John Stuart Mill Versus the New Totalitarians
Commentary
I have expended a fair amount of ink criticizing John Stuart Mill’s ideas about liberty in his (in)famous 1859 pamphlet “On Liberty.”
I think that Mill’s greatest critic, James Fitzjames Stephen, was right about Mill.
In his devastating polemic “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” Stephen criticized various aspects of Mill’s teaching, especially the anemic, abstract nature of his idea of liberty and the “great defect” upon which it rests: “too favorable an estimate of human nature.”
In my judgment, Stephen made (as the philosopher David Stove put it) “mincemeat” of Mill’s arguments.
But that was only intellectually, in terms of the cogency of Stephen’s arguments….