On Liberty

Journalist, author and historian Misha Glenny presents his first edition of In Our Time, succeeding Melvyn Bragg who retired from this role last summer. Misha and his guests discuss the landmark work On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, published in 1859 and the increasing recognition for his wife Harriet Taylor Mill's contribution. The subject matter of the essay is ‘civil or social liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual’ and it argues that the sole end for which mankind may interfere with the liberty of action of anyone is self-protection and even then only to prevent harm to others. This essay became enormously popular and a foundational text for liberalism. With Helen McCabe Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham Mark Philp Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick And Piers Norris Turner Associate Professor of Philosophy at The Ohio State University Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed.), Harriet Taylor Mill, Complete Works (Indiana University Press, 1998) Bruce L. Kinzer, Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, A Moralist In and Out of Parliament: John Stuart Mill at Westminster, 1865-1868 (University of Toronto Press, 1992) Christopher Macleod and Dale Miller (eds.), A Companion to Mill (Wiley, 2016) Helen McCabe, John Stuart Mill, Socialist (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021) Helen McCabe, Harriet Taylor Mill (Cambridge, 2023) Piers Norris Turner, ‘The Arguments of On Liberty: Mill’s Institutional Designs’ (Nineteenth-Century Prose 47 (1), 2020) Piers Norris Turner et al (eds.), John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, On Liberty with Related Writings (Hackett Publishing, forthcoming 2026) Mark Philp (ed.), John Stuart Mill: Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 2018) Mark Philp and Frederick Rosen (eds.), John Stuart Mill: On Liberty, Utilitarianism and other Essays (Oxford University Press, 2015) Frederick Rosen, Mill (Oxford University Press, 2013) Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Palgrave MacMillan, 1998) Ben Saunders, ‘Reformulating Mill’s Harm Principle’ (Mind 125/500, 2016) John Skorupski, Why Read Mill Today? (Routledge, 2006) William Stafford, John Stuart Mill (Red Globe Press, 1998) C. L. Ten (ed.), Mill: On Liberty: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2008) Nadia Urbinati and Alex Zakaras (eds.), John Stuart Mill’s Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment (Cambridge University Press, 2007) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

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  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. On Liberty is one of the most important works in the history of liberalism. The philosopher John Stuart Mill rushed it out in 1859 after the death of his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill. They'd been working on it together for some years, and their message was urgent. They feared that personal liberty was under threat, not from tyrants, but from stifling

• 3:03Speaker 04

  public opinion, from consensus on how to behave, think and live, societal pressures that made it impossible to be truly individual, when it was that very diversity of individuals that made society strong. It became enormously popular then, and has been ever since. With me to discuss On Liberty are Helen McCabe, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham, Piers Turner, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University, and Mark Philp, Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick. Mark Philp, let me come to you first. What do we need to know about his childhood?

• 3:47Speaker 04

  Because for one of the fathers of liberalism, there wasn't too much liberty in evidence at home, was there?

• 3:53Speaker 05

  There certainly wasn't. So Mill was brought up on a design of his father's that treated him as a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which Mill senior could write everything that he thought Mill needed to know. He taught him Greek by the age of three. Mill then was required to learn Latin in order to teach his sisters. He became adept at chemistry and mathematics. He had an extraordinary wide reading. If you read his autobiography, it's a list of the great books of Western civilisation, all before the age of fourteen.

• 4:33Speaker 05

  His autobiography is absolutely clear that he thinks that this was, in many respects, it equipped him extremely well. He also says that he didn't think he was in any way exceptional as a child. And in fact, Mill's protestations of his lack of exceptionality go on throughout his whole life.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  He must have been emotionally stunted, though, surely?

• 4:58Speaker 05

  He himself came to think of his father's method as failing his emotional side. So he ends up thinking that his father comes from the age of enlightenment, that it's just about reasoning and nothing else. And in his twenties and thirties, he becomes, he comes to embrace a more romanticist concern with feeling and self-development and self-direction and so on, which he thinks is a necessary complement to the kind of education he received. His autobiography shouldn't be trusted. It's pretty clear that he's accurate about what he says, but he's making a case. He doesn't want to be thought of as somebody who is simply crammed.

• 5:41Speaker 05

  He wants to be thought of, and he wants to be someone who has mastered this material and made it his own.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  Now, one of the other people who influenced him a lot, of course, was Jeremy Bentham, his godfather. Bentham, of course, being the founder of utilitarianism, which argued that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong. What impact did that have on Mill intellectually and emotionally over the years?

• 6:11Speaker 05

  So he spent a lot of time with Bentham as a child. Bentham invited James Mill and John Stuart Mill down to his house in Somerset on a regular basis. When Mill was in his late teens, he worked with Bentham on Bentham's Review of Judicial Principles, and that, I mean, Mill has ended up being accorded an author's contribution to. He was absolutely committed to utilitarianism, at least from the kind of the age of fourteen. There's a hiatus around his mental crisis, which was when he was about twenty-four, twenty-five.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  And we'll come on to that in a minute.

• 6:47Speaker 05

  But Mill never really ceases to be a utilitarian. He says in his autobiography, he just came to realise that the happiness principle demands a much more complex and sophisticated understanding of the potentialities of human life. And that means that you need to think of happiness not in the best and right terms of pleasure versus pain, but in terms of the development of individuals' capacities.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  Yes, and when we come on to look at the text, we'll try and tease out what the real difference between utilitarianism and liberalism actually is. But let's go back, Helen McCabe, to that nervous breakdown, I suppose, or mental health crisis that Mill suffered aged about twenty-one. Can you describe what was happening there?

• 7:35Speaker 06

  So in the autobiography, Mill talks about how, as Marx just said, at fourteen, he'd read Bentham again for himself and he had this sort of conversion to the truth of Benthamism. And he had seen his life's goal as trying to achieve all the reforms that Bentham and his dad stood for. And he'd set his goal of happiness as being that these would be achievable. And he, it sounds like he was quite smug about that because he knew you wouldn't actually achieve that. So then he knew he had like a whole life's worth of happy pursuit of this retreating goal. And then, in the autumn of eighteen twenty-six, twenty-seven, when he says that he was suffering from a dull state of nerves, such as anyone might have, and such as repeatedly happened to Mill through his life, he asked himself the question, if all the things you're fighting

• 8:19Speaker 06

  for could happen tomorrow, would you be happy? And instantly, there was this resounding answer in his head that just said, no. And that was, that's the crisis, because then he was like, ah, he says in the autobiography, you know, that it was as if the foundation of my life had fallen down and I had nothing left to live for. Because the goal that he'd set all his happiness on wasn't going to make him happy. And then he says the end had ceased to charm and so thus also had the means. So none of the pursuits that he had filled his life with were going to make him happy anymore.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  So does he give up and take to his bed and not get up in the morning?

• 8:56Speaker 06

  So I feel like he couldn't do that because he was living with his dad. And he says, it's very moving passage in the autobiography, he says, if I had loved my, we had a more loving and open relationship, I maybe could, with my friends, I could have mentioned that, but I didn't have friends like that. Other problems I would have taken to my dad, but I couldn't take this one because it's the, as Mark was just saying, it's the outcome of his education. It shows that the whole educative process that his dad had put so much time and effort into was a massive failure. He says, I felt like a robot, I just went through all the motions. But unfortunately for him, and I guess for us, because at one point he says he didn't think he could live for another 12 months if he felt like this all the time. He was reading some memoirs by Marvin Tell, in which there's a moment where Marvin Tell's father's dying. And yes, psychologists have made a lot of this, being the moment that Mill partly recovered from his crisis.

• 9:41Speaker 06

  And Marvin Tell realises that he's going to step up and take on the mantle to be to his family everything that his father has been. And Mill found himself in floods of tears. And he was like, I was inspired by this scene, I felt pity and empathy and sympathy and that kind of inspiration. And I realised that I wasn't an entirely emotionless being and that I had some of what he says in the autobiography is what makes life and character worthwhile. And then he remembered or started to feel again happiness in, he says in the autobiography, you know, music, a blue sky, a walk in beautiful nature. He has this lovely account of walking near Reading and there being a wonderful sunset. And so these small pieces of things that did actually give him pleasure started to give him pleasure again and he built up from there.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  And then a few years later, he meets Harriet Taylor.

• 10:26Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  How does that relationship develop? Because clearly there was an element of happiness there.

• 10:31Speaker 06

  Very well, I mean, and also great tragedy, right? And unhappiness, but yeah, so as Mark was alluding to earlier, as part of the result of the crisis, Mill thinks that his dad and Bentham's philosophy isn't the complete truth. And this has real bearing for the arguments we'll come to later in the text of On Liberty, I think, that they had only a partial view of the truth. And so he goes kind of looking for other. Different, possibly also partial truths. So in Romanticism, gets very involved in it with Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, he starts thinking a bit more maybe about religion and other forms of radicalism and people interested in reform who weren't in that sort of quite narrow circle around his dad and Benham, which led him to a Unitarian chapel run by the Reverend William Johnson Fox, a member of whose chapel was Harriet

• 11:14Speaker 06

  Taylor at the time. So she was married to another reformer, she had two children, she was pregnant with her third when she met Mill.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  And what happens is they wait until her husband dies and then they marry.

• 11:27Speaker 06

  I guess that's the clean version, yes. The autobiography slightly, slightly skates over. They have this very intense friendship. Harriet Taylor after a bit says, look, I don't think I can see you anymore. And there's a very moving love letter being preserved in French from Mill saying, all right, if that's your decision, then I guess I'll have to abide by it, but our paths must and will meet again. This is not the end. It isn't the end. She leaves her husband, she goes to Paris and she takes the children with her. Mill also happens to go to Paris at much the same time. And then while they're in Paris together, they decide that actually, in terms of the greatest happens the greatest number, they're very happy together in Paris, but the terrible impact it's having on her husband and the potential terrible impact it will have on her children. So they do come back and they have this kind of utilitarian compromise where they continue to see each

• 12:12Speaker 06

  other, but platonically, until her husband tragically dies, yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  And we'll see later on how that, how that professional relationship, then intellectual relationship develops. But let me turn to Piers Turner now. Piers, in 1855, Mill complains to his wife, Harriet Taylor, they're married now, that opinions were encroaching, and I'm quoting here, more and more on liberty and almost all projects of social reformers are really liberty side. Now, that ugly neologism means, I presume, killing liberty. What do you understand by it? And is this what's driving their work together?

• 12:51Speaker 07

  Well, I think when he's thinking about liberticide, he's thinking largely about August Comte, who had reforms in mind, but they were reforms that were going to be great impositions on many other people. But for many years-

• 13:04Speaker 04

  August Comte, of course, being the French positivist philosopher, social reformer.

• 13:09Speaker 07

  Exactly. And he later would write a book about that philosophy, where he was quite critical of it overall, although he was a great admirer also in some respects. But for many years, John Stuart Mill had been a proponent of freedom of thought and expression, freedom of discussion. And he and Harriet had both also written things about the value of individuality in bits and pieces prior to this time. And for a long time, they had seen the value of needing to articulate the importance of open society, the importance of people being able to live their own way, according to their own tastes and pursuits. And so then, really, the challenge that gives rise on liberty that they present at the very beginning of the book is that they see that democracy does not guarantee liberty.

• 13:53Speaker 07

  So you have a situation where they were great supporters of democratic reforms. They strongly believed in this. But it was possible, just as de Tocqueville had pointed out in his great book Democracy in America, that there was still the possibility of a tyranny of the majority. And so what the Mills saw was that there needed to be limits on any kind of sovereign authority, even a democratic authority. And so what we needed to do was think about what are the principled limits that take precautions against the misuse of that sovereign authority?

• 14:22Speaker 04

  Okay, so this leads up to them deciding to write On Liberty, the essay. It's only about 80 pages long in a modern paperback. There's an introduction, then four chapters on liberty of thought, on individuality, on the limits of society's power over individuals, and on applications. What was the principal aim? Of writing on liberty.

• 14:47Speaker 07

  The principal aim of On Liberty was to articulate principled limits on sovereign authority and to try to explain why it should be the case that individuals should be able to make some decisions for themselves in a way that should not be intruded upon by any kind of government or other social authority. So that relates to both legal means and also to social pressures. And what kinds of limits should there be, both on the kinds of legal coercion that might exist, but also kinds of social coercion that could exist from like a church or other prevailing opinion on the way that people were living. So in some, they were trying to make a case for social diversity and individuality against pressures about social conformity.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  Thank you, Piers. Before we drill right down onto this, I want to clear one thing up, Helen, and that is John Stuart Mill said in his dedication that he and his wife worked on this together, which will come as a surprise to many listeners, I would have thought, because for well over a hundred years, it was J S Mill, On Liberty, and that's it. Can we now say that this essay was jointly authored?

• 15:54Speaker 06

  So I think we can. He talks about On Liberty as being the thing that they really authored most together. They had the manuscript with them, they were married by this point, they were living together, they were working on it day by day, they went over every sentence together, he says. And also, it's a product of two minds. And so the ideas in it, he says, occurred spontaneously to both of them, they were discussing them and putting them together. And we see that as well through, we don't have a manuscript of On Liberty to look at to sort of see both hands. But then Mill also says, when you're both discussing ideas all the time, the person who puts pen to paper isn't the only author. And then there's been some recent work in digital humanities, you could train a computer program to sort of learn someone's style. And so that research, done by some colleagues of ours in Germany, shows that when you ask it to read On Liberty, it detects Mill very

• 16:38Speaker 06

  strongly, but it also detects somebody else. Particularly strongly detects somebody else in chapter three, the one on individuality, which as Piers has also mentioned, is very strong in much earlier texts by Harriet Taylor. And so certainly it suggests that somebody as well as Mill writing On Liberty, and if there is, then she's the only other person in the picture. And I guess also maybe worth emphasizing. The longevity of these commitments in both of their works and the way that Mill talks about how Harriet Taylor kept him from drifting towards too many of the ideas of communism and over-government and she kept him on the straight and narrow a little bit about liberalism. And that very early on on paper that's watermarked from 1831, she wrote that every human being has a right to all personal freedom which does not interfere with the happiness of some other. And that's not exactly the harm principle, but it's quite similar.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  It comes on, we'll talk about the harm principle. Mark Philp, okay, what are the great threats to liberty that On Liberty identifies?

• 17:33Speaker 05

  So he starts by listing things, sabatarianism, temperance movement, reform of morals movement, insistence that people giving evidence in court swear on the Bible, people's rights to serve as a juror, in fact, people who had things stolen from them were thrown out of court if they didn't. So those are all instances of the lack of liberty of expression that Mill picks up on. But that's not really what worries him. What worries him and is what's worried him from the 1820s is the sense that society

• 18:14Speaker 05

  more generally is becoming more and more intolerant of diversity of opinion. And you get some of that from the Saint-Simaurs who say in periods of organic societies, people end up with exactly the same kinds of opinions. And it's only by breaking out of that that you can get progress and change. So his deep worry is that at this particular moment that he's writing, though it's a moment that lasts probably for about 20 years, the tendency for opinion to dominate individuals is just overpowering. Even if it doesn't stop them thinking things, it stops them saying things.

• 18:54Speaker 04

  Yes, he doesn't have much time for fixed moral codes like Christianity, for example, does he?

• 19:01Speaker 05

  He's perfectly happy for Christians to be Christians. He had himself no real religious upbringing, but he doesn't want Christians to tell everybody else how they ought to live. There's a really interesting letter by Engels in eighteen forty-four where Engels writes to one of his German friends saying, look, everybody praises the British constitution for the liberty that it defends, but actually when you get here, you realise that people are just stultifyingly boring because they're dominated by opinion. And in many respects, Mill is picking up on that kind of sort of sense of his own society as becoming very much kind of dominated. I mean, the point of that is, he really thinks, unless you live in accordance with opinions

• 19:46Speaker 05

  that you form for yourself, it's not your life. It's an ape-like existence in contrast to a life of self-direction.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  And he says that the important thing is not to inflict harm on others. Helen, what do we understand by harm, or what do you understand by harm according to On Liberty?

• 20:07Speaker 06

  Mill talks about how he doesn't want to appeal to utility, except in the broader sense in On Liberty, it's kind of linked with his utilitarian background, and that we should understand that as man's interests as a progressive being, or mankind's interests as a progressive being. And so harm is whatever might set those interests back. He has lots of examples in the book, and there's a really interesting last chapter applications where he and Harriet Taylor are thinking through some exact examples of whether people's interests are being set back or not, how to balance that. But that's the broad framework in which he wants us to think about harms. There's some kind of detriment to these important interests that allow us to progress, and exactly what Mark was just saying, this sense of progression is really important to Mill.

• 20:48Speaker 06

  It's about our self-progression, our development as human beings. So if you could think about it in terms of more modern political theory about interest-based accounts of rights, capabilities, approaches to rights, where there's certain things that we need in order to be able to perfect ourselves, there's lots of different metaphors Mill uses in On Liberty that are about sort of self-perfection, self-improvement. But being able to do that, we need certain kinds of circumstances and goods provided and opportunities.

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• 23:56Speaker 04

  So, Piers, over to you. You and Mark have alluded to the tyranny of opinion, let us say, and the possible dangers within majoritarian democracies and so on. So what's the core of the essay's argument for respecting individual rights as opposed to those of the majority? And are you persuaded by it?

• 24:18Speaker 07

  Well, I've spent a career so far studying Mill and partly because I am very persuaded by the core case that the Mills make in On Liberty about the value of the kind of liberal society that they are putting forward. We've already got on the table a few different threads. One is about the value of freedom of discussion that Mark was emphasizing. There's also the harm principle proposal that the Mills introduce, saying that society shouldn't even consider interfering with an individual's life or decision-making, except where there's non-consensual harm to others. But we've also put on the table just generally this idea of the value of individuality. And I think that's what you're asking about now.

• 25:01Speaker 07

  And I just want to say there's two main parts that the Mills seem to emphasize. One is the value to society of individuality. The value to society is that when each of us are able to pursue our own lives in our own way, they say there are as many possible centers of improvement as there are people. Right, we explore the world in our own way. We have these experiments in living, as they say. And then what happens is we are able to learn from each other and talk about those different experiments in living. And that's just an engine of social progress, maybe the main engine of social progress. But also, as I think Mark alluded to earlier, it's also just valuable for each of us to direct our own lives and develop our own capacities, our intellectual capacities and

• 25:42Speaker 07

  our emotional capacities, as ways of living as rich and full a life ourselves and have it be our own life. And so in both those ways, actually, now tying back to what Helen was saying about man as a progressive being, those can be put in the context of a utilitarian argument that says, look, if you want to maximize happiness in society, we both need to have the conditions in place for social progress where we learn from each other. But we also need to be, have a society in which people are able to develop themselves in their own way, so that they can develop their capacities and appreciate life to its fullest. And so I think, big picture, that's kind of how the utilitarianism and the liberal society that they're envisioning come together.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  Okay, now, central to this, of course, is going to be the argument for freedom of thought and expression. What, Mark, Phil, how does Mill articulate this? And again, how persuasive are those arguments for freedom of thought and expression?

• 26:42Speaker 05

  Mill has a four-part defence of it. He says, the opinions you're trying to repress might be true, and so you've lost something. They might be partly true, so you've still lost something. They might be false, but unless you test your current opinion, you won't really understand what your current opinion is. So there's a reason for not interfering on that ground. And fourthly, that the, and it's not altogether clear that three and four are always distinct, but the fourth one is, you know, if you want opinion to remain lively and relevant to people, it needs to be constantly tested. And the chapter runs those kinds of stories.

• 27:27Speaker 05

  There's a question about why you'd put that much weight on those aspects. You start by saying, this essay is about defending one very simple principle, and that single principle is not referred to at all in that chapter. So what happens in that chapter and what's happening in that chapter is not the claim that these things don't do any harm. He thinks opinion can be harmful, but he's making a case, or they're making a case, which I think I should say, they're making a case for protecting opinion as a special kind of category, different from action, which needs to be protected even when it

• 28:11Speaker 05

  causes harm.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  So in a sense, that would mean that he would be against banning speech that incites violence, for example, am I right?

• 28:24Speaker 05

  So there's, there are cases where you would want to say you have to arrest somebody for inciting a riot, for example. He has the example of giving a speech to an angry mob in front of a corn dealer's house and the speech says, you know, lynch him. That clearly needs interfering with, but for the most part, you shouldn't interfere with things. You should, they can be reacted to, but they're reacted to with opinion, not with legal kind of instruments. And in many respects, the chapter on freedom of thought and discussion is about the defence of liberty in opinion as far as possible.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  And thanks for that clarification, Mark. Helen, Mill suggests in his dedication that the work was perhaps unfinished. What do you make of that? Do you think it's an incomplete text?

• 29:21Speaker 06

  I think he says it would have benefited from a final edit by Harriet Taylor.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  That's a different issue.

• 29:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, because they were, so they were working on it writing together. Harriet Taylor wasn't very well, they, they went to the continent to try and, she had TB, so thought that warmer, softer air would, would help her. They made it as far as Avignon and she had a final hemorrhage and she died. And the text on liberty was probably in the room. And certainly Mill published it within sort of two months, in November, I think, fifty eight, and he published it in January, February fifty nine. So obviously not much happened to the text. Afterwards, as he sort of says in the, in the beginning, some people have a view that Harriet Taylor was much more left wing than Mill. So there's a view that it would have got a lot worse, would have been much less pro-liberty if she had had a last go at it. Gertrude Hippo-Farves argued that actually it might have got a lot more conservative

• 30:10Speaker 06

  if Mill had had another go at it and not left it as it was, because she has a sense that Harriet made him more liberal. And I, I think, it's very hard to tell because we don't have a manuscript to see sort of where they got to with it. But some of the things Mark was alluding to, where people picked up, you know, it's, it's certainly one very, very simple principle. Then it has a chapter on free speech, not super clear how those fit together. Then in chapter four, it talks about there being two maxims. Maybe those things might have been evened out or thought through more.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  Or perhaps even a conclusion.

• 30:38Speaker 06

  So I was, I was thinking about that this morning when I was thinking about this programme. And I was thinking, you might think there's going to be a conclusion to on liberty. And then I was thinking about other books by Mill, and none of them have a kind of concluding chapter. And so I just wonder whether that wasn't a Victorian thing to do. But I do think that the last chapter, the applications chapter, in the autobiography, Mill says, one of the real strengths that Harriet Taylor brought to their writing collaboration was that she was much better able at kind of concretising imaginary scenarios in her head and seeing them from all different angles and working out the potential problems with them. And so I feel like the applications chapter, which is maybe less well developed, I don't know, than the rest of the book, or that scenario that might have had more development if they'd had another go at it, especially as part where they're talking

• 31:22Speaker 06

  about prostitution and gambling, where basically it just says, not really sure which side we should come down on. And I feel like, so maybe they would have said they were sure which side they should come down on. But maybe they wouldn't. Maybe part of the point of the book, of the application section is to show, which I think is a very interesting part of nearly all of Mill's work, there's a big theoretical section, but then in practice, this is going to get more messy.

• 31:42Speaker 04

  Well, Piers, let me pick up with you then and say, what do you understand as being the limits on personal freedom from on liberty?

• 31:50Speaker 07

  Well, the limits on personal freedom, we saw earlier that if there's non-consensual harm to others, then that opens the door for society to consider, consider interfering with someone's life choices in one way or another. Now, there's a lot of disagreement about what exactly constitutes harm to others. And so I think one thing that's very interesting is to think about how strong the principle might be, depending on how you interpret the notion of harm to others. So the- On one view of harm, you might think that any setback to others' well-being constitutes some kind of a harm, although there might be weightier or less weighty harm. Or if you think harm is only a matter of like rights violations, then that raises the bar significantly for what counts as harm to others, and then that makes the principle

• 32:35Speaker 07

  a much stronger principle. It gives you much more leeway as an individual in the decisions you're making, because it's only when you're violating someone else's rights that you maybe could be interfered with. So I think that's a very important thing. What they have in common, though, is any interpretation of the harm principle says that society should not be interfering with you for paternalistic reasons that have to do with just your own good, and they shouldn't be interfering with you just because society has some prevailing view about what's wrong, where that's understood in some non-harm-related way. And that actually opens a really, already a wide field of play and can be very challenging to anyone who wants to live in a society where people are, where the assumption is that we would all be living in the same way, according to the same principles. That's just, that's what the great challenge of On Liberty really is.

• 33:21Speaker 04

  Well, talking about living in different societies, Mill is quite critical or differential about different types of society, and there's one which he refers to as barbarous. Mark, I'd like to ask you, what is this issue about, what can I say, non-European, non-in- inverted commas, civilized societies, as it was perhaps understood at the time? What is he talking about?

• 33:48Speaker 05

  He thinks the liberty principle that he's adumbrating is designed for Britain in 1858, 59. He writes to a French friend of his, Pasquale Vellari, who said, and he says in the letter to Vellari, that very little of this will be applicable elsewhere. So we have to take absolutely seriously his commitment to understanding the particular historical circumstances that he's in and designing a response to those circumstances. And one of the things he says in On Liberty is, the principles clearly don't apply to societies in their knowledge.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  Just as they don't apply to children when they're being educated, until you are capable of being guided by, to your own improvement by conviction and persuasion, then you don't, you're not subject to the kind of principle of liberty. Now, the question of which societies meet those criteria is a very complex one. But in our own time, we know that we've, when we've gone into societies thinking, if you just take the despot away, then everything will be fine. And everything is not fine. So we have to accord Mill at least some respect for recognizing

• 35:12Speaker 05

  that not all societies have the, have yet developed the capacity to be ruled by what Mill would say, by their own kind of convictions and by persuasion.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  Well, you mentioned there his exchanges with one or two Europeans, and I'm really interested in this. On Liberty is published just over a decade after the great liberal revolutions, failed revolutions of 1848, but nonetheless with a huge impact. And liberalism is a big issue outside of England and Scotland at this time. To what extent is there cross-fertilization between all the tumultuous events going on in Europe and the thinking going on in Europe, and what's going on in Mill's world?

• 35:57Speaker 05

  So Mill was aware of many of those currents and was in correspondence and met with many of those people, was influenced in part by Matt Szene, who was living in London, probably not influenced much by Marx and Engels. But he, he really was open to a full kind of range of influences. But what that does, if you kind of, if you're interested in the Europe of that period, is it informs you that actually these societies, although they're talking a very similar language and they're using very similar terms like liberalism and socialism and communism, there's huge diversity of opinion about what those things mean and what they stand for and what the challenges are in particular places.

• 36:40Speaker 04

  So does that mean that On Liberty becomes important both in England and elsewhere? Because it, it sets a standard, a measure of what liberalism is or might be.

• 36:51Speaker 05

  So I think Mill thought that in many European countries, they hadn't got to the stage where opinion was so dominant. They were still dealing in many respects with societies which were dominated by a ruling elite that didn't tolerate mass participation, whereas he thought of England as a much more tolerant political system, but one that had become dominated by the church and opinion and by social pressure. That's the same thing doesn't really apply in many other kind of cases.

• 37:24Speaker 04

  Nonetheless, Helen, On Liberty has become woven into the fabric of so many ideas since its publication. How did that happen? How did it develop after the publication?

• 37:38Speaker 06

  Mill says in the autobiography, and I keep referring back to that book, that he and Harriet Taylor felt that Liberty would be the book that had the most lasting impact and would be still being read many, many years after they were dead. And it's true, people do seem to keep going back to it and finding arguments in it that they want to, that they believe and they want to try and encourage to be the basis of the political system, so more tolerance of diversity, celebration of individuality, defence of free speech. And so people have returned to these arguments over and over again. I mean, there could be some kind of historic luck about that, that it was written by somebody who was famous at the time.

• 38:19Speaker 06

  He became more famous after On Liberty was published, he became an MP, Mill very involved in the women's suffrage movement, very notorious when he was an MP and at his death. And had a famous author has kept those ideas alive. But I also think there is something in the ideas, as part of what Mill says in On Liberty itself, right? If ideas are good, they do keep coming back through history. That doesn't mean we're allowed to persecute them because it's fine, they'll come back anyway, but it's a sign that people will keep returning to them. And I think that is something that has happened, people do keep returning to this book and finding something meaningful in it.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  Looking at the meaningfulness, I want to ask Piers, is this the foundational text of liberalism or a foundational text of liberalism?

• 39:06Speaker 07

  I'm not sure what hangs on that difference, but I I do think it is certainly one of the most important books on liberalism and will remain so for a long time. As long as we have pluralistic societies that values social diversity, this book provides a it's a kind of a textbook on what we have to have in mind if we're all going to be able to live together in a society like that. And so, you know, we live in a time again where I think people are learning how hard it is to live together when we have very different ideas about how we ought to live. And this book is a challenge. And I will say part of its attraction is that it sets out a set of sort of baseline.

• 39:47Speaker 07

  It says freedom of discussion, certain kinds of like freedom of association, the harm principle, sort of also the value of individuality to some extent, right? It sets out a baseline that's consistent with quite a few, quite a range of views, actually. You could be a very libertarian person who's who's interested in on liberty, but the Mills themselves saw themselves as qualified socialists, right? So there are forms of even socialism that would be compatible with the principles laid out here. And I think that that's a really important feature of this book is to just understand like what is the kind of baseline commitment for a progressive liberal, open society that they're setting out that I think all of us need to understand what the challenge of that and what's involved in trying to live up to that.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  Mark, you've noted that Mill was building on a quite a long tradition of texts. Do you see it as the culmination of something or does it does it lead to a shift in our understanding of liberalism?

• 40:47Speaker 05

  It's a complicated question because liberalism isn't an English doctrine originally. It's a Spanish one. It's the liberal rebellions of the 1820s that start the ball kind of rolling. What I would say is there are two aspects of unlimited that I think are sort of important. One is that it's a richer, more pluralist, more optimistic view of how we can live together than many other forms of liberal doctrine. It's not just concerned with Government design, which a lot of early liberalism was, it's concerned with how we live together as a community. And that's attractive for us because I think we recognise that it's not all about kind

• 41:32Speaker 05

  of government. But the other thing I'd say is, Mill is a fantastic elitist. I mean, we have to recognise that he's a fantastic elitist. I mean, he thinks they are, he and, he and Harriet described it as maybe a form of mental pemmican, you know, that is sort of. Do elaborate. Well, pemmican being the North American Indian form of food that takes you through the kind of winter. This is something that will sustain people for kind of generations. They, they really did think they were far in advance of many of the other people of their time. Well, to be fair, I mean, you know, it's, influence has lasted generations. Absolutely.

• 42:16Speaker 05

  And, and we shouldn't hold that against him. What he is also committed to, though, is that there's an egalitarian kind of dimension to this. It's really important that everybody develops as far as possible, the potentialities that they kind of have. And that mix of recognising that there are values out there to be pursued, while at the same time recognising that people have to work their own way to those values, that, that's extremely important. Yeah, Piers, you wanted to come in there.

• 42:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, I just wanted to jump in on the point about the egalitarianism, which I think we've not, we've spent quite enough time on here, maybe because the book is called On Liberty. But it really is important to understand this book as being something that's part of a larger egalitarian reform effort. At the time of Mill's death, what he was most famous for in the world was as being a radical egalitarian reformer, not just on women's equality, but he also resisted the rise of scientific racism, was a proponent of equal rights for former slaves in the United States after the Civil War, and more. Also, I mean, he was, he was somewhat of a hero of the working classes. And I think if we don't really understand the way in which On Liberty is also about

• 43:28Speaker 07

  social equality and for everyone, and, and, and I think Harriet's inclusion, well, then I think we're missing some of the point of the book. And I think Harriet's inclusion as a co-author helps us see that women's equality isn't, isn't, is a liberty issue, and it's just below the surface of a lot of what's going on in On Liberty.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  Thank you, Piers. We're coming to our last question now, and it's a quickfire round to all of you. The impact of On Liberty today, is it still a relevant text?

• 44:00Speaker 06

  Yes, because we still live in a society where people are very diverse and we haven't worked out how to live together and not harm each other and make sure that everyone does achieve everything they could possibly do, being allowed to live under their own lights of what they understand their best interest to be.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  Mark?

• 44:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think, as you probably, I mean, you probably read it sort of thirty or forty years ago and, you know.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  And then again over Christmas.

• 44:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, and rereading that text constantly promotes new ideas and kind of new thinking. I think it's something that we need to engage with and that we need to discuss. I mean, one aspect we haven't talked much about is what are the rules for how we conduct our discussion?

• 44:46Speaker 05

  I mean, Mill thought that people could behave in a bigoted, untruthful, deceiving kind of way, but he thought that those people had to be dealt with by opinion, not by law. So, working out what counts as good discursive practice in thinking through our collective future is something I think the text would promote.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  Yes, what really struck me, rereading it, was that insistence on the need for opinions to be exchanged and seen against each other because only then can you build towards the truth. Piers, your last thoughts on the relevance of On Liberty?

• 45:30Speaker 07

  Well, I think the book is even more important to liberals than they might realise. I think many liberals have come to focus more on the need for accommodation of different people's beliefs so that there's reasonable disagreement and so we need to accommodate each other. But really, the overarching message of On Liberty is about experimentalism. It's about exploring the world and learning from each other. It's not just about accommodating each other. So it's really about all of us committing to those social conditions that allow us to continue to make progress by learning from each other. And I'm not sure that actually liberals have sort of carried on that particular argument as well as they should have for the last few decades.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  Well, we've been talking about On Liberty for the last 150 years or so, and I dare say we will in another 150 years. I certainly hope so. So my thanks to all of you, Piers Turner, Helen McCabe and Mark Philp. Next week, we take a deep dive into the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench, much deeper, incidentally, than Everest is high, and the life that thrives there. Thank you for listening.

• 46:35Speaker 10

  And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

• 46:43Speaker 04

  Tell me, is there anything that's missing as far as you're concerned?

• 46:46Speaker 05

  So one thing I think is, so harm to interests. I mean, Mill thinks that if two of you go for the same job, then somebody's interests are harmed. So we shouldn't think that he thinks that the category of non-harming is very big and that needs protecting. He thinks there are lots of cases in which there will be harms, but, you know.

• 47:10Speaker 04

  Legitimate harms is what.

• 47:12Speaker 05

  Exactly. So there are harm, there are cases where no harm is done. There are cases where there is some harm done, but we should just ignore it because there are other kinds of benefits for it. And there are cases where there is some harm done and we should condemn it with by opinion. And there are cases in which there's some harm done and it should be condemned by law. And working out what the balance is between those different things is a really important part of Mill's thinking. And that's, he comes back to that. And there are, in the application section, that's the sort of thinking that's driving that.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  Yes, I think we could have, we could have done a bit more on the application section. Piers, I was going to ask you about that.

• 47:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, I think there's, there are, it's not exactly what Mark said, but there are two different questions that are important. One is, what is the criterion that even allows for society to consider interfering? That has to do with sort of their rightful authority. Can, can society even take up a question about interference? And then there's still a further question of when is that interference actually justified? Would it be beneficial? So for instance, there's a case of free trade that Mill, the Mills, regard as a social act and therefore could be regulated by society rightfully.

• 48:29Speaker 07

  But shouldn't be, because on balance, it's better to leave trade as a, in the commercial sector, as a, as a free exchange of goods or whatever. And so I think it's important to see that sometimes they might say interference is not justified, even though it, it could be rightful. And, um, and the, the arguments come in at different places.

• 48:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:49Speaker 07

  Helen?

• 48:50Speaker 06

  I just want to pick up on, on what Piers was saying at the end, and a bit of what Mark was saying as well, but like this, not only is it a positive book, I think sometimes people say, oh, it's a bit of a naive book, but I think it is giving us this like much more positive vision about how we could live together and a positive rule by which to judge our behaviours and like that, that's the, that's the aim is to really shift how we think about the reasons we make laws or the reasons we, um, might decide we're friends with somebody or cut them in the street. It shouldn't be about sort of religious belief, it shouldn't be about the fact that I think what you get up to on a Saturday afternoon is, is disgusting or boring. It should be about harm. Um, and that that is a really radical shift and, and perhaps doesn't seem as radical to us because we're more used to cost benefit analysis or like thinking of things on those terms, but was really radical when they came up

• 49:35Speaker 06

  with it. And then also Harriet Taylor has these wonderful early pieces on toleration and about the, how we need to tackle what she calls the fasces of public opinion and how trammeling public opinion can be. But she also doesn't think toleration is good. She thinks toleration is kind of mealy mouthed, it's very weak. It's basically saying, well, I don't really care if you're burning hell for eternity, as long as you don't interfere with my soul.

• 49:57Speaker 04

  So she wanted more clearer definition?

• 50:00Speaker 06

  I think she just wants us more kind of celebration of difference. It's not that I tolerate you, toleration's quite a negative thing, is that I say, oh, you are one of the thousand flowers, look how beautiful you bloom.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  Mark?

• 50:13Speaker 05

  There's one other thing. There are actually four principles in, on liberty. So harm to others is one, and the, you know, the, the speech in front of the corn dealer would be an example of that. There are duties that we have as part of living in a society together, and we're rightly coerced into performing those.

• 50:34Speaker 04

  Which he does recognise.

• 50:35Speaker 05

  Jury service, exactly. He also has this view about making a nuisance of yourself, being offensive to others. And that's where It's a complicated case and he never really develops it, but it's having adulterous sex in a hotel is perfectly okay. Doing it in a public place is not okay. So intruding yourself into shared space in certain kinds of ways could also be controlled. And finally, where you've got distinct obligations. So a soldier who gets drunk on duty is rightly punished. So those four principles are at work. And I think as I think as a sort of

• 51:14Speaker 05

  another edit of On Liberty, you might have moderated the single, simple principle and said, well, actually, there are a few other things as well.

• 51:23Speaker 04

  Well, I trust the new edition, which Piers and Helen have co-edited, will be clearing up some of these issues. Just one thing, Mark, that you said, which really struck me, and Piers talked about this when talking about Tocqueville, the elitism. Is part of the elitism a sort of fear of the mob, fear of the majoritarian, majoritarian rule?

• 51:46Speaker 05

  It is. The fear of majoritarian rule is not because of the, I mean, for Tocqueville, it's that they become led by demagogues. I mean, it's the classic kind of critique of democracy translated into the 19th century. For Mill, I think he thinks that there are three forms of power he discusses in Spirit of the Age. I mean, there's the intellectual elite, there's the church, and then there's the government. When those three work together, then it's absolutely stultifying, and they will lead the mass in their intolerance. And that's what we really need to avoid. And that, I think, is what he's most worried

• 52:27Speaker 05

  about in the 1850s. And of course, the thing we didn't really talk much about is Mill's relationship with Harriet was the source of deep controversy, much like George Eliot's relationships. And Mill was facing a kind of personal battle as to how to deal with intrusive opinion.

• 52:47Speaker 04

  Piers, a final, a final comment from you.

• 52:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, just to put some of the elitism claims in a certain context, when you look at his considerations on representative government. And his institutional design approach. It's clear on one hand that Mill is not willing to forego a kind of democratic check on power. There has to be security for good government where the people have their say. But what he's trying to figure out, and I think we're still struggling with today, is how do you maintain a democratic check on power, but then on top of that, still have representative systems that allow for competent judgment to be able to have its appropriate weight? Oh, and here comes Simon.

• 53:32Speaker 05

  Would you like tea or coffee?

• 53:33Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 53:35Speaker 05

  Coffee, tea?

• 53:35Speaker 04

  Tea.

• 53:36Speaker 07

  Tea for me, please.

• 53:37Speaker 05

  Thank you very much.

• 53:38Speaker 06

  Thank you very much.

• 53:39Speaker 10

  In Our Time with Mischa Glenny is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production.

• 53:48Speaker 11

  Hello, Alex Von Tunsenwin here with a brand new series of History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including the little-known story of a famous author caught up in a horrific accident, which would require all his courage.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Dickens remained in the river, helping the rescue, assisting the wounded. He didn't search out to be heroic. He didn't play on his heroism.

• 54:19Speaker 11

  Subscribe to History's Heroes on BBC Sounds.

• 54:24Speaker 12

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