And yet the problem is so much deeper than bad candidates. It’s the problem of a decrepit regime — a collection of functionaries and placeholders, who’ve reaped the benefits of the past 40 years of economic and moral deregulation and are now incapable of running the world which they have made. Like all elites, they developed the habit of backscratching and logrolling. And, like all elites, they soon lost touch with the people beneath them.

That explains the striking number of destructive liberal policies, which have wreaked havoc across the West. San Francisco, a bastion of social liberalism, is so addled with homeless encampments on the streets and drug addicts snorting fentanyl in public, that even progressives have had enough. Sweden, once a by-word for social harmony, now suffers from the highest rate of death-by-shooting in Europe, thanks to the proliferation of immigrant gangs. The British northern cities that powered the Industrial Revolution are plagued, in their ethnic enclaves, by cousin-marriage, honor punishments and grooming gangs. The response of all too many liberal intellectuals to these tragedies is to demand more of the policies that led to them in the first place. The triumphalism of the Nineties has been the common man’s loss.

This has provoked a growing number of intellectuals on both the Right and the Left to proclaim the death of liberalism. The most familiar argument is the Marxist one that liberalism is a ruling-class trick, and that the harsh realities of exploitation and imperialism underlie their treacly words about “freedom” and “democracy”. A more interesting, and more influential, argument is being made by the New Right — many of whom call themselves “postliberals”. They argue that liberalism proved a disaster, not because good ideas were badly applied, but because liberalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.

In his 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, the political theorist Patrick Deneen wrote: “Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded. As it becomes fully itself, it generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-aids and veils to cover them.” Liberal regimes succeeded when they were disciplined by traditional ideas about virtue and civility. But their core belief — that we are all rights-bearing individuals, answerable primarily to ourselves — inexorably destroyed the civilizational constraints that gave it strength. Liberal individualism generates self-indulgence and anomie. Equality of opportunity produces a new meritocratic aristocracy that has all the aloofness of the old aristocracy with little of its noblesse oblige.

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The bulk of these postliberals are headquartered in the United States. A group of followers of Leo Strauss, based in the Claremont Institute in Southern California, relentlessly expose the faults of the “liberal regime”. Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a leading exponent of the idea of the “unitary executive”, argues that the job of the state is to promote good government rather than to protect liberty as an end in itself. The US vice-president declares himself to be a postliberal. There are so many products of the Claremont Institute in the White House, the administration, and Congress that they are fondly known as “Claremonsters”.

Postliberalism has plenty of supporters in Britain, like James Orr, a Reform advisor and Cambridge philosopher of religion, and the Reform MP, Danny Kruger, who propose a faith and flag-based conservatism as a solution to the disillusionment of modern life. Both are devotees of Roger Scruton, the late conservative intellectual, who fulfills a similar role to Leo Strauss in British postliberal circles. Far more belong to the Blue Labour tradition, like Maurice Glasman, Adrian Pabst, John Milbank and Philip Bond. (John Gray, the most intellectually significant of this group, has retreated from postliberalism of late.)

Their critique predominates at a time when the current liberal establishment is the most decadent it’s been — when, in the words of the American historian John Patrick Diggins, “few live for liberalism, but many live off it”. This all comes at a time when the forces of illiberalism are stronger than they have been at any time since the Thirties. The world’s second-biggest economy, China, is ruled by a Marxist dictator; its biggest democracy, India, by an illiberal strongman; its most battle-tested war machine, Russia, by a man who wants to bury the liberal order; and its most important liberal power, the United States, is, at best, an uncertain friend of the liberal order that it created after the Second World War. Donald Trump is an instinctive rather than a cerebral politician, but almost all his instincts are illiberal, sometimes astonishingly so. Trump has declared, like an absolute monarchy, that the only constraint on his actions lies in his own conscience. He has not even bothered to pay lip-service to international law in his wars of choice in Venezuela and now Iran and the wider Middle East.

Yet the postliberal influence owes much more to luck than substance. They fail to address the material problems that plague the post-industrial wastelands that they excoriate: Deneen’s follow up to Why Liberalism Failed, called Regime Change: Towards a Post-Liberal Future, is notably short on workable policies. They have no answer to the question: what happens to populism when it’s undisciplined by liberal constraints? The experience of the Thirties suggests nothing good. It is time to mount a defense of liberalism before it is too late.

***

It’s impossible to defend liberalism without starting with a definition of what we are defending. Over the past 40 years, liberalism has been associated with the shrinking of the role of the state when it comes to both markets and morality. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair produced a widely admired bourgeois-bohemian (BoBo) synthesis by combining the Thatcherite deregulation of the economy with the Sixties deregulation of morality. The strength of the postliberal argument is that it recognizes this synthesis is now producing more problems than benefits.

But the BoBo synthesis is only one possible manifestation of liberalism. You can have big government liberalism as well as small government liberalism, moralizing liberalism as well as permissive liberalism. (John Maynard Keynes was no less of a liberal than Friedrich Hayek.) All are linked by three core beliefs: that society starts with the individual rather than the collective; that truth is only reached through open debate; that power is so dangerous that it must be divided and constrained. Anything that prevents individuals from flourishing, ideas from clashing, and power from being constrained, is illiberal.

During its long history, liberalism has suffered from several near-death experiences, but it has always revived. It has done this by addressing new problems in new ways while staying true to its fundamental principles. One example is particularly germane to our current predicament — namely, New Liberalism, which emerged at a time in the late 19th century, when the laissez-faire liberalism of the Victorians risked being swept aside by the emergence of a new world of organized trade unions, mass political parties and authoritarian nation states. A group of intellectuals, such as T.H. Green, Leonard Hobhouse, and Graham Wallas, dreamed of a liberal state — more interventionist while not sacrificing the principles of individualism and divided power. A remarkable group of New Liberal politicians followed — such as David Lloyd George, R.B. Haldane, and Winston Churchill, who revived the moribund Liberal Party and built the foundations of the welfare state. The First World War and the rise of Labour eventually led to the Liberal Party’s “strange death”, but liberal ideas were absorbed by both ascendant parties under the influence of John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge.

In the Twenties and Thirties, liberalism risked being stamped to death by jack-booted fascism or communism. “The liberal state is destined to perish. All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal,” proclaimed the socialist-turned-fascist Benito Mussolini. But the Allies proved him wrong by defeating the Axis powers in the Second World War, constructing the Iron Curtain, and remaking the world according to a new collection of liberal principles. In the Seventies, the postwar regime gave way to stagflation and bureaucratic sclerosis only to revive under the influence of the neoliberal revolution.

It’s understandable that people are angry with the liberal establishment and disillusioned with centrist promises. But the alternatives from both the Right and the Left are certain to be worse. During his first term, Trump catered to his billionaire friends, entrenching crony capitalism and passing big tax cuts, while providing his populist base with rhetorical puff balls. He didn’t even make significant progress with his “beautiful wall”. During his second term, with the old Republican establishment sidelined and both postliberal and illiberal thinkers in the ascendant, he is creating chaos in the Middle East, sending stock markets into a tailspin. Meanwhile, in Britain, Reform’s economic policies are an unsustainable mixture of Thatcherism and Left-wing statism.

The radical Left is even more impractical. The Green Party’s policies, so entreatingly presented by Laura Spencer, the victorious candidate in Gorton and Denton, are a JCR laundry list of wishes: spending funded by taxing billionaires, the legalization of drugs and pornography and, almost as an afterthought, nice things for the environment. Not only that, but the radical Left is also blind to the problems created by mass immigration, half-hearted integration, and the development of parallel societies. Spencer not only brushed aside worries about immigration as “racism” but also distributed pamphlets in Urdu and extracted political capital by posturing over the war in Gaza. The noisy fight between the far Left and far Right is often a distraction from collective problems like fixing governments that require concerted effort and careful thought.

The only way forward is to reinvent liberalism just as thoroughly as previous generations of liberal reformers did to address new problems, while discarding established shibboleths if they happen to get in the way. If we fail, we will be swept aside by the radicals of the Left and Right; if we go off half-cocked, we may end up making the problem worse. The last attempt to revive the radical center was made by Emmanuel Macron, who only entrenched and deepened France’s divisions. His failure is not only the result of his divisive, vain and self-glorifying character, but — more importantly — because, as a creature of the neoliberal revolution, he focused on yesterday’s solutions, economic deregulation, rather than addressing today’s problems: the tensions between the center and the periphery, and the failure to assimilate immigrants. Liberals must be bolder and more self-critical than the Man in the Élysée. We must also be more consistent. Such a reinvention must start with three strategies: rethink, reposition, and re-articulate.

First: rethink. Today’s liberals need to break with their four-decade fixation on economic and moral deregulation. The Epstein affair should provide both a reason for such a break and a spur to self-reflection. The Epstein Files have not only exposed how many neoliberal heroes, from tech-billionaires to illustrious economists, have feet of clay, but also the moral hollowness of a philosophy of self-indulgence and self-gratification that lies at the heart of the BoBo culture.

Today’s liberals must also reapply the core principles of liberalism as they encounter old sins in new forms. The tech giants are not only amassing market dominance of a sort that we haven’t seen since the robber barons, but are also using that dominance to misinform and manipulate individual citizens. Left-wing identitarians are offending the basic principles of individualism by treating people as members of groups rather than as unique individuals, even applying different selection standards to different groups, or by canceling people with what they deem to be heterodox opinions.

The biggest weakness of today’s liberals is that they have become the establishment — the heads of Oxbridge colleges, Quangos, the BBC — and they have all the attendant weakness of an establishment. Radical liberals must challenge this establishment with the same vigor with which the Greens and Reform challenge it, but in the name of liberal principles rather than identitarian ones. Why have the heads of universities betrayed the sacred principle of free speech? Why has the grooming-gang inquiry been bogged down in procedure and vacillation? Why is groupthink spreading in NGO circles?

Every successful reformulation of the liberal creed, from the New Liberals, through the managerial capitalism of the Forties, to the neoliberal revolution of the Eighties, has involved the sweeping away of a decadent elite and the creation of a new cadre of reformers. Today’s radical liberals must muscle aside the existing liberal establishment — that is, the Davos establishment — before the populists do it for them. Radical liberals also need to be willing to forge alliances with groups that their elders have made a career demonizing. Conservatives such as Roger Scruton turned out to be right about pornography and libertinism. Some socialists were right about the dangers of the over-concentration of economic power. Liberalism has a wonderful history of reviving itself through unexpected alliances.

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Third: re-articulate. One reason why liberals were so successful in the past is that they were so good at communicating. John Stuart Mill was a master of clarity. Lincoln wrote like an angel. Gladstone held his audiences enthralled for hours. Today’s liberals have entirely lost the art. Officials sound like Soviet-era bureaucrats, with wooden phrases about diversity being our strength taking the place of “the laws of dialectical materialism”. Eurocrats have invented their own language of “attestation” and “decommitting”. Academics write for constipated referees who hold their fates in their hands. Corporations produce bureaucratic blather. The current leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, is better known for his theatrical stunts than any particular argument or opinion.

There are two reasons for this failure: being the establishment, liberals largely talk to each other rather than to the public, academics to academics and Eurocrats to Eurocrats. Being a decadent establishment, they don’t really believe what they are saying. They are repeating formulaic phrases in much the same way as Soviet bureaucrats repeated such phrases — to protect themselves from criticism and curry favor with the even more powerful. The simple fact of breaking with the establishment should be enough to take care of the dead-prose problem: once people start believing what they say, and once they start speaking to the public rather than experts, they discover the language that they need.

Once they’ve recovered their spirit, our reformed liberals need to take to the public square. Diplomats need to be willing to advance the case for open societies and religious toleration in the UN and other such forums. Politicians need to speak out more loudly against illiberal practices such as shouting down speakers in universities, persecuting people who “blaspheme” against Islam in schools, or practices such as arranged or cousin marriage.

What often passes for liberalism today is a ghost of its former self. But liberalism has revived from near-death experiences in the past— and it has revived precisely because liberals have rediscovered their ability to reapply their philosophy to fresh problems and put their arguments into new world. Liberalism properly conceived is the only reasonable solution to the great problems of modernity: how to live together in a pluralist society and how to preserve social cohesion while unleashing individual talents. Ignore the siren voices talking about postliberalism. Resist the superficial glamour of the twin populisms of the Left and Right. It is time to begin the patient but exhilarating work of renewing liberalism for a new age. Centrists of the world, unite!

If it’s to survive the century, then, liberalism must rekindle a sense of hope, one that dovetails respect for institutions with a politics of plenty. I believe the solution can be found in two words: liberal socialism. 

For some, the term’s an oxymoron. Many classical and neoliberals see liberalism as doggedly committed to unbridled capitalism, with the economist Ludwig von Mises summarising the ideology as representing “private ownership of the means of production”. Many on the Left would surely agree. For socialists, isn’t liberalism the “bourgeois” ideology par excellence, serving as an intellectual defence of capital ownership and worker exploitation?

In fact, liberalism is a much more dynamic, complex family of creeds than these reductive labels suggest: while thinkers such as von Mises were quick to equate capitalism and liberalism, there’s always been an economically progressive strain to liberal thinking too. For these self-proclaimed liberal socialists, redistribution isn’t simply preferable — but actually the only way of securing liberal goals. Put it like this: domination by bosses is no less oppressive because it happens in the market and is sanctioned by the state. 

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Two of the first thinkers to develop these ideas were Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In his seminal book Rights of Man, and in pamphlets such as Agrarian Justice, Paine argued that property was a social rather than a natural institution. This meant that the rich owed society a debt for their property, a debt which could be paid through heavy taxes and fund a lively proto-welfare state. 

Wollstonecraft is, of course, most famous for her stirring arguments for women’s equality in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Less remembered, though, is her acid claim in the same work that from “respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.” From there, Wollstonecraft went on to argue that both the aristocratic rich and the emerging capitalist class could be compared to a fungus growing upon society, one which distorts its moral virtues through avarice and greed. 

Wollstonecraft and Paine were important precursors. But it was really John Stuart Mill who developed a mature form of liberal socialism. Mill is best remembered today for his uncompromising defence of personal liberty. Less familiar are his innovative economic arguments for workplace democracy. 

In his autobiography, Mill concedes that in his youth he’d been excessively rigid in his economic thinking, seeing “little further” than the classical liberals so beloved by Victorian Britain. In his mature period, however, Mill proudly identified as a socialist. One recent work reconstructs Mill’s liberal form of market socialism. In it, Helen McCabe particularly highlights his commitment to a welfare state and democracy, alongside the democratisation of the workplace through a transition to cooperatives and worker-run firms.

In the 20th century, many of the greatest liberal thinkers identified with liberal socialism too. This includes the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the great anti-fascist Carlo Rosselli, alongside political theorists like Chantal Mouffe. But surely the best example here is John Rawls, the greatest liberal philosopher since Mill. 

After publishing A Theory of Justice, his most famous work, Rawls was variously praised or condemned for offering a moderate defence of the mid-century welfare state. In truth, however, his overall philosophy was much more radical. In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, published posthumously, Rawls insisted that welfare capitalism still allowed too many inequalities to persist. That was particularly true, he added, of economic inequalities that meant citizens had unequal political power. This, Rawls felt, was incompatible with liberal commitments to citizens getting “fair value” from their political rights in a democracy. Rather, Rawls argued that only a “property-owning democracy” or “liberal socialist” regime could genuinely embody liberal principles of justice. 

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Rawls and his fellow liberal socialists were right to worry. Many liberal democracies continue to fall short of their ideals — for all the reasons liberal socialists have highlighted for centuries. Nor is this merely an academic discussion. The further today’s plutocratic reality diverges from the grand egalitarian theories of liberal justice, the weaker liberalism becomes, with an increasing number of voters openly sceptical of democracy. 

That, it goes without saying, leaves room for extremists to thrive. In one 2019 study, for instance, a pair of political scientists attribute much of the popularity of right-populists to their promises to upend liberal elites and their policies. This flows from both the perception that liberal elites are out of touch with regular people, and that the institutions they govern aren’t accountable to their own citizens. This isn’t just perception: in American politics money really does talk, and loudly. The 1% are far more likely to get their way than the “people” the American constitution claims as the source of political legitimacy. 

The public, for their part, are hardly unaware of how they’re being treated. Surveys around the world show that people want the rich to pay more, think highly of unions despite decades of falling membership, and worry about soaring levels of inequality. When they realise liberals are not only failing to fix these problems — but are actively compounding them — they unsurprisingly drift towards authoritarians promising miracle cures, even if the latter prove worse than the disease. 

Liberal socialism, then, is inextricably bound to the future of liberal democracy. I try to retrieve this worthwhile tradition in my book — both backwards from Paine and Mill and on towards the future. Happily, I found plenty of contemporary scholarship to explore here, with an increasing number of academics now identifying with liberalism’s egalitarian ideals. What we might call a “liberalism of hope” has plenty of proponents, notably economists like Daniel Chandler. Philosophers, for their part, are moving in a similar direction: William Edmundson, Igor Shoikhedbrod and Elizabeth Anderson are just three examples among many. 

This panoply of thinkers disagree about much. Yet all are united in rejecting what Alexandre Lefebvre calls the empty cynicism of neoliberal “liberaldom”. For Lefebvre, “liberaldom” is the kind of society that promises freedom and equality for all, yet ultimately makes no real effort to deliver. But it doesn’t have to be that way. By being a theory of hope for all, liberal socialism represents the best of the liberal tradition, and an ideology that can stand firm against the buffeting winds of our century. 

What might that look like in practice? Perhaps the best real-world examples are in Scandinavia. There is, to be fair, some argument about just how socialist they are. But as Scott Sehon notes, these debates are largely semantic: by most metrics, Denmark and Norway are far more socialist than almost any other state. A similar point was even made by Sweden’s iconic Prime Minister Olaf Palme when he pointed out that his country had moved further down the “road to socialism” than many explicitly Marxist states. 

The point here is that the Nordic model has produced the world’s highest quality of living for decade after decade. In large part, Oslo, Helsinki and the rest achieved this by dovetailing strong liberal-democratic institutions with redistributive economic programmes, similar to the philosophy advanced by Wollstonecraft or Paine. The connection to liberal socialist theory is even clearer given how Nordic governments integrated “co-determination” into the workplace. Offering workers a strong say on the boards of large companies, theorists such as Rudolph Meidner have even advocated giving staff shares in their employers, with the ultimate aim of making firms completely worker-owned. 

Unfortunately, the advent of neoliberalism meant the Swedish economist’s vision was never really implemented, even as Nordic ambitions have retreated somewhat from their mid-century peak. This was a serious mistake. In an era where millions feel they have little control over their lives at work, and where digital surveillance technology is now intruding on their domestic schedules, the democratisation of work and industry is long overdue. 

There are signs, in fact, that other progressive leaders are rediscovering liberal socialism for themselves. That’s especially true in Canada, where the New Democratic Party has a strong liberal socialist heritage. Former leader Ed Broadbent was a cheerleader for Millite cooperatives, and his thinking and activism have lately been reappraised. South of the border, Bernie Sanders and the “Squad” have done much to update a liberal style of socialism for new generations, with millions of millennials now enthusiastic backers of the Green New Deal. Combined with the resurgence of liberal socialism in the academy, the tradition’s future seems bright — and just as well. Rosa Luxemburg once said that everyone faced a choice between socialism and barbarism. With the barbarians now looming, the choice for any liberal should be clear.

Our approach to the whole issue of free speech is still largely moulded by attitudes born in the Enlightenment, when the main enemy of freedom of expression was the state and certain quasi-state institutions, such as the established churches. But in modern liberal democracies, the real enemy of free speech is not the state but the pressure of opinion from our fellow citizens. This is not a new insight, but it is a frequently forgotten one. Most of our issues were recognised by the great Victorian apostle of free speech John Stuart Mill, a thinker whose uncanny ability to anticipate the dilemmas of our own age can still take us by surprise. Mill foresaw that in a democratic age, such as was just dawning in Victorian Britain, a culture of conformity would be a greater threat to freedom of expression than any action of the state. Society, he wrote, is capable of practising “a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life and enslaving the soul itself”.

Tolerance does not come naturally to human beings. For most of human history, what people believed about the natural world, about government and society and about the moral codes of humanity was laid down by authority, usually by people claiming to speak in the name of God. Pluralism and diversity of opinion have only been accepted as desirable for the last three or four centuries. They are essentially the legacy of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and the European Enlightenment of the 18th. These movements rejected mere authority as a source of truth, in favour of observation, reasoning and rational discourse. But like all cultural phenomena, theirs was a fragile construct. In recent years, we have reverted to the older, more authoritarian model which prevailed before the 17th century, although God no longer has much to do with it.

A large part of the explanation has been the decline of individualism. Mill’s outlook on life was profoundly individualist. He once declared that if all mankind were of one opinion and only one person of the contrary opinion, there could be no justification for silencing him. But today individualism is widely rejected as a social value. It is regarded as selfish, uncaring and antisocial. This attitude has undermined the case for freedom of expression; it reflects a view of society as a single great organism which must have a single collective notion of what is true and good. Free speech is seen as a tool of oppression.

It is true that in a world of free speech, the most powerful voices will belong to people influential enough to have a public platform. This is so even in an age when speech has been democratised by social media. However, in a world of free speech, what the powerful say will be open to challenge. The alternative is a world in which public discourse is dominated by a different and more sinister form of power — the power of those with loud enough voices and sharp enough elbows to drown out others. That power will not be open to challenge. The idea of a community with a common outlook on the world sounds more inviting than a community divided by ideological or economic conflict. However, as long as human beings retain their individuality, their intellectual curiosity and their scepticism, a common outlook cannot be achieved without systematic coercion — which is what we are witnessing today.

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When fear leads to tyranny

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John Stuart Mill anticipated many things, but he did not anticipate the internet. Social media can conjure up instant online lynch mobs. They make a powerful amplifier available to the most intolerant strands of opinion. The algorithms which determine what material is placed under people’s noses expose them only to sentiments which they already agree with, thus intensifying their opinions and eliminating not only dissent but even nuance and moderation. Mill assumed that the pressure to conform would come from self-righteous majorities. But social media has conferred immense power on self-righteous minorities, often quite small minorities.

The most remarkable illustration of this is the vicious campaign currently being conducted to silence those who believe that gender is based on an immutable biological fact. Polling evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority of people believe that gender is determined at birth and cannot be altered by medical or surgical intervention, let alone by simple choice. That view is consistent with the current scientific orthodoxy, which regards gender as binary. Yet pressure from a noisy minority has created a situation in which the public expression of the prevailing and probably correct view about gender can lead to dismissal from employment, the cancellation of speaking engagements and publication contracts, and an avalanche of public shaming and abuse.

John Stuart Mill taught that the only purpose for which power might properly be exercised against individuals against their will was to prevent harm to others. But what we are presently witnessing is a subtle redefinition of the whole concept of harm to include the harm said to be caused by having to endure contradiction. The argument is that words wound, especially when they relate to another person’s identity or status; a university or a workplace where a person is exposed to disagreement must therefore be regarded, in the standard catchphrase, as “unsafe”.

The difference between violence and words is obvious. Violence is coercive. Words, even if offensive, are not coercive except in those cases where they are calculated to provoke violence. Yet in North America, Britain and much of the Anglosphere, this notion of harm has captured institutions. Recent research in the United States suggests that 29% of university professors have been pressured by university authorities into avoiding controversial subjects; 16% have either been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their words, their teaching or their academic research, while another 7% say that they have been investigated. Those working on any subject involving ethnic or religious sensitivities are particularly vulnerable. More than 80% of students report that they self-censor their work for fear of stepping out of line.

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Underlying much of this debate is a fundamental challenge to the objective notion of harm. When interest groups object to someone’s opinion, harm is whatever they perceive as harm. It depends on “lived experience”, as the phrase goes, particularly when the offended group is an ethnic, religious or sexual minority. The desire to accommodate minorities who feel themselves oppressed is understandable. It assists social inclusion. But carried to its logical extreme it gives them a right of veto, an entitlement to silence opinions. And it is being carried to its logical extreme. In many countries, including Britain, hate speech is in some circumstances a criminal offence or an aggravating factor when accompanied by some other criminal conduct. The British police and prosecution authorities have agreed upon a definition of their own devising, according to which a hate crime means any action which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice. In other words, they have adopted a subjective definition dependent on the feelings of the victim rather than an objective assessment of the words used.

All of these problems have been intensified by a powerful generational divide. A mass of anecdotal evidence suggests that venues, publishers, and other media who shun controversial views are often pushed into it by their junior staff. This rage of a younger generation against their own societies is not wholly irrational. Liberal democracy has always depended on economic good fortune. The turn in the economic fortunes of Western democracies has persuaded a whole generation that they will be the first cohort for many decades who will be worse off than their parents. The postwar generation seems to them to have lived on the fat of the land, deferring intractable issues like climate change, capricious patterns of inequality and poisonous race relations for their children and grandchildren to deal with.

The perceived power of vested interests and the inertia of democratic decision-making have combined to persuade much of the younger generation that debate is worthless and direct action the only answer. The European and American sense of moral and intellectual superiority provokes attempts by a younger generation to discredit their legacy. Hence the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement (even in societies such as Britain where the police do not routinely murder people of colour), the demands for “decolonisation” of school and university syllabuses, and so on. The influential French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that what people regard as objective truth or independent opinion is really no more than the product of entrenched power structures. Debate is pointless in such a world; to get anywhere, you have to break the power structures. I do not imagine that the young enemies of free speech have read Foucault’s opaque prose. But many of them act on the same principle. An angry and frustrated generation is unlikely to accept the conventions of rational discourse or the messy compromises of democratic politics as readily as their parents did. Indeed, successive surveys by the Washington-based Pew Research Institute suggest that support for democracy is declining among the young in much of the West, especially in Britain and America.

These developments have fundamentally changed the argument about freedom of expression. The issue now pits different groups of citizens and different generations against each other. The people who scream abuse at their adversaries from the roadside or from their social media accounts would claim to be exercising their own rights of free expression. The impact of their anger is indirect. They create an oppressive climate in which other people are silenced and may lose their careers, their livelihoods and their reputation, or else may simply be forced to keep away from controversial subjects. The screamers do not themselves bring about these consequences. They simply influence the mood in a way which causes other people, such as editors, publishers, universities and employers, to persecute dissenters, because in a world of heightened intellectual tensions they prefer to keep their heads down. An editor is under no obligation to give space to people of controversial views. A publisher is under no obligation to publish them. A university cannot be made to employ them. So, when the freedom of expression of one group is used to silence others, how is the state to mediate?

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The law has generally been on the side of free speech. In the United Kingdom, to be criminal, words have to be inflammatory and intended to — or known to be likely to — stir up hatred against vulnerable categories of people. For good measure, there is a broad exemption for the protection of free speech which in principle permits discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse. The British police have recorded as “hate incidents” gender-critical tweets, tweets critical of the police, accidental damage done by schoolchildren to a copy of the Koran, even speeches by ministers proposing restrictions on immigration. But when these cases have come before the courts, they have usually been thrown out. In one case where the police took action against a gender-critical tweeter, the judge remarked that their conduct offended against a “cardinal democratic principle”. “In this country”, he added, “we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”

But there are limits to what law can achieve. The government and the courts are impotent to protect people against the worst threats to free speech: the howling trollers of the internet, the addictive outrage of the street protesters, or the oppressive self-censorship of publishers, journalists and academics. These things can only be addressed by a profound cultural change, which it is beyond the power of law to bring about. Changing this culture depends on you, on me, on every one of us. The only reason that activists try to disrupt and suppress unwelcome opinions is that experience shows that it works. Venues do not book controversial speakers. Publishers do not publish controversial books. Prominent commentators do not step out of line or, if they do, they are bullied into issuing cringing apologies.

None of us has to behave like this. All of us can contribute to the solution by being willing to make it clear where we stand, not just on free speech itself, but on the subjects which have become taboo. I return to the ideas of John Stuart Mill. He recognised that what was needed was the courage of individuals to defy the mob. In language which might have been directed at our present problems, he wrote that “precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable in order to break through that tyranny that people should be eccentric”. By eccentricity, he meant diversity of opinion. “That so few now dare to be eccentric”, he wrote, “marks the chief danger of the time”.

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The death of historical truth

By Jonathan Sumption

If, for example, we believe that gender is not an optional status but a biological fact, we can say so, instead of being shamed into silence. If we reject concepts dear to particular ethnic or religious groups, we should say so and refuse to back down or apologise when they take offence. We have to discuss the unmentionable, challenge the unchallengeable. I am not recommending rudeness or abuse, but there is a larger place for reasoned objection than we realise.

The greatest challenge will be self-censorship by venues, publishers, the media, and academic institutions. They will say, perhaps only to themselves or in the privacy of their editorial boards or faculty meetings, why should we expose ourselves? Why should we quarrel with our young and idealistic junior staff or students who do not wish to sully their hands with this or that book, film, or lecture? Why should we court the unpleasantness involved in speaking up? The answer to that was given by Mill in his inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews, after he had been elected as its Rector in 1867. “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion,” he said; “bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing”.

Free speech is not a luxury. Ever since the 17th century, the civilisation of mankind has been based on the notion that there is such a thing as an objective truth, independent of human will. It may be only partly knowable, and more or less difficult to identify, but it exists somewhere out there whether we like it or not. We have built our intellectual world by objective study of the available material, by logical reasoning and by willingness to engage with dissenting opinion. These are not just social constructs. They are universal principles, which are necessary if we are to discuss controversial issues in the same language. They have made possible the phenomenal economic prosperity and intellectual achievement of the last four centuries.

The basic principles of rational discourse on which all this depended are now under challenge. Reason is rejected as arrogant. Feeling and emotion are upheld as suitable substitutes. Freedom is treated as domineering, enlightenment as offensive to the unenlightened. Current campaigns to suppress certain opinions and eliminate debate are an attempt to create a new conformity, a situation in which people will not dare to contradict, for fear of provoking their outrage and abuse. These things are symptoms of the closing of the human mind and the narrowing of our intellectual world. Something in our civilisation has died.

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No one can be entitled to intellectual safety. That is because statements of fact or opinion are necessarily provisional. They reflect the current state of knowledge and experience. Once upon a time, the authorised consensus was that the sun moved round the Earth and that blood did not circulate round the body. These propositions were refuted only because current orthodoxy was challenged by people once thought to be dangerous heretics and disturbers of the peace. Historically, most societies have abhorred democracy, rejected religious and political tolerance, and regarded the whole idea of racial or gender equality as ridiculous. These ideas, which were thought to reflect obvious moral truths, died out in most countries in the face of rational argument. Knowledge advances by testing conflicting arguments, not by suppressing them. Understanding increases by exposure to uncomfortable truths.

For those of us who live in democracies, our collective life depends on the resolution of issues between citizens by marshalling objectively verifiable facts. It depends on ordered debate about their implication under common rules which exclude coercion and falsehood. It depends on a culture in which the outcome of our processes of collective decision-making is accepted even by those who disagree with it. That is what is at stake in the current debate about free speech. The alternative is a narrow-minded, intolerant and authoritarian society in which the fear of giving offence or challenging existing shibboleths eliminates the most creative and original products of the human spirit.

Ultimately, we have to accept the implications of human creativity. Some of what people say will be wrong. Some of it will be hurtful. Some of it may even be harmful. But there are greater values at stake. We cannot have truth without accommodating error and tolerating the challenge to received ideas. We cannot live together in society without allowing people to say things that other people regard as foolish, hurtful or untrue. It is the price that we pay for allowing human civilisation to advance and flourish. It is worth fighting for.

This is an edited version of a speech delivered last weekend at the Christchurch Town Hall, for the New Zealand Free Speech Union.

For Mill, in the tradition of nominative determinism, was once a machine. His precocity is now the stuff of legend: essays on Rome combining historiographical mastery with a recondite vocabulary at age six; trilingual fluency in English, Latin, and Greek by age 12. But it came at a cost. Mill was essentially a lab rat, an educational experiment gone awry. Home-schooled — some may say groomed — by his martinet father, he swallowed whole the utilitarian creed of James Mill: the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But he himself remained a stranger to happiness.

In the younger Mill’s Autobiography, he recalled his father’s “asperities of temper… I thus grew up in the absence of love and in the presence of fear; and many and indelible are the effects of this bringing-up in the stunting of my moral growth.” Public speaking was an insurmountable challenge. He had no self-confidence. Carlyle recorded Mill’s “incapability of laughing”. Aged 17, he followed mechanically in his father’s footsteps, taking up an East India Company job that he held for 35 years. His worldview, likewise, was a carbon copy of his father’s: disdain for unearned privilege in general and the monarchy in particular; respect for the inherent goodness of the middle classes, whose historical role it was to educate the working classes out of their revolting ways; and belief in the superiority of private property over public ownership. All of this he uncritically absorbed and fiercely defended — that is, until he met Harriet Taylor in 1830.

By all accounts, it was a remarkable encounter. Reporting on what transpired, Jane Carlyle observed “that a young Mrs Taylor, tho’ encumbered with a husband and children, had ogled John Mill so successfully that he was desperately in love”. Accustomed to ceaseless cerebration but little else, Mill had been unacquainted with deep emotions. To be sure, he had had crushes before. The Oxford historian Jose Harris writes of the “adolescent tendresse” he had felt for “the dashing Sarah Austin”, translator and wife of the legal philosopher. Mill had later fallen for the musician Eliza Flower. All the same, as one of his friends had it, on the subject “of women, he was a child”.

It was, foremost, an intellectual relationship. Indeed, there is nothing in Mill’s Autobiography to satisfy prurient curiosity. Harriet was drawn less to what Caroline Fox, a mutual friend, described as his “exquisitely chiselled countenance” than his dazzling mind. Her husband John, in Carlyle’s words “an innocent, dull good man”, knew his limitations and was, by the standards of his time, an astonishingly liberal character. Between the married Harriet and Mill, dinner invitations, and later assignations in France, ensued; her husband considerately absented himself, to give the couple the privacy they needed. The affair remained unconsummated. “A Seelenfreundin to both men,” Mill’s biographer Richard Reeves suggests, Harriet stayed “faithful to both men by having sex with neither”. Mill and his mistress — later wife, on John’s passing — were what we would probably call sapiosexuals.

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It is possible, Harriet’s biographer Jo Ellen Jacobs surmises, that she had syphilis, which would explain why her second was a childless marriage, though it could well have been the upshot of Mill’s anti-natalism. He posited an inverse relationship between sexual and intellectual appetite, blaming working-class fecundity on their being thick as mince. Mill may have died a virgin. At any rate, none of this prevented the scandal that unfolded upon his marriage, prompting the newlyweds to withdraw completely from society. It was just as well. Isolation breeds intellectual independence, and the Mills’ folie à deux was most certainly a fecund one, intellectually speaking.

Ironically for a child prodigy, Mill’s damascene conversion came rather late in life. Harriet and her partner developed a “collaborative self”. True, the title pages of Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty, and The Subjection of Women carry Mill’s name, but they were very much co-authored enterprises. Her influence is all over these works. Gone were Mill’s Ricardian reassurances about the importance of private property. In its place came the recognition — no surprise to both renters and landlords in Britain today — that “the laws of property have heaped impediments upon some to give advantage to others; they have purposely fostered inequalities and prevented all from starting fair in the race”.

Successive editions of the Principles grew increasingly radical, feeding off both Mill’s mesmerised infatuation with Harriet and morbid fascination with French politics. During the July Revolution of 1830, Mill could be found in Paris singing the Marseillaise at the opera. And during the Spring of 1848, when anti-monarchical sentiment swept Europe, he lamented that England remained eirenic. Robespierre was “the greatest man that ever lived”. The extermination of all those who earned north of £500 a year (he himself earned £600) would be no great loss to humanity.

And so the technocrat embraced populism. That the Commons was “composed of millionaires” did not worry him in the 1830s: what mattered was “not by whom we are governed, but how”. By the 1860s, Harriet’s influence ascendant, his tune had changed: “There can be no parliamentary reform worthy of the name so long as a seat in Parliament is only attainable by rich men.” In the interim, Mill had succumbed to what he would later call his beloved’s “heretical” opinions on the “probable futurity of the labouring classes”. In the wake of the Paris Commune, he called for a cap on inheritance, by which time he had already declared himself in favour of a freeze on rail fares, cooperatives, and greater trade union power — albeit only to “heal the feud between capitalists and labourers”. Gardens and baths could be nationalised, he argued.

Harriet “made me move forward more boldly”, he wrote in his Autobiography, but he stopped short of demanding full-blown statism. John Stuart Mill, Socialist, to quote a recent title, is pushing it. Take his view on democracy. Railing against majoritarian tyranny, Mill betrayed the same technocratic fantasies that plague Remoaner centrists today — ruled by Gina Miller and the perfectly smug Jolyon Maugham. In Considerations on Representative Government, in many senses his weakest effort, Mill makes the case for an enlightened epistocracy: only those who pass a literacy and numeracy test would be eligible to vote. The experts know better. Elsewhere, he wistfully hoped for the day when “the uninstructed” shall show “deference and submission to the authority of the instructed”. Here as well, we see Harriet’s hand. In the 1850s, Mill wrote that he and Harriet were “much less democrats than I had been, because so long as education continues to be so wretchedly imperfect, we dreaded the ignorance and especially the selfishness and brutality of the mass”.

Then there were Mill’s attacks on the polar opposites of the class system, both parasitic: the rentier aristocracy and the lumpenproletariat. The latter, in particular, were singled out for criticism; they were “often very much to blame for bringing themselves into a position in which they require relief”. Worse, they could do with birth control — administered with force: Mill was not averse to using state power to forbid marriages “unless the parties can show that they have the means of supporting a family”, not to mention making welfare cheques contingent on family planning. This was, of course, for their own good. It was because the lower orders bred like rabbits that real wages had been sent plummeting. Harriet had her own reasons for extolling the benefits of smaller families: more children meant more domestic drudgery for women.

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Harriet’s guiding hand was more palpably registered in On Liberty. Many of its key ideas, Jo Ellen Jacobs tells us, can be directly traced to her early writings. Today, Mill’s liberalism has become a shorthand for individualism. But as the Oxford philosopher Alan Ryan reminds us, this is a mischaracterisation. On Liberty combines both a “positive” and a “negative” idea of liberty, but it is only the latter it is known for. This is the gospel of toleration: live and let live (so long as it doesn’t harm others). Verging perilously close to the autobiographical, practically telling on his own dangerous liaison, Mill castigates the American intolerance for Mormon polygamy. Prostitution and gambling, too, ought to be tolerated, he argued. But his relationship with Harriet was equally to be felt in Mill’s “positive” conception of liberty. Here is the communitarian, as opposed to individualist, strain in his thinking. Mill expected the bourgeoisie to show leadership, working for the greater social good on the behalf of the working class that looked up to it.

More than shaping his views on equality and liberty, Harriet above all won Mill over to female suffrage. Indeed, his reputation as an apostle of gender equality in great measure rests on her interventions. Mill’s father, it should be remembered, had concluded in his Essay on Government that women’s interests were essentially the same as those of their fathers and husbands; extending the vote to them was essentially superfluous. The younger Mill’s progress, acutely shepherded by Harriet, led him to question the wisdom of this line of thought. He may have been an incorrigible bore — and Stefan Collini is on to something when he observes that a compendium of Mill’s wit would be “a slim one indeed” — but we owe one of the better ripostes to the votaries of the male franchise to him: excluding women was about as absurd as denying the vote to redheads.

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Mill also made an early foray into the pronoun wars, replacing “his” with “their” in the third edition of the Principles, at Harriet’s instigation. In The Subjection of Women, he challenged the institution of marriage, for depriving women of the rights to property, inheritance, and divorce. In 1867, Mill introduced the first bill proposing suffrage for women in the Commons. He died in Avignon five years later, leaving half his estate to promote women’s education.

Mill may have started his intellectual journey as a utilitarian, but he ended it, more than anything else, as a utopian. And it was that restless font of reform, Harriet Taylor, who was responsible for this. Her brilliance and ebullience were, undoubtedly, very infectious. But I wonder if they might have got carried away, putting so much store in Progress. British society evidently was less Millian than they imagined. They felt sure, for example, that Britain was to be “republicanised … before we die”. There is some irony, then, that the 150th anniversary of Mill’s death will find the country not only not republicanised but in the mad throes of coronation hysteria.

In the eyes of sceptics, Mill has lost his relevance. The campaigns in which he fought have been won, and the ideas he defended — namely, free speech and female suffrage — have become widely embraced, elaborated, refined and transcended. Furthermore, aspects of his writings grate on current sensitivities. To many, his career in the East India Company reveals not only a thoughtless acceptance of colonialism but also a complacent conviction of the superiority of British society. His proposals to grant extra votes to the well-educated demonstrate a casual elitism, as does his emphasis on higher pleasures: on poetry rather than pushpin. What’s more, the negative picture of liberty he defended — focused on insulating people’s lives from outside interference — can be used today by libertarians and other boosters of minimally regulated markets; perhaps Mill was even a closet libertarian himself. Clear-headed charity should allow him to fade gracefully into the (Victorian) wallpaper.

All this, I believe, is profoundly incorrect. Mill was a far deeper thinker than many of his readers today recognise. He was a progressive, not a neoliberal, someone who has much to teach us about our own society and its conflicts.

These common misconceptions of Mill will no doubt be articulated in a future canonical text entitled Mill for Dummies. When this book is written, it will tell us what “everybody knows” about him. First, he was a utilitarian. To act rightly, he claimed, is to maximise happiness. Following Jeremy Bentham in this thesis, he added a new twist: some pleasures are “higher” than others. Reading poetry supplies more units of bliss (hedons) than you derive from playing childish games in your local tavern. Second, he was an ardent defender of individual liberty. The most important freedom, he tells us, consists in your choosing and pursuing your own good in your own way. Intervening in other people’s lives is warranted only to prevent their harming other folk. These two ideas are the major themes of his most important works: Utilitarianism and On Liberty.

Unfortunately, Dummies probably won’t address the obvious question: How do these two ideas fit together? To find an answer you’d have to go back to On Liberty, where Mill tells us that his defence of freedom will not involve any concept of rights that are independent of utility. He continues by explaining what he means: “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.” The authors of Dummies, who identify utility in terms of happiness with an elitist additive, will see this as obfuscation rather than clarification — a lapse into flowery Victorian rhetoric.

Yet the thought of human progress, together with a commitment to promoting it, is all over Mill’s writings. It is expressed in the closing pages of A System of Logic, in The Subjection of Women, throughout On Liberty, and in the Principles of Political Economy (a work roughly four times as long as Utilitarianism and On Liberty combined, and which went through eight editions in his lifetime). In fact, whenever Mill takes up any issue of social policy, he always asks first about how to make progressive changes in individual lives and in the conditions of society that foster or impede such advances. If he mentions happiness at all, it is an afterthought.

The “only freedom which deserves the name” — the ability to choose and pursue your own good in your own way — is at the core of his concept of progress. People’s lives are better when they have more opportunities for figuring out what kind of life they want to lead, more developed cognitive and emotional capacities for making choices about their aims and aspirations, more support in trying to attain their selected goals. When societies restrict options — when, for example, they deny women any chance to obtain university degrees or to own property or to engage in public activities allowed to men — they are interfering with human progress. Advances come when these kinds of restrictions are abolished. It is hardly surprising that Mill would oppose de jure restrictions on the kinds of activities women can pursue; he is, after all, the apostle of non-interference.

Once progress is understood in terms of freedom (real freedom), however, things get more complicated. A poor but talented black American child may dream of becoming a lawyer, perhaps even a judge, or a Supreme Court Justice. But if that child is being raised by a single parent, sometimes homeless, often hungry, and sent to a dangerous and underfunded school staffed by a rotating corps of disillusioned teachers, he may in principle have a chance to realise the dream of giving eloquent speeches in a courtroom, but, even with the most determined effort, his chances of success are slim. What the law allows is negated by the facts of the child’s life. In the absence of public goods — education of the quality available to their more fortunate contemporaries, or a “safety net” that protects against severe poverty and homelessness — the odds are against success for even the most gifted and diligent of children.

Despite popular assumptions, Mill’s conception of human progress does not write off the children of the poor. Throughout his entire career, he advocated Bentham’s famous dictum, “Each to count for one, and none for more than one”, elaborating it in a conception of human well-being that went far beyond his predecessor’s limited focus on momentary pleasures. To ground utility in “the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” is to demand providing resources to support the many members of affluent societies who are allowed to fall by the wayside.

Mill’s educational commitments go even further. If someone is to make a wise choice about how they want their life to be, they must be able to discover their talents and to understand the options for developing and exercising them. They require the emotional and social capacities to understand how their aims might have a positive impact on the lives of others. To improve individual lives is thus to fashion educational institutions that develop self-understanding; and to produce citizens who can work cooperatively together. A Millian society emphasises two kinds of liberty: not only freedom from the interference of others, but the freedom to become reflective and sensitive people as well.

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Mill’s emphasis on the “cultivation” of the individual is evident in On Liberty, especially in its third chapter. There, the idea of “making the [human] race infinitely better” is tied to “furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every individual to the race”. Similarly, The Subjection of Women argues that allowing women “the free use of their faculties” and “the free choice of employments” makes social progress both through correcting an injustice and through doubling the power of individuals to contribute to society. Yet Mill’s most obvious break with libertarianism, and, indeed, with the dominant socio-political conceptions of our day, comes in the work in which he figures as one of the great predecessors of contemporary economic thinking: the Principles of Political Economy.

His purely economic writings are pervaded by judgments about what is most valuable in human life. For Mill, political economy consists in engaging the best ethical thought with investigations in the social sciences. Although that engagement appears in the work of other classical political economists (notably Adam Smith and Karl Marx), nobody pursued it more deeply than Mill. It figures prominently in Book 2 of the Principles, with its astonishing title and theme: “Distribution”. From the perspective of prior political economy, there should be no need to discuss how income and wealth should be distributed: the task is to understand how aggregate wealth is amassed and how societies prosper. After that, the chips — the bullion and the banknotes — fall where they may. For Mill, that is not good enough. The distribution of wealth must allow for as many individual lives as possible to flourish.

Hence, he is an early advocate of what contemporary libertarians call “death taxes”. With his respect for liberty, Mill gives inheritance law an interesting twist: the amount any person can gain via inheritance is to be limited; donors can decide how to spread their prosperity among a large number of recipients (Mill conjectures that they will often opt for providing public goods, apparently foreseeing the coming of Andrew Carnegie and his like). In each generation, he believes, differences in talent, industry and, he points out, luck will produce inequalities in wealth. But, as resources pass down the generations, a death tax results in more equal distribution, benefiting both those whose ancestors had little to leave them and the potentially pampered children of the rich, whose motivation to exert themselves would otherwise be sapped.

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Nor is Mill obsessed with productivity and growth as primary economic imperatives. The progressive interests of humanity are not fostered by intensifying competition. In the section of Mill’s Principles entitled “Of the Stationary State of Wealth and Population”, he wrote: “I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but one of the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.” If capitalism is superior to socialism — and that is a question Mill takes very seriously — it must be capitalism with a human face.

The narrative that will be contained in Dummies, then, sells Mill short. He is neither a peculiarly elitist utilitarian (indeed, it is doubtful whether he is any kind of utilitarian), nor is his concern for liberty consistent with even the slightest move in the directions that libertarians favour. Instead, he draws on a rich and complex approach to human progress, suggesting reforms both for his own society and for our own.

Were he alive today, Mill would remind us that freedoms are for all, not simply for a privileged few; that democracy requires taking the perspectives of all people seriously; that minimally regulated markets produce consumer goods cheaply at enormous personal and social costs; and that ethical inquiry should be the foundation of socio-political decisions. Much contemporary political “thought” would be subjected to the rebuke he directed at Bentham: politicians and pundits today see in human life “little but what the vulgarest eye can see”. In this, Mill belongs at the progressive end of the progressive parties of the modern world. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders should welcome their ally — Mill the progressive.

Some would say he had it coming. The doyen of India’s nationalist historians, R.C. Majumdar, has said that Mill “suffered from a strong dose of racial prejudice and ignorance about ancient Hindu culture”. Likewise, for the Stanford historian Priya Satia, Mill was little more than a propagandist for empire, an apologist for “Britain’s civilising mission”. To be sure, there is plenty in Mill’s triple-decker History of British India to support this view. “The Hindu,” Mill writes, “like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave.” In the Muslim, he discerned “the same insincerity, mendacity, and perfidy”. India was a “rude” and “backward” society.

But to carp about a clutch of infelicitous phrases is to miss the wood for the trees. The charge of racist imperialism, of course, isn’t easily resisted in our time. Understanding the thought-world of the 19th century, however, requires more than a mindless aggregation of poorly-aged gaffes. Reflexive cries of “Orientalism” will not do. The truth is that Mill was a radical egalitarian ahead of his time.

If the History took the form of a scathing sermon, it was only because its author was a sour man. His impatience with Indian tradition must be taken as a proxy for his frustration with British tradition. Railing against the caste system was a way of railing against the class system. Born in Angus in 1773 to a shoemaker and smallholder, Mill had a keen awareness of status. His mother had married down. Mill’s benefactress, who put him through Edinburgh University, that centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, reminded him of his station when he fell in love with her daughter, whom he was tutoring. Wilhelmina Stuart was hurriedly married off to the seventh baronet of Pitsligo, very much against her will. In her dying breath, apparently, she would call out Mill’s name, and he would name his daughter Wilhelmina.

Mill carried his hatred for the aristocracy into maturity. It didn’t help that, studying for the Kirk, he had to moonlight — like the character in Parasite — by teaching the privileged sons and daughters of the titled nobility. Disillusioned with the ministry, he reinvented himself as a freelance writer in London, married, and sired nine children.

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Mill had never been to India. It was poverty and precarity that prompted him to write his History, a job application masquerading as a 2,000-page love letter to Progress, in 1818. In it, Mill made a virtue of his shortcomings, spinning his lack of first-hand experience, not to mention his monolingualism, into a commitment to objectivity. But no matter. Ruth Benedict wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, arguably the greatest work of 20th-century anthropology, without ever setting foot in Japan, and the East India Company’s head-hunters duly recognised Mill’s equally impressive achievement. On the strength of it, Mill was placed in charge of examining the Company’s prodigious correspondence, a position he held until his death — as a very rich man — in 1836.

Proclaiming the creed of Utilitarianism, the History seemed to come out of nowhere. At the time, the Company men who ran the subcontinent were traditionalists to a man — committed, in the first viceroy Warren Hastings’s phrase, to “reconciling the people of England to the nature of Hindustan”. Indians, by their account, were incorrigible. It was the Company’s job to interpret their way of life. Mill disagreed: the point was to change it.

It may appear that in tut-tutting at the nabobs who went native, Mill shared the reforming ambition of the radical Clapham Sect, which believed in putting the heathens to rights with the aid of its militant brand of Christianity. Yet Utilitarianism was an altogether different proposition. For one thing, it belonged to the Enlightenment tradition. Indeed, Mill and his mate Jeremy Bentham thought in universalist terms, where once even Voltaire held that different rules applied in the “oriental despotisms” of the East.

So it was that where, like obliging Erasmus students on cultural exchange, the likes of Hastings and his successor Charles Cornwallis coolly accepted — appreciated even — the inequities of the caste system as a fact of life, Mill vehemently denounced the “detestable views of the Brahmins” in rather colourful terms. Caste was “a degrading and pernicious system of subordination”, and the Hindu “system of priestcraft” was “built upon the most enormous and tormenting superstition that ever harassed and degraded any portion of mankind”. It was for this reason Mill described Hindus as “the most enslaved portion of the human race”. The enormities of untouchability, in particular, made a deep impression on him: “Those wretched outcastes had no resource for subsistence excepting either the bounty of the established classes, to whom they were objects of execration and abhorrence, or the plunder of those same classes, a course to which they would betake themselves with all the ingenuity of necessitous, and all the atrocity of much injured, men.”

Contrast this with the head-in-the-sand observation of Mill’s nemesis, the Bombay governor Mountstuart Elphinstone: the condition of the lower castes “was much better than that of the villains of the Middle Ages or any other servile class with which we are acquainted”. What’s more, while Mill was drawing attention to the plight of India’s underclass, Elphinstone insisted that such a “servile class” had ceased to exist in the early 19th century.

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Our latter-day Elphinstones, of course, still like to bang on about cultural relativism, defending primordial hierarchy as “alternative modernity”, primitive savagery as “alternative justice”, shamanic quackery as “alternative medicine”. These are fanciful sleights of hand. It’s an uncomfortable thought, but too much sympathy for an alien society can easily shade into a naive exculpation, if not outright endorsement, of its most hidebound traditions.

Some of Mill’s contemporary critics, such as Lord Bhikhu Parekh, complain that the Utilitarians tipped the balance too far in the opposite direction. For nearly 40 years, to 1855, the History was the established textbook at Haileybury College, the Company school in Hertfordshire. It was insinuated by early Indian nationalists, including Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and R.G. Bhandarkar, that Mill had spawned a whole generation of Indian Civil Service apparatchiks inimical to Indians, a foreign ruling caste as removed from hoi polloi as the native Brahmin elite. Not so. To the traditionalist credo of “live and let live”, the Utilitarians had one of their own: “Human nature is the same in Cawnpore as in Cheapside.” Ideology trumped culture. Far from being a homogeneous mass of traditionalists, Indians, too, had their diminutive reforming currents. The heirs of the Scottish Enlightenment found allies in the freethinkers of the Bengal Renaissance.

Mill’s greatest contribution, however, was his stab at bettering the lot of the Indian peasantry. This is a side of him generally ignored by decolonial historians, for it sits uncomfortably with their Manichean worldview. In Mill’s time, two systems of land tenure prevailed: Cornwallis’ zamindari system, predicated on middlemen who served as tax-farmers and prevalent in Bengal, and Thomas Munro’s ryotwari system, widespread in the South and North-Western Provinces, wherein the state took a share of the produce directly from peasants. Both were perversions of pure capitalism. Mill’s solution was to bring all land under public ownership. He was inspired by David Ricardo, who had held that “the interest of the landlord is always opposed to every other class in the community”. It followed for the Utilitarian Mill that the “greatest happiness of the greater number” could only be secured if the parasitic rentier interest was eliminated.

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It should be stressed that, despite being a radical egalitarian, Mill was no Marxist avant la lettre. His vision turned on free trade and individual enterprise, both shackled in equal measure by government and go-betweens. Here, then, was a rather quaint, Right-wing case for nationalisation. A big state was dead weight, he argued. As universal landlord, government could extract the tiniest rent to conduct its business and educate the masses, and so eliminate taxation altogether. As he put it in his History, “light taxes and good laws; nothing more is wanting for national and individual prosperity all over the globe”.

What of good laws? Here, too, the cocksure know-it-all that that he was, Mill had a ready answer: abolish juries and judicial procedures, investing competent judges with autocratic powers. Mill and his mentor Bentham had no time for the Whig fetishisation of checks and balances. The separation of powers was pooh-poohed in Utilitarian circles. Betraying a vestigial Protestantism — he had in fact developed his own eccentric faith — Mill hoped that mass education and simpler legislation would render the legal profession redundant and every man his own lawyer. More importantly, where Company traditionalists supported having separate legal codes for Hindus and Muslims, and preferential treatment for Brits, Mill believed there ought to be only one law for everyone.

These were big, bold reforms. Needless to say, Mill’s startlingly original assault on privilege did not go down well with the men on the spot, many of them of aristocratic and gentry stock. Land reform along the lines proposed by Mill was briefly piloted in the Bombay Deccan, but then abandoned as impracticable. Spurred by developments at home — the Great Reform and Slavery Abolition Acts — a soupçon of social reform ensued in British India from the 1830s on, admittedly more of Whiggish than Utilitarian stamp, outlawing suttee and enabling widow remarriage. But then, in 1857, the deus ex machina of the Great Rebellion detonated. For a brief moment, it appeared that Britain’s empire in India was teetering on the edge of collapse. Lessons were learned, and the blame laid squarely on reformist zeal.

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British imperialism didn't destroy India

By Razib Khan

In the autopsy of the revolt that followed, the view from London was that traditionalism was a better doctrine to rule India than Utilitarianism. One could either keep the moral high ground or keep an ear to the ground — but not both. So it was that the traditionalist consensus that ran from Clive of India in the mid-18th century to Elphinstone in the mid-19th, fleetingly interrupted by the Utilitarian moment, resumed for another 100 years until independence in the mid-20th. Ultimately in the grand scheme of empire, Utilitarianism was little more than a blip, a pointillist dot shrouded by the thick brush strokes of traditionalism. But of its existence, and brief influence, there can be little doubt.

Mill himself, it needs stressing, was no saint. Like Whitman, he contained multitudes — embarrassing contradictions even. Iconoclastic in some ways, he was utterly conventional in others. For one thing, his impeccably liberal premises led him to conclusions that were incontrovertibly authoritarian. Utilitarianism, after all, preached the doctrine of happiness, not liberty — of good government, not self-government. Mill himself ruled out democracy for Indians. Likewise, to the dismay of his contemporaries — his son John Stuart Mill especially — he argued against extending the franchise to women, who, like children, had no interests independent of the family patriarch.

In philosophical mode, he struck a rather different note. Each individual, he wrote in his Essay on Government, was the best judge of his own interests. Suffragists a century on, then, were staying true to Mill’s principles rather than his prejudices, as indeed were Indian nationalists after independence, when they abolished zamindari and outlawed untouchability. It’s an irony of history that it was the Indians, not the British, who put into practice the theories James Mill advanced in his History of British India.