If the tyranny of the majority breeds monsters
The fall of liberalism also threatens to undermine its most important spin-off, democracy. Liberal thought has placed itself on the market of ideas to find new solutions to the challenges of contemporary society. By its constitution and nature, liberalism is pragmatic, it is open to new contributions and contaminations, even radical ones. It already happened in the thirties when a liberal thinker like John M. Keynes took note of the crisis of the companies based on that model to invent the welfare state, one of its important evolutions. Liberalism is a very open "church" in which very different ideas hold citizenship on key issues such as the role of the individual and that of the state. The duels between Rawls and Nozick, between Keynes and the "Austrians", between the Chicago school and that of the East Coast punctuated and enriched liberal thought and determined important repercussions on political and institutional issues.
Modern liberalism, ie free trade, globalization and individual freedom, was the world's dominant creed for thirty years before the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis crumbled it. Since then the baton has passed to supporters of economic austerity, protectionism and populists.
Precisely for this reason the most important liberal think-tank in the world, that of the London magazine "The Economist", on the occasion of its 175th anniversary launched an "Open forum project" in which to debate and formulate new ideas on the liberalism of the future. He also decided to revisit some liberal thinkers of the past, in terms of their relevance, whose reflections also teach us today.
We are pleased to offer our readers the Italian translation of this series of articles from the English magazine which, obviously, starts with John Stuart Mill, the father of liberalism.
Enjoy the reading!
The luck of Mill
By the age of six, John Stuart Mill had already written a history of ancient Rome. At seven he was devouring the works of Plato, directly in Greek. “It's not to brag – his father James had told a friend when the boy was eight years old -. John is now familiar with the first six books of Euclid and with Algebra”.
Infant Mill's intensive instruction paid off: the boy became a prodigy with a deep belief in the power of reason. To such an extent that he became the main exponent of the philosophy of liberalism, thanks to the elaboration of ideas on the economy and democracy that inspired the political debate of the XNUMXth century. His reflections on individual rights and the dynamics of mass power continue to resonate today. Especially today.
Mill grew up in an age of revolutions. Democracy was on the march. America had broken away from Britain; France had overthrown the monarchy. In 1832, the first Reform Act had been passed, extending suffrage and electoral rights to the middle classes. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing. The old social order, in which birth determined social position, was disintegrating. However, no one knew what it would be replaced with.
Many today see Mill as the embodiment of the ruthless capitalism of his time. Henry Adams, an American historian, referred to Mill as “his Satanic Free Trade Majesty.” In the few photos that have survived, the English thinker looks rather cold and insensitive. It wasn't.
The overcoming of utilitarianism
Admittedly, in his early years Mill was a staunch utilitarian. His mentor, Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher and jurist of the generation before Mill, had stated: "The greatest happiness of the greatest number of people is the foundation of morality and the law". The purpose of political economy, as economics was then called, was precisely the maximization of utility. Like Thomas Gradgrind, the wealthy retired merchant who based his life on the philosophy of rationalism, in Tough times by Charles Dickens, Mill initially followed Bentham in regarding men as mere calculating machines of the principle of utility.
This infatuation did not go beyond his youth. In his brilliant autobiography, published after his death in 1873, he confided that he grew up "in the absence of love and in the presence of fear." The result had been a psychological breakdown in his 20s. Later he came to believe that there must be more to life than what Benthamians called the "happific calculus," that is, the accounting of pleasure and pain.
At that point his attention turned to the poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from which he learned the value of beauty, honor and loyalty. His new aesthetic sense pushed him, with measure, to move away from fanatic reformism towards conservatism. If the societies of the past had produced such good art, he thought, they must still have something good to offer his time.
Mill did not depart from utilitarianism as deeply as his contemporary Thomas Carlyle, who said that only pigs would conceive of the pursuit of pleasure as the foundation of all ethics. Instead, Mill gave new meaning to utilitarian theory. Unlike Bentham, who thought that Push-pin, a board game, was "of equal value with poetry", Mill became convinced that some kinds of pleasure are superior to others. However, this differentiation did not lead him to deny utilitarianism. Far from it. For example, what at first glance might seem like a purely virtuous act, such as keeping one's word, that is, not intended to generate any immediate pleasure, in the long run, could prove to be an essential act for one's well-being.
The Approach to Pragmatism
This refinement of utilitarianism has revealed a pragmatism that is one of the hallmarks of Mill's thought. On many issues it is difficult to pigeonhole his thinking, or even to pinpoint his exact terms. It is precisely this connotation that makes him a great thinker and that gives depth to his arguments. His views of him have evolved over the course of his life, but for the most part he has rejected dogma and acknowledged the chaos and complexity of the world. John Gray, a political philosopher, writes that Mill was "a transitional and eclectic thinker whose writings make no claim to produce any coherent doctrine."
In any case, like all liberals Mill believed in the power of individual thought. His first major work A system of logic, argues that humanity's greatest weakness is its tendency to delude itself about the veracity of unproven beliefs. Mill has set aside buzzwords, orthodoxy and handed down wisdom: everything that has prevented people from forming their own idea of the world.
Mill wanted all opinions on a subject to be debated and examined, and that no idea or action should go untested. This was the road to true happiness and progress. To protect freedom of expression he elaborated the "principle of harm": "the only purpose of exercising a legitimate power over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others", wrote in Essay on freedom, his most famous work.
As Richard Reeves' biography explains, Mill was convinced that the nascent industrial and democratic age would bring prosperity to mankind, but it would also hinder it. Take free trade, of which he was an enthusiastic advocate (although he worked for a long time for the East India Company, perhaps the world's largest monopoly). He thought that free trade increased productivity: "Whatever leads to more units being produced in a defined place, generates a general increase in the productive capacities of the world," he writes in Principles of Political Economy. He criticized the Corn Laws (import duties on agricultural commodities in force from 1815 to 1846 in the United Kingdom), tariffs that largely benefited landowners.
But Mill is even more interested in the philosophical argument for free trade. “It is impossible to overestimate the importance, in the current low state of human development, of putting individuals in contact with people other than themselves, with different mentalities and initiatives from those with which they are familiar. This applies to all peoples: there is no nation that does not need to borrow something from the others”. And indeed Mill practiced what he was preaching. He spent a lot of time in France, seeing himself as a sort of mediator between the revolutionary passion of French politics and the staid gradualism of English politics.
The limits of capitalism
With the spread of democracy there will be a battle of ideas. Mill was a staunch supporter of the Reform Act of 1832, which, in addition to extending suffrage, eliminated "putrid boroughs", that is, constituencies dominated by large landowners and often controlled by a single person. He praised France's decision in 1848 to establish universal male suffrage. The views of each voter would be properly represented and each citizen would have the opportunity to be informed. Participation in the collective decision-making process is, for Mill, a component of well-being.
For the same reason he was one of the first supporters of the vote for women. “I consider [gender] completely irrelevant to political rights such as difference in height or hair color,” he writes in Considerations on representative government. After becoming an MP in 1865, he petitioned for women's suffrage.
Mill believed in the positive progress of society. But he also saw the threats. Capitalism had flaws, democracy had a dangerous self-destructive tendency.
Let's start with capitalism. In 1800-50 the average annual growth of real wages in Britain was an embarrassing 0,5%. The average working week was 60 hours. Life expectancy in some cities had fallen below 30 years. For this reason, Mill has given his support to the action of trade unions and legislation to improve working conditions.
He also feared that capitalism could inflict spiritual damage on people that is difficult to repair. The drive to accumulate wealth could have led to a passive acceptance of the status quo – what Mill's disciples would have called the "tyranny of conformity."
Mill loved the idea of a nation, like America, founded on freedom, but he feared that America had fallen into this very trap. Americans displayed "a general indifference to that kind of knowledge and mental culture which cannot be immediately converted into pounds, dollars and pence." Following the ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville, Mill saw America as the country where there was less genuine freedom of thought than any other. How differently could he have interpreted the enormous inconsistency between the proclamation of freedom for all and the existence of an institution like slavery?
… and the limits of democracy
Democracy itself threatens the "free market of ideas" in various ways. Mill thought that individual freedom would lead to the emancipation of people. But once free to make their own choices, it could happen that people could become prisoners of prejudice or of their social status. Voting for the working classes may have resulted in chaos.
This reform, in turn, could have hindered the intellectual development of the society as the views of the majority would have ended up stifling individual creativity and thought. Those who challenged traditional wisdom – the freethinkers, the eccentrics, the Mills – could have been marginalized by mainstream opinion. Competence would thus have run the risk of being set aside since the "will of the people" would have reigned supreme.
This outlet was scary. Paradoxically, individual freedom might have been more limited under a mass democracy than under the rule of former despotic rulers. To describe this drift of democracy, Mill speaks of the "tyranny of the majority". Because of this, he is concerned about both the "respectable" views of the middle class and the ignorance of the working class.
At this point Mill began to consider ways of countering the tyrannical tendencies inherent in capitalism and democracy. The conclusion is that competence has an essential role to play. Progress requires the time and inclination of people to devote themselves to a serious education. It is therefore necessary that a sort of secular clergy with these characteristics emerge, which Mill defines as "clerisy" (a word borrowed from Coleridge). This intelligentsia would have drawn its foundations from a utilitarian principle: its members would have individualized the "rules to maximize the collective well-being if everyone had followed them", as Alan Ryan, a political theorist, glosses.
The praise of education
One solution was to give educated voters more power. An exemption under which the illiterate or people on the equivalent of 19th century social assistance would not get the right to vote. (Mill also thought that some citizens of the British colonies, including Indians, were incapable of self-government). Graduates could have six votes and unskilled workers one. The purpose of this derogation was to give a voice to those who had had the opportunity to reflect deeply on the world, to the educated and knowledgeable. The lower orders of society would have become aware of the need for political and moral leadership, although, in time, many of them might have joined the ranks of educated and knowledgeable people.
While this approach may seem snobbish, or worse, Mill was enlightened for his time. Indeed, he would no doubt have supported many of the social changes that have occurred in the 21st century, such as universal suffrage and women's rights.
Millwitness of today
Today there are many things that would have interested him. Let's take Brexit. Whether or not he was a Brexiteer, he would have abhorred the referendum. Why call the voters to decide on an issue of which they have so little knowledge? Witnessing the rise of President Donald Trump and detesting his anti-intellectualism, he reportedly commented: "I told you so!". He would no doubt have been surprised at how long it had taken America to elect a demagogue.
The intellectual climate on both sides of the Atlantic would depress him. “Silencing an opinion is a particular crime because it means robbing humanity – writes Mill in Essay on freedom. – If an opinion is right, we are deprived of the possibility of mistaking the error for the truth: while if it is wrong, what is a great benefit is lost, that is, the clearer perception and more vivid impression of the truth, highlighted by the contract with the error”. He wouldn't even be impressed by today's lack of political platforms.
It might well acknowledge that, prior to 2016, liberal thinking had given way to a tyranny of conformity. Until recently, there was little talk in liberal society about the "forgotten" or losers of the free trade economy. Many liberals had fallen into decidedly anti-Millan complacency, believing that all the big issues were settled.
Not anymore. Trump's victory prompted liberals to rethink everything from free trade to immigration. Brexit has opened an intense debate on the essence of power. And universities have become a battleground on the limits of freedom of expression. Like Mill's, ours are times of disorientation that urgently reclaim the mental resilience and audacity embodied by the father of liberalism.
