his arguments for the utility of freedom of speech and opinion and the dangers of conformity. Mill states his object from the start:
The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
For me so far, so good. I see two major problems with his arguments though, defects that are undermine the above. First, there is his insistence in grounding his argument on Utilitarianism:
It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.
And then Mill makes a curious move. He states his arguments don't apply to children that those "who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury." Fair enough. But then he goes on to say that:
Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.
That in my opinion is what always lets the tyrant in the door. It's for their own good! Wasn't after all that the argument for everything from black chattel slavery to colonialism? If you don't ground individual liberty as a right, then the argument can always be made that a individual person or even the majority of the people don't know their own good. Who is to say when humankind has reached the age of majority? And indeed you can see that in Mill's own evolution. In this essay he argues for the free market--but eventually would become a socialist. So...
