3. John Stuart Mill

Mill played a crucial, but inflated, role in liberalism. Rothbard did not like Mill much. Mill was a disaster on economic freedom and international issues. Mill rejected that workers and capitalists shared interests. Mill was anti-capitalist. Mill’s On Liberty addresses the nature and limits of legitimate power by society over individuals. Mill’s relationship with Harriet Taylor, a married woman, twisted his own mores. Mill’s liberalism had little regard for the past. John Maynard Keynes also contributed to liberalism meaning almost anything including Nazism. Keynes felt his system was more adapted to socialism and Stalinism. But the hallmark of liberalism is that society can run itself with voluntary agreements based upon private property rights. French liberalism involved the idea of class conflict which led to totalitarianism. This doctrine is generally associated with Marxism, but predated Marx. The French made all government offices open to all citizens. That was the essence of the French Revolution. Two main conflicting classes are producers and plunderers. The British tradition of liberalism, as F.A. Hayek espoused, leaves out the tradition of natural rights. Transcript: Lecture 3 of 10 from Ralph Raico's History: The Struggle for Liberty. [This transcript is edited for clarity and readability. The Q and A at the end of the lecture has been omitted. Annotations have been added by Ryan McMaken.] John Stuart Mill played a crucial role in the transition from the older liberalism—the laissez-faire liberalism—to the new liberalism, a type of democratic socialism. Now, it is, to my mind, a disservice when a typical college course that deals with the history of political thought does this: as an example of eighteenth-century liberalism they’ll maybe have Adam Smith. As an example of nineteenth-century liberalism, they will have John Stuart Mill. They’ll present it as John Stuart Mill versus Karl Marx or Friedrich List, and use the idea that Mill is the exemplary liberal of the nineteenth century. One reason that he’s very attractive to people is that he had a very good writing style. There’s no doubt about that. And his writing style is superficially very logical and rational. But, there are very serious problems with Mill from an authentic liberal point of view that I’ll be pointing out. Much of the confusion prevailing in the whole problem of defining and understanding liberalism can be traced to Mill. To my mind, he occupies a vastly inflated position in the conception of liberalism entertained by English-speaking people. This is an example of Anglo-centrism, you might say. It is a scandal how few American social-scientific university professors cannot easily read even modern European languages like French and German. I happen to know this is a fact in connection, for instance, with the Stanford University history department, although they have great scholars. On the other hand, there is this lack of having access to works of continental writers that have not been already translated. James Buchanan, when he undertook his study of public finance, learned Italian—which I think must be a very rare accomplishment among American economists—in order to read the rich treasury of economic thought among the Italian economists of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The lack of the ability to access some of the most important continental political figures, leads to ridiculous overemphasis on the British tradition, to my mind. A man that I’ll be mentioning a number of times, I think from now on, is one of my favorite authors altogether: Benjamin Constant. Constant wrote an enormous amount on political philosophy and other subjects. It was only a few years ago, in the Cambridge “blue” series of political thinkers, that some of his major writings on political philosophy became available in English. George Sabine’s history of political thought doesn’t even mention Constant, although I would be prepared to argue that he was the most important liberal philosopher of the nineteenth century.George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961). First published 1937.  He was worlds ahead of Mill, as far as I’m concerned, and Mill was a disaster on a number of fronts. In economics, Mill held that, “The principle of individual liberty is not involved in the doctrine of free trade.”John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, (London : Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green,1864) p. 171 He is using “free trade” in the sense of economic freedom: freedom of trade, not just internationally. But for Mill in On Liberty, in general, the principle of freedom is not involved in economic affairs. In contrast, Milton Friedman quotes a great letter that Benjamin Franklin sent to one of the French physiocrats where Franklin said that he thought that liberty of exchange, li