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.

Today, neoliberalism, broadly understood as the extension of markets and market logic into ever-expanding swathes of social and political life, is everywhere misunderstood as a straightforward legacy of the liberal Enlightenment. Worse, its supposed emphasis on individual autonomy and responsibility is widely seen as a vestige of dated illusions of human reason and freedom that are now too big for humanity’s boots. Wasn’t it the silly notion that reason could light the way to freedom that lit up the ovens in the death camps? Surely, if the 20th century has taught us anything, it’s that reason doesn’t need to be freed — it needs to be constrained. Far from needing to be raised up, humanity could use, so the popular prejudice goes, being knocked down a few notches.

But what critics fail to realise is that neoliberalism long ago left behind the rights-bearing human subject, one that was capable of self-reflection and worthy of autonomy and freedom. Humanity must be divested of these illusions. The real ideal is heteronomy, or a will that is relieved of responsibility and conditioned by external forces that stipulate the proper conduct of life. These ideal subjects are aware that their untrained, non-expert judgments are potentially dangerous; they thus look constantly to external rules to ensure they make the “correct” choice. And if no such rules exist, they demand them. Think, for instance, of the profound unease many felt when governments did not stipulate whether and how they might hug family members as the pandemic wound down.

If you spend too much time in academic circles, you might get the idea that neoliberalism’s supposed valorisation of freedom and autonomy is an evil that lurks behind every corner. For instance, critics of therapeutic fads like the self-esteem movement of the Nineties and recent obsessions with promoting “mindfulness”, “wellbeing” or mental health often argue that these crusades are really part of an overarching neoliberal project bent on creating ideal, self-governing subjects —autonomous, self-reliant individuals who won’t call on expensive state or employer supports. However, what is frequently left out of such analyses is the question of why it is so taken for granted that such subjects need to be created in the first place. The human capacities that had so animated the liberal Enlightenment — rationality, a capacity for self-reflection and conscious judgment — are now seen as uncharacteristic not just of women and minorities who had once been left out of it, but of the vast majority of humanity.

Indeed, flipping through the pages of newspapers and magazines, one is persistently reminded that it is humanity’s persistent lack of capacity for self-determination that supposedly underlies a host of social ills. Mindfulness gurus tell us that we spend our time on “autopilot”, going through the motions of life unthinkingly and leaving disaster in our wake. Governments have been receptive to such claims, seeing interventions that help citizens to “pay attention to what’s happening in the present moment” as the solution to myriad social issues. What is more, the fact that we are unaware of this — that we carry on thinking that we are in control of our lives, much less our inner lives, is part of the problem.

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But don’t worry, the “experts” have the solution. Fund their ever-proliferating programmes. Buy their new book. Adopt their creepy brain surveillance technologies. And before long, when we give up our silly illusions of freedom, wellbeing and happiness will prevail.

At the heart of this confusion lies the fact that neoliberalism long ago dispensed with Mill’s notion of freedom as about removing barriers to human flourishing. Today’s crusades, from attacking “white privilege” to accommodating the needs of proliferating minority groups, are much more focused on protecting child-like citizens from each other. Longstanding movements for indigenous self-determination, for instance, have gradually shifted towards therapeutic obsessions with the indigenous person as a “traumatised” subject in need of extensive intervention. Even institutional defenders of free speech can’t help but reach for justifications based on protecting the weak and vulnerable.

Having jettisoned the Enlightenment subject on which so many liberal freedoms rest, it is little surprising that contemporary society finds it difficult to place freedom at the centre of social and political life. Even David Harvey’s widely referenced Marxist critique of neoliberalism struggles to wrest a powerful subject from its entanglements with neoliberal logic. He criticises neoliberal assumptions that, for example, all “agents acting in the market… have access to the same information”, as at best “utopian”. In other words, a key criticism of neoliberalism as an economic doctrine rests on its emphasis on a classical liberal subject that does not really exist. Unmasking this fiction becomes a key part of explaining why neoliberalism so often leads to ruin. It seems we can’t challenge the power of neoliberal economics without destroying the classical liberal subject along the way.

But if the Enlightenment subject, capable of reflecting on emotions and experience and rationally deciding how to live, is a myth, then freedom is not only not a goal — it’s a problem. Vulnerable subjects don’t need to be freed. They need to be protected.

In the place of this “myth”, we have valorised what Kant, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, warned against: an ideal human subject that is content (or perhaps in today’s parlance, sufficiently “mentally well”) to revel in self-imposed immaturity. The good citizen now has learned to embrace a rule that springs from a foreign will as a matter of course. This is why “neoliberalism” is a bit of a misnomer. Instead of revitalising some kind of classical liberal project, it sounded its death knell. And in its place, our democratic will was subordinated to that of the expert and the technocrat.

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Today, as a result, whenever public discussion erupts, someone always seems to interject that now everyone suddenly thinks they’re an expert. But this is precisely where even liberals fall short. The truly liberal response to such comments would be “every cook can govern”, not “that persons of talent, the more known and respected the better, should put themselves forward”. Yet the former was not said by Mill or any 19th-century liberal – but by the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R James in 1956.

The latter, on the other hand, was written by Mill, in reference to the American Civil War in 1861. It’s interesting here to compare Mill’s remarks with those of his contemporary, Karl Marx, who was also writing about the same events as they unfolded. While both men agreed that slavery and the power of slave owners must end, as August Nimtz describes, they differed profoundly on which force would prove decisive in bringing this about. And Nimtz continues, history seems at least to show that it was the middle and working classes, and not men from Mill’s milieu, that often proved most decisive in the conflict.

And yet, descend from the halls of academia and into the hellscape of our social media squares, and you will find that it is Marx who is vilified as the incarnation of illiberalism. The ominous label of “cultural Marxism”, or now just “Marxism”, is wielded to decry the erosion of individual rights. Yet it was Marx, writing in 1842, who emphasised that “the truly radical cure for censorship would be its abolition”. And it was Marx who defended freedom of the press, describing it as a thing of “beauty” “without which my nature can have no full, satisfied, complete existence”. What is more, Marx himself did not waver in his commitment to democracy. “Democracy,” he wrote, “is the solution to the riddle of every constitution”, because it is where “we find the constitution founded on its true ground; real human beings and the real people… posited as the people’s own creation”.

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In fact, although his writings were later twisted by his successors to justify repression in his name, Marx’s commitment to liberty, democracy and free speech surpasses many liberal theorists. By the time Mill wrote anything on the American Civil War, for instance, Marx had written (or had ghostwritten via Engels) at least 18 articles on the topic. Moreover, following the emancipation of the slaves, while Marx and Engels looked immediately to agitating for the expansion of freedom in the form of suffrage to former slaves, it was Mill who considered the potential need to hold back the freedoms of the “privileged” in order to make enfranchisement a possibility. He even mused that without black suffrage, a “military dictatorship” lasting “two generations” would be necessary before “the stain which the position of slavemaster burns into the very souls of the privileged population can be expected to fade out”. While Marx was analysing the colonies as illustrating capitalism’s tendency to eat up whatever “primitive” forms of freedom existed there, Mill defended “despotism” as legitimate when dealing with “barbarians” provided those in power had the best of intentions.

Where Marx differed was in his belief in the self-governing capacities of all human beings, not just the learned or the better or the higher or whatever is the going excuse of the time. Against the grain of conventional wisdom, Marx’s advocacy for individual freedom often surpasses the efforts of Mill and other liberal luminaries. Marx vested his faith in human reason and held that history could be shaped by the collective force of rational thought.

Where does this leave us today? Well, we clearly do need those copies of On Liberty, but to have a true commitment to liberty we could do with also recalling the liberal core of Marx’s writings. For while Marx and Mill agreed on more than history gives them credit for, it was Marx who surpassed Mill in the expansiveness of his vision of human freedom and in his refusal to accept external limits to its expression. Today, everywhere we see excuses, and sadly often in Marx’s name, for why freedom should be rolled back to “protect the vulnerable”. But in the 19th century, it was Marx, more than Mill, who looked down those pathways to freedom that thinkers of the liberal Enlightenment built, but that they often could not bring themselves to travel.

Yet while Mill’s text was written as a defence of the requisite conditions for a liberal society, today it is self-described conservatives who are most likely to invoke its arguments. If it was the free-thinkers in the Victorian era who were likely to be “canceled” by religious traditionalists — the source of most immediate concern for Mill — today the situation is the opposite. Conservatives and “classical liberals” of various stripes today regularly invoke Mill as a refutation against the oppressiveness of the progressives. One of America’s more prominent religious conservatives, the Catholic legal theorist Robert George of Princeton University, has become among the most prominent of Millian free speech defenders. “[We should] go back to John Stuart Mill,” he characteristically suggested last year. “Having legal protection for free, robust discourse in place is one thing, and it’s a very important thing, and it’s, as I say, a necessary thing, but it’s not sufficient. In addition to those legal norms protecting free speech, we need to build a culture of free speech.”

However, it is far from clear that Mill would be pleased by these new admirers of his work. Indeed, there’s good reason to believe Mill would be deeply gratified by the new progressive hegemony his arguments have produced. Mill’s case on behalf of liberty was not, as today’s conservatives and libertarians mistakenly believe, an argument for freedom of expression as an end in itself, but rather, a means toward a further end: regime change. The regime he hoped to overturn was the custom-bound society of Victorian England, as well as the traditional civilisation of the West more broadly, particularly its classical and Christian inheritance. The regime he hoped to usher in was none other than the progressivism that now dominates the major institutions of the West.

Throughout his text, Mill is clear that liberty is a means of displacing what he called “the despotism of custom”. Robert George is correct that Mill’s concern was less the narrowly legal defence of free speech, expression and action, and more a worry about the spectre of social conformity. Mill begins his text by arguing that an earlier generation of philosophers and political actors had secured formal liberalism — limited government and political representation of the demos. He observed that formal liberty was ultimately useless in a society that remained bound by traditional opinion — the social “tyranny of the majority”. His aim, then, was to secure the social conditions of liberty, aligning an increasingly liberal political order with what were less liberal civic, social and private domains.

Social conformity for Mill took a particular form: the untoward social dominance of the many over a small minority of people who were marked by distinctive features of “individuality”. The oppression he decried percolated from the bottom-up, an informal but nevertheless pervasive way of life that was reflected in society’s customary practices. In Mill’s Victorian era, such customs included what might still be categorised as “manners and morals”, regulating informally but powerfully everything from dress to forms of address, table manners to social comportment, expectations of church attendance to avoidance of visible vices. Of course, it also involved social conformity to traditional sexual roles and behaviour, distinguishing between men and women, exerting strong pressure toward marriage, and dispersing the norm that marriage was the necessary institution in which children were born and sheltered, provided for by the man and typically raised primarily by the mother. This web of social expectations constituted a form of “despotism”, and for Mill, its source and most powerful enforcer was everyday people. His philosophy was an argument of how to liberate the unique, inventive, free-thinking few from the oppression of the herd-like, tradition-bound, narrow and unadventurous many. Liberty was the means of moving the social order from one that was conservative to one that was liberationist.

Indeed, Mill is clear that what he seeks is a society that is progressive. Customary societies — the “greater part of the world,” in fact — have “no history”. Here, Mill meant not that nothing happens in such societies, but that in tradition-bound settings, the future extensively resembles the past. By “history”, Mill means progress: a society of constant change, disruption, and transformation. For Mill, humans do not have a fixed nature, but rather are defined for the capacity to change and transform in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Humans are, he states, “progressive beings”, but their capacity to realise their potential for transformation can only be developed in progressive — and not customary — societies.

For Mill, progress only occurs when the distinctive genius, originality and adventurousness — the “individuality” — of rare individuals is liberated from the oppressiveness of the masses. In traditional societies, such unique individuals are thwarted from engaging in “experiments in living”. It is not sufficient to have formal rights to liberty, including free speech and freedom of expression: because of the “despotism of custom”, and the growing political influence of ordinary people, such individuals will need both active political protection from the masses, and, better yet, eventually enjoy political control.

So he wrote: “There needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them” [emphasis mine]. Mill recognised that ever-more democratic societies would likely be not just socially dominated, but politically dominated, by the backward views of ordinary people. The main project of On Liberty, as well as his work Considerations of Representative Government, is how to secure, in the first instance, the political dominance of the progressive element of society, and thus ensure that the traditionalism of the social order first be restrained, subsequently sequestered, and ultimately transformed in a more progressive direction.

The great obstacle to the emergence of a progressive elite was the pervasiveness of ordinary opinion — the “conservatives” for which Mill had such withering disdain. Mill had nothing but contempt for the backwardness of ordinary people, a view that to this day remains a hallmark of self-described “progressives”. Society, he bemoaned, was governed by the “mediocrity” and “low state of the human mind” of the “masses”. He hoped that a small group of “eccentrics” would arise and, perhaps by persuasion of the “more highly gifted and instructed One or Few”, would exercise authority over the masses.

Yet, as a potential backstop to the difficulty of persuading such a mediocre mass, he also commended a system of plural voting in which those with higher attainments of education would be given more votes. Of less importance than the mechanism of progressive dominance was that there be some means of avoiding their being politically swamped by the masses — what can be done today, for instance, by media control and dominance of the education, suffices for what Mill hoped plural voting might achieve. Above all, the demos must be prevented from thwarting progress.

In place of the despotism of custom, Mill proposed the despotism of progress. Only when we understand that, for Mill, liberty is a means to progress, and not a good in itself, can we grasp some of the more seemingly jarring arguments contained in On Liberty. At the very opening of his text, Mill acknowledges that his argument for extensive liberty is meant only for societies that are already shifting in a progressive direction, such as England or the United States. Most nations, as he later acknowledges, “have no history” — in other words, they are not yet on a path of progress, and thus are not yet suited for liberty.

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In such cases, he writes on the sixth page of a text titled On Liberty, “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided their end be improvement, and the means justified by effecting that end”. These words are often excused by Mill’s partisans as the time-bound prejudices of a man shaped by his years working for the East India Company — and doubtless, they reflect a widespread sentiment. But they were, and remain today, a view endemic to a progressive mindset, particularly among those who believe themselves to be more progressed, and therefore entitled, to govern despotically over those who are deemed deplorable.

On Liberty, then, is shrewdly mistitled. Had Mill wanted to highlight its more fundamental theme, it would rather have been titled On Progress. Liberty was never its main object; rather, liberty was the mechanism that would transform a traditional, bottom-up social order into a top-down progressive liberal regime. His text sought to align the extant liberal political order, based in theories of radical individual autonomy, with a yet-unrealised progressive social order dominated by those at liberty to engage in ever-more radical “experiments in living”.

Mill stated that the liberty of a progressive society constitutes a temporary, intermediary condition. “As mankind improve[s]” — that is, as we progress, and become more “progressive” — “the number of doctrines which are no longer disputed or doubted will be constantly on the increase: and the well-being of mankind may almost be measured by the number and gravity of truths which have reached the point of being uncontested.” Those who believe that the homogeneity of viewpoint in modern institutions such as universities constitutes a betrayal of Millian principles have not been reading their Mill.

For he is no ally of today’s so-called “conservatives”, who look to him for assistance in securing minuscule platforms in an otherwise dominant progressive academy or wider progressive social and political order. What they fail to understand is that the academy, as well as society as a whole, has been transformed in perfect conformity to Millian ambitions: institutions dominated by progressive elites who impose their social radicalism upon the rest of society. The charges that such “liberals” are hypocrites for failing to live up to the ideals of the university, or that they are “illiberal”, are therefore non-starters — progressive dominance is, in fact, the realisation of exactly the vision for society first articulated by Mill. Today’s “conservatives” pick up On Liberty and believe they are holding a shield against progressive despotism, but what they have found is a sword that progressives no longer need and now have readily discarded.

Rather than look to Mill, those seeking to resist today’s progressive totalitarianism should, as Orwell recommended, “look to the proles”. Just as Mill effected a “regime change”, we should look to do the same by aligning ourselves with the instinctive traditionalism of the demos that Mill deplored. In either regime, some theoretical condition of “true liberty” is purely fictional and not an aim requisite for a flourishing society. We will either have today’s “despotism of progress” or the “restoration of good custom”. In the hopes of encouraging the latter, it is time for a revolution against the revolution.