Toleration occupies a conceptual space somewhere between approbation and prohibition. We do not, in other words, tolerate that which we have reason either to approve or to prohibit. Within the territory marked out between approbation and prohibition, tolerators can adopt a range of different stances towards the tolerated, including mere indifference, silent acquiescence, and judgmental disapproval.1 A political theory of toleration ought to prescribe the appropriate stance or, what I intend to call, the mode of toleration. A political theory of toleration ought also to identify the limits of toleration. Where, in other words, ought we to mark the boundaries between the approved, the tolerated, and the prohibited? A complete political theory of toleration will include an account of both the mode and the limits of toleration.
Since its publication in 1859, Mill’s essay On Liberty has been a target of conservatives, who believe that Mill tolerates too much that ought to be prohibited.2 Mill famously refuses to prohibit anything that does not directly threaten the vital interests of other individuals. Neither sexual immorality nor religious heresy—the twin irritants of conservative moralists, then and now—warrants, so Mill believes, prohibition. Some contemporary self-styled liberals have joined conservatives in criticizing Mill’s principles for permitting too much.3 But more commonly liberals now tend to criticize Mill’s essay for being insufficiently “respectful”—a distinctively modern form of approbation—of traditional, religious, and communal ways of life.4 Mill would merely tolerate these ways of life, when they actually deserve, so Mill’s critics maintain, a fuller measure of societal approval or respect.
Mill’s recent critics trace the roots of his alleged failings of respect to two different sources. For so-called “political liberals,” Mill goes wrong in his attachment to a comprehensive conception of the good—a substantive form of human flourishing, in other words—that not all “reasonable persons” can accept. Mill, from this perspective, fails to deliver an “adequate solution to the political problem of reasonable disagreement about the good life.”5 For “radical pluralists,” Mill’s liberalism suffers from its reliance upon a theory of progress that not only purports to distinguish more and less advanced societies, but refuses to recognize either the intrinsic value of less advanced societies or—more troubling still—their right to self-government.6 It would be wrong to exaggerate the similarities between political liberals and radical pluralists, but on one key point they agree: “Mill’s text simply is no good as the footing for a liberalism comfortable with human plurality.”7
On the face of it, criticisms of Mill for his hostility to pluralism seem implausible. Mill’s essay famously celebrates diversity and laments the increasing tendency to conformity in the society of his day. Mill, to be sure, does prefer individuality to bovine conformism; and he does believe that some societies are more advanced than others. But it is not obvious why these two commitments (to a conception of the good and to a conception of progress) necessarily render the argument of Mill’s essay “narrow,” “intolerant,” “racist,” or “ethnocentric.”8 A central task of this essay is to identify the role that these two commitments play in Mill’s political theory and his account of toleration in particular. This task is complicated by the fact that Mill’s political theory forms a part of a more general sociological theory, the central feature of which is the process of socialization or, what Mill terms, the formation of character. Much of Mill’s argument concerning the mode and limits of toleration turns, as we shall see, on a set of claims concerning the interconnections of security, liberty, progress, and character-formation. The first part of this paper identifies the core features of Mill’s sociological theory. The second part identifies Mill’s conception of liberty, a conception that also fixes the limits of toleration. The third part shows how Mill justifies this conception of liberty with reference to our vital interest in security. The fourth part elaborates Mill’s understanding of the mode of toleration. And the fifth part responds to political liberal and radical pluralist criticisms of the alleged “intolerance” of Mill’s liberalism.
Although Mill presents his essay On Liberty as if it were a self-contained argument, it quickly emerges that his position presupposes a more general sociological theory that he does not fully defend in this text. This sociological theory informs all of Mill’s political writings, even when it goes unmentioned. The quickest way into this sociological theory is through a number of the essays that he published in the London and Westminster Review during the 1830s and further elaborated both in the Principles of Political Economy and in Book VI of the System of Logic.
Mill himself acknowledges in these early writings the limits of any moral and political theory that ignores sociology (by which he means the study of social change and social cohesion). In his highly critical assessment of Bentham, Mill levels two general charges at Bentham’s reformist project: one, Bentham fails to recognize that social and political institutions cannot be prescribed for a society as such, but only for a particular society at a specific stage of social and political development; and two, Bentham neglects the educative role of national culture.9 “A philosophy of laws and institutions not founded on a philosophy of national character is,” so Mill complains, “an absurdity.”10 It is worth unpacking these two criticisms, for they take us to the core of the more sociologically sophisticated political theory that Mill wishes to put in place of Benthamite utilitarianism.
For Mill, societies are culturally and historically distinctive. Societies, in short, have a distinctive national character. Mill conceptualizes this “national character” along two different dimensions: one, organic-cultural; and the other, historic-developmental. Both dimensions are, from the perspective of contemporary sociological theory, controversial. Let’s begin with the organic-cultural dimension.
For Mill, a society cannot be understood merely as a conglomeration of self-interested individuals who share a common set of institutions. Mill maintains that “habitual sentiments and feelings, … general modes of thinking and acting” are constitutive components of society and shape the character of the individual members of that society.11 Granted this view of society, Mill has little sympathy with those “philosophical speculators” (from “Plato to Bentham”), who believe that society can become “whatever the men who compose it choose to make it.”12 Each individual society, so Mill argues, has its own distinctive character, which is to say its own distinctive opinions, feelings, and habits. Political institutions and practical policy suggestions must fit the particular character of a society; what is suitable for one society may not be suitable for another. It is the task of “political ethology”—the science of character formation—to identify the causes that determine “the type of character belonging to a people or to an age.”13 While Mill concedes that our knowledge of “political ethology” remains rudimentary, he identifies certain features of society that we can take for granted.
First, he thinks that there is such a thing as “a state of society” defined by that society’s material factors (i.e., state of economic development), political factors, (i.e., laws and forms of government) and ideal factors (i.e., beliefs, feelings, and general moral culture). These “factors” (my term not Mill’s) coexist in a state of “consensus” (Mill’s term not mine), such that they mutually determine the development of each other. Second, Mill thinks that there exist identifiable “uniformities of coexistence” between these material, political, and ideal factors. And third, he thinks that the proximate cause of every state of society is the state of society preceding it. The first and second of these propositions reveal the extent to which Mill—despite his later celebration of “individuality” in the essay On Liberty—embraces in his sociological theory a thoroughgoing form of social holism.14 The third of these propositions make it clear that a philosophy of social science presupposes a philosophy of history. As Mill puts this third point:
The fundamental problem, therefore, of the social sciences is to find the laws according to which any state of society produces the state of society which succeeds it and takes its place. This opens the great and vexed question of the progressiveness of man and society; an idea involved in every just conception of social phenomena as the subject of a science.15
Let’s turn now to the idea that societies can be measured along an historical-developmental continuum, which itself is a presupposition of the view that societies can be described as more or less progressive or improved. Mill maintains, as we have seen, that each society has a distinctive character (or state of society), the chief determinant of which is the state of society that preceded it. At its most trivial level, this point amounts to little more than the observation that each society is shaped by its history. At a more controversial level, this point includes a claim about the relative importance of ideational factors—or changes in the state of knowledge—in determining social change.16 At the most controversial level, however, Mill contends that changes in the state of knowledge follow an identifiable order of progression. This point is worth quoting in full:
There is a sort of necessity established … by the general laws of human nature; by the constitution of the human mind. Certain truths cannot be discovered, or inventions made, unless certain others have been made first; certain social improvements, from the nature of the ease, can only follow, and not precede, others. The order of human progress, therefore, may to a certain extent have definite laws assigned to it.17
Granted that when societies develop, they do so following an identifiable order of progression, it becomes possible to identify societies as more or less advanced along a developmental path of progress. This is not to say, however, that there is anything inevitable in movement along this path of progress. Mill recognizes that societies can, if they are not fortunate, stagnate or even regress. Nonetheless, he hopes that the scientific study of society—sociology, in other words—will help identify what “artificial means may be used … to accelerate the natural progress [of society] insofar as it is beneficial.”18 Given the importance that Mill attaches to the role of ideas in motivating social change, intellectuals—and more generally, a culture of intellectual vitality—is the most important of these “artificial means.” Mill, in short, looks to intellectuals to stimulate change in the character or culture of their society. He faults Bentham for focusing on laws and institutions, when cultural change is a more effective means of reform.
Notwithstanding Mill’s criticisms of the sociological deficiencies of Benthamite utilitarianism, Mill still remains something of a Benthamite in his account of the ultimate ends of societal improvement. Mill recognizes that any definition of ultimate ends falls outside the scope of science and belongs to an account of, what he terms, “the Art of Life.”19 For Mill, the ultimate end of human development—and thus the gauge of genuine societal improvement—is happiness. Mill’s notion of happiness is, however, complex. Typically, moral and political theorists think that happiness and perfection represent two contrasting options so far as the ultimate ends of human and societal aspiration are concerned.20 Mill, however, muddies this distinction by interpreting happiness not, in its conventional sense, as a subjective state of mind, nor, in the modern economists’ sense, as the satisfaction of preferences, but as the property of a particular type of character. For a sense of just how Mill muddies the conception of happiness, consider this passage towards the end of Book VI of his System of Logic:
the general principle to which all practice ought to conform … is the conduciveness to the happiness of mankind. [T]he cultivation of an ideal nobleness of will and conduct, should be to individual human beings an end, to which the specific pursuit either of their own happiness or of that of others (except so far as included in that idea) should, in any case of conflict, give way. But I hold that the very question, what constitutes this elevation of character, is itself to be decided by a reference to happiness as the standard. The character itself should be, to the individual, a paramount end, simply because the existence of this ideal nobleness of character, or of a near approach to it, in any abundance, would go further than all things else towards making human life happy; both in the comparatively humble sense, of pleasure and freedom from pain, and in the higher meaning, of rendering life, not what it now is almost universally, puerile and insignificant—but such as human beings with highly developed faculties can care to have.21
This passage is revealing not only for its repudiation of happiness as a strictly “want-regarding” consideration, but also for its emphasis upon the development of a particular type of character.22 Mill’s scientific study of society does nothing to suggest that the trajectory of social change will prove propitious to this type of character. Indeed, Mill fears that the rise of the new middle classes will see the triumph of the “puerile and insignificant” at the expense of this type of character.23 Nor does Mill make it clear why the happiness of this type of character, which he allows is the exception, has any authority with respect to the (subjective) happiness of the more numerous less developed characters that populate society. To pursue this problem further, we need to turn to some of Mill’s later writings, especially his essay On Liberty.
To grasp Mill’s account of the limits of toleration, we need to understand Mill’s conception of liberty. This task is more difficult than it initially appears, because it is not clear whether one, two, or multiple different conceptions of liberty inform the argument of On Liberty. Nor is it clear whether Mill provides one, two, or multiple different justifications for liberty. It is clear, however, that Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between “negative liberty” (i.e., freedom from coercion) and “positive liberty” (i.e., freedom to do something valuable) is not very useful in understanding Mill’s position.24 Nonetheless, Berlin’s discussion of On Liberty provides a good place to start, not least because his criticisms of Mill’s argument have been taken up and amplified by contemporary radical pluralists.
For Berlin, Mill is “the most celebrated” defender of negative liberty. In support of this interpretation, Berlin cites Mill’s bold assertion that “the only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.”25 Yet Berlin also recognizes that Mill’s essay contains a number of arguments that recommend a particular life a free person ought to lead. Here Mill appears to endorse a particular type of character development (or “individuality”) and to denigrate a life led in accordance with custom. The puzzle for Berlin (as for any interpreter of Mill’s liberalism) is to reconcile Mill’s defense of negative freedom with his more specific advocacy of “individuality.”
Berlin’s own solution to this interpretative puzzle involves a rather uncharitable reading of On Liberty. Mill, so Berlin argues, “confuses two distinct notions.”26 The first notion is that of freedom from unwanted interference by others (i.e., negative liberty); and the second notion is that of a certain type of character-development—“critical, imaginative, independent, non-conforming to the point of eccentricity” (i.e., individuality).27 For Berlin, Mill’s failure to distinguish these two different conceptions is compounded by his effort to employ the second in justification of the first. In Berlin’s interpretation, Mill’s argument rests on the claim that individuality “can be bred only in conditions of freedom.”28 Against this view, Berlin contends—arguing here along the lines of Mill’s conservative adversary James Fitzjames Stephens—that
the evidence of history shows … that integrity, love of truth, and fiery individualism grow at least as often in severely disciplined communities, for example the puritan Calvinists of Scotland or New England, or under military discipline, as in more tolerant or indifferent societies; and if this is so, Mill’s argument for liberty as a necessary condition for the growth of human genius falls to the ground.29
Berlin’s criticism appears, on the face of it, to be devastating. If true, it would provide confirming evidence that Mill is a muddled thinker, who defends his liberalism with a ragbag of ideas that do not belong together. Berlin’s position is not, however, altogether persuasive, either in its interpretation of Mill’s argument or in the suggestion that individuality can develop “at least as often” in authoritarian communities as in tolerant liberal societies. In order to rescue Mill from Berlin’s misjudged criticisms, it is necessary, first, to identify the specific conception of liberty that Mill defends; and second, to rescue Mill from the charge that this conception of liberty lacks a convincing justification.
Mill introduces his conception of liberty in the context of a broader genealogical discussion of organized power. At the current “stage of progress,” Mill informs us, “protection … against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough, there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing feeling and opinion.”30 We need, in short “a different and more fundamental treatment of liberty” that fixes the legitimate limits of the power over the individual of both state and society.31 Central to Mill’s own treatment of liberty is his strong presumption in favor of free thought and action. All forms of coercion—whether involving legal penalties or societal control—require a justification. Mill defends a particular principle of justification—“one simple principle,” as he rather misleadingly puts it—according to which “the only purpose for which power can be rightly exercised over any member of a civilized community … is to prevent harm to others.”32 Although this justificatory principle is now commonly referred to as Mill’s “harm principle,” it is important to recognize that “harm” is merely one of a number of different terms that Mill employs to express the same point. Thus he tells us at various points in the text that coercion can be justified solely for the “self-protection” (of society); “for the security of others”; when actions “produce evil to someone else”; when actions “concern the interest of other people”; when actions are “hurtful to others”; when an individual “make[s] himself a nuisance to other people”; and when an individual “molest[s] others in what concerns them.”33 Yet, regardless of which words Mill uses to express the point, the task remains that of identifying precisely where the boundaries lie between protected freedom and legitimate coercion, because these boundaries mark the limits of toleration.
Mill himself clearly believes that his own principle of justified coercion yields a determinate sphere of individual liberty (a specific “doctrine” of liberty, as he sometimes terms it). Included within this sphere are a number of specific liberties, including “liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense, liberty of thought and feeling … liberty of tastes and pursuits, of framing the plan of life to suit our own character; [and] … freedom to unite.”34 Yet, to some of his critics (including Berlin), Mill’s principle of justified coercion is simply too vague, no matter what words (“harm,” “security,” “hurt,” “self-protection,” “producing evil,” “making oneself a nuisance to others”) are plugged into the principle. This problem is further compounded by the vagueness of another concept Mill introduces: that of a “self-regarding” sphere of action or conduct.
Mill employs the term “self-regarding” in both a descriptive and a moral sense. The double usage of the term gives rise to confusion. In its descriptive sense, self-regarding action has no social dimension and does not affect others. Thus, when I cut my toenails in the solitude of my windowless study, I act in this (descriptively) self-regarding way. Yet, if I were to take off my socks and cut my toenails in a packed lecture hall, I would not be acting in a self-regarding but in a social way. My actions in the lecture hall affect others, even if only in a trivial way. Rather than employing the term “self-regarding” solely in this descriptive sense, however, Mill also employs the term in a moral (or evaluative) sense. He notices, for instance, that descriptively self-regarding actions can sometimes affect others in a non-trivial way. Take, for instance, the person who drinks at home to excess and cannot look after his children or turn up for jury duty. Such a person cannot, so Mill thinks, be described as acting in a self-regarding way. As he puts this point:
When a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-regarding from performance of some definite duty incumbent on him to the public, he is guilty of a social offence. Whenever, in short, there is definite damage, either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty, and placed in that of morality or law.35
The idea here is that when actions damage others, it ceases to be (evaluatively) self-regarding even while it remains (descriptively) self-regarding. Mill recognizes cases where actions deservedly lose their “self-regarding” status—as in the case of the drunken jury member—and cases where actions undeservedly lose their self-regarding status. Mill is primarily concerned with this latter situation. He wants to warn us of the tendency of public authorities to regulate actions or conduct that is deservedly self-regarding. Consider here, for example, a Muslim community that seeks to prohibit a dissenting minority from eating pork. For Mill, this type of prohibition is not “a legitimate exercise of the moral authority of public opinion.” Why? Because “with the personal tastes and self-regarding concerns of individuals, the public has no business to interfere.”36 In other words, the eating of pork is a deservedly self-regarding issue, no matter how repugnant to the wider community.
Having clarified the different meanings of the term “self-regarding,” it must be conceded that the term itself does not help us to decide which actions or forms of conduct deserve to be treated as self-regarding and which deserve to be regulated by law or public morality. In order to settle this issue, we need to focus attention on the different ways that one person’s actions can affect others. Without going into the full details of Mill’s argument here, we can summarize these ways as follows:
i. Actions that affect merely the agent;
ii. Actions that affect others in a trivial way;
iii. Actions that affect others negatively, but (a) consensually; or (b) justifiably;
iv. Actions that unjustifiably and non-consensually harm the vital or essential interests of others.
Insofar as we are concerned here with Mill’s conception of liberty, actions (iv) are the most important. Mill would prohibit only those actions that “harm” (or “hurt,” or “damage” etc.) the vital or essential interests of others. Actions that merely affect the agent (i), affect others trivially (ii), with their consent (iii a), or with justification (iii b) do not warrant prohibition. Viewed in this light, Mill’s principle of justified coercion—and thus his account of the limits of toleration—depends upon a conception of vital interests. Unfortunately, Mill’s own text is less helpful here than it ought to be. Mill recognizes the existence of a certain class of essential or vital interests—which he also sometimes refers to as “rights”—but he does not provide us with a clear account of these interests.37 True, he informs us that his argument appeals to “utility … grounded in the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.”38 But this does little to resolve the problem of identifying these interests.
Berlin himself resolves this ambiguity by interpreting Mill’s “progressive being” in terms of the account of “individuality” that Mill provides in Chapter III of On Liberty. In this chapter, Mill sings the praises of a particular character type that displays, in the face of increasing pressures to conformity and leveling, a form of originality, spontaneity, and self-fashioning. Mill fears that this type of character, already a rarity, will become rarer still in the modern world. The suggestion (by Berlin and others) that “individuality” provides the justification for Mill’s more general conception of liberty—which involves pursuing “our own good in our own way” and allows coercion only to prevent harm to (the vital or essential) interests of others—is, however, deeply problematic: it begs the question why this character-type has any normative authority in a society where (by Mill’s own admission) it is rare and unpopular.39 Unless, we can offer some resolution of this problem, it will be difficult to resist the “traditionalist” interpretation of Mill’s political theory as confused and contradictory.40
Granted that Mill’s conception of liberty can only be inadequately defended in terms of “individuality,” it is important to locate an alternative stronger justification for liberty. The solution lies, I think, partly in Mill’s account of security—which he labels our most “vital interest”—and partly in his theory of character-formation. The drawback with this interpretation is that it concedes that Mill’s essay On Liberty does not contain within itself a fully adequate defense of Mill’s “doctrine” of liberty.
Mill informs us in On Liberty that compulsion is “justifiable only for the security of others.”41 On Liberty itself, however, has very little to say either about “security” or its opposite, “insecurity.” Elsewhere in Mill’s writings, however, he has a lot more to say about security. Indeed, we must look to Mill’s essay on “Utilitarianism” for a clear statement that security is “the most vital of all interests.” Mill here goes on to explain why: “security no human being can possibly do without; on it we depend for all our immunity from evil.” In the absence of security, we would have no ability to look forward with any degree of confidence to the future. “Nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us.”42
Security also figures prominently in Mill’s account of progress and in his understanding of civilization.43 As Mill makes clear in these writings, security involves not merely immediate, short-term physical safety, but durable long-term protection of personhood and property. Absent this protection, individuals would merely have momentary access to their goods; they would never achieve psychological tranquility. Furthermore, individuals in insecure societies would be unable to save and plan for the future. Mill sees security (understood in this expansive way) as both a precondition and a defining feature of a civilized society. “One of the acknowledged effects [of social progress],” he reports, “is an increase of general security. Destruction by wars and spoliation by private or public violence, are less and less to be apprehended.”44 When Mill refers here to the progress achieved by civilized societies, he has in mind not only the level of security provided by such societies, but also the distribution of the benefit of security to all members of society on roughly equal terms. While in premodern (or “backward”) societies, some achieved security at the expense of others. A civilized society provides security to all of its members, which in turn allows for greater cooperation and greater economic productivity.
While it is sometimes said that “security” is the core value of the modern liberal tradition, it is not clear that Mill can rely wholly upon this value to justify his doctrine of liberty.45 First, security might seem to justify the imposition of a wide measure of liberty-limiting measures. Indeed, security seems to fit more securely into the absolutist tradition than the modern liberal tradition. Second—and more specifically relevant to Mill’s argument—Mill professes to appeal to “the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.” Security, in contrast, would appear to be an interest of man as such rather than man as a progressive being; it certainly seems to lack the developmental dimension suggested by the term “progressive.” These two difficulties are, however, more apparent than real. Security, as Mill understands it, is a sufficiently complex interest to allow the state to protect us from something other than mere physical violence. Indeed, here it is important to recognize that Mill allows the state to punish people who fail to perform various essential duties to society. This more expansive conception of security—which would allow the state to prohibit various types of private “spoliation” of our property—coexists with a refusal to allow state coercion to prevent more indirect threats to security. Mill, for instance, dismisses the arguments of the prohibitionist, who claims that alcohol consumption “destroys my primary right of security.”46 In addition to Mill’s complex understanding of the threats to which our security is and is not vulnerable, Mill’s security-based argument coexists with a character-based argument that provides an additional set of reasons for limiting the scope of state coercion.
The formation of character is a theme that connects Mill’s political theory to his earlier sociological theory. For Mill, our character is everything. Yet, notwithstanding its importance, Mill does not think that the coercive apparatus of the state can play a role in its formation or improvement. Much like Tocqueville, Mill fears that under any absolute forms of power—whether exercised by a government, a factory owner, or male head of household—we develop a dependent type of character. For Mill, the formation of character must proceed passively, by way of the influences of our background national culture, and interactively, by way of our dealings with each other in a free and open society. Intellectuals can and ought to play a role in the formation of a national character by holding themselves up as models of excellence. The state, in contrast, is largely an obstacle to this bottom-up and interactive form of character formation. This belief gives Mill further reason to think that the state ought to coerce as little as possible—and never, for instance, for paternalist or perfectionist reasons. The Millian state accordingly sets the limits of toleration at a very permissive level. The same point is not true, however, when it comes to organized public opinion, which—as we will see in the next section—Mill expects to play a more intrusive role in the formation of character.
Notwithstanding Mill’s reliance upon a character-based argument in his justification of liberty, argument must be kept separate from Mill’s own celebration of “individuality.” Admittedly, Mill’s On Liberty is less than clear on this point. Nonetheless, it is important to recall that “individuality” is, merely, as Mill puts it in the title of Chapter II, “one of the elements of well-being” (emphasis added). Elsewhere in Mill’s writings—especially in his early reviews of Grote’s and Tocqueville’s books, and his own later works Considerations of Representative Government and Subjection of Women—Mill offers a much more rounded account of the type of character that, under ideal circumstances, can emerge in a civilized society. Here he has less to say about “originality,” “spontaneity,” and “eccentricity”—core characteristics of “individuality”—than about independence (the capacity for self-governance), public-spiritedness, and civic-mindedness. These characteristics are considerably less heroic, more democratic—and thus more widely shareable—than those that define individuality. Mill’s worry is that even these characteristics, which together define, what might be termed, a free and independent character, will be eroded by one or the other of two regressive developments present in civilized societies. One is the encroachment of the state on social life; the other is the rise of a new conformist middle class. Thus, if overweening state power represents one potential threat to a free society, society itself, in the form of a conformist public opinion, represents another.
If we accept Mill’s account of a civilized society, then his doctrine of liberty stands in an instrumental relationship to the vital interest of security. While liberty, as Mill understands it, is essentially “negative” (in Berlin’s sense of the term), Mill nonetheless believes that only in a free society (and, more to the point, never under a paternalist or perfectionist state) will people acquire the capacities for self-government and sociability that offer a more reliable long-term guarantee of their freedom. In this respect, negative liberty (freedom to do what you want) is the route to a form of positive liberty (freedom to be self-governing), which itself offers the best protection for negative liberty. The state (at least in any of its coercive dimensions) can do nothing, however, to ensure that people take this route and use their negative liberty to develop their self-governing capacities. A limited state focused solely on security interests thus remains a necessary condition of a free and equal society of self-governing individuals.
We are now in a position to explain how Mill’s security-based justification for liberty fits into his account of the limits and mode of toleration. Simply stated, the limits of toleration correspond to the boundaries set by the doctrine of liberty. We must tolerate all acts that do not unjustifiably prejudice the security interests of others. In practice, the limits of Mill’s toleration would accord closely with what we have come to expect in a modern liberal democratic society. In some areas, Mill would be more tolerant. He would, for instance, regulate rather than prohibit prostitution, gambling, and even the sale of poisons. These examples suggest that Mill would require an act to be an immediate, direct, and a very serious threat to security before it would warrant prohibition. In other areas, however, Mill would be less tolerant than most liberal democratic societies. Mill is, for instance, quite willing to prosecute parents for failures to safeguard the welfare of their children. Presumably, he thinks that children have security interests that impose specific parental duties, the nonperformance of which the state must deter.
While Mill’s account of what we ought to tolerate (i.e., the limits of toleration) occupies a central and uncontroversial position in the liberal political tradition, this is not the case with his account of how we ought to tolerate (i.e., the mode of toleration). Mill’s account of the mode of toleration is especially important, because it is here that Mill wrestles with some of the tensions present in his own account of the formation of human character. Mill, as we have seen, believes that a civilized society can form and sustain independent, sociable characters. This belief plays a crucial role in Mill’s justification for a minimal security-based liberalism. Yet Mill also recognizes that a civilized society can generate conformist characters that, when organized into an impersonal public opinion, jeopardize not only the formation of independent sociable characters but liberty itself. Mill presents us here with two different stories—one positive or progressive, one negative or regressive—about the process of character-formation in a civilized society. The problem for Mill is that insofar as the regressive process predominates, then his own argument for a minimal security-based liberalism loses much of its force. Indeed, this negative process not only makes Mill’s arguments vulnerable to conservatives who reject the enfranchisement of the working classes; it also makes Mill’s arguments vulnerable to those who favor a more state-centric, rights-based liberalism. For these state-centric, rights-based liberals—of whom Ronald Dworkin is perhaps the leading contemporary example—the state (and, more especially, judges and the law courts) must assume a much more expansive role in the regulation of our social affairs if we are to safeguard our personal liberties.47 Mill can resist this state-centric approach, only because he believes that the progressive process of character-formation requires a minimal and non-interventionist state. Furthermore, he thinks that the progressive process of character-formation can still—notwithstanding a rising tide of conformity—be rescued. Mill’s account of the mode of toleration can be understood as a key contribution to this rescue operation.
Chapter IV of On Liberty—a chapter not usually read as addressing the topic of toleration at all—might be read as an extended discussion of the mode of toleration.48 To understand this aspect of Mill’s theory, it is important to recall the distinctions drawn above in Section II between:
i. Actions that affect merely the agent;
ii. Actions that affect others in a trivial way;
iii. Actions that affect others negatively, but (a) consensually; or (b) justifiably;
iv. Actions that unjustifiably and non-consensually harm the vital interests of others.
In the case of (iv), Mill’s principle permits legal penalties, because such acts violate the vital interests (or “rights”) of others. Mill goes to pains, however, to distinguish these acts from actions (ii) and (iii) that have a negative impact upon others, but “without going the length of violating any of their constituted rights.”49 Mill includes under (ii) various types of anti-social behavior and the character flaws that give rise to such behavior. Yet merely because Mill’s principles call for the toleration of such behavior does not mean that such behavior ought to be ignored or accepted. For Mill, the mode of toleration is consistent with—and sometimes demands—judgmental disapproval.50 Indeed, Mill is at pains to emphasize that his doctrine of liberty is not one of “selfish indifference.”51 As Mill elaborates this point:
Though doing no wrong to any one, a person may so act as to compel us to judge him … as a fool, or as a being of an inferior order: and since this judgment and feeling are a fact which he would prefer to avoid, it is doing him a service to warn him of it beforehand as of any other disagreeable consequence to which he exposes himself.52
Mill laments the customary distaste for this sort of judgmentalism. “It would be well, indeed,” he writes, “if this good office were much more freely rendered than the common notions of politeness at present permit.” On Mill’s account, we must judge others and put these judgments into practice, even by pointedly shunning the judged person’s company if necessary, and advising others to do the same. In this way, a judged person might “suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself.” The character flaws that merit this treatment include “rashness, obstinacy, self-conceit … [and the pursuit of] animal pleasures at the expense of feeling and intellect.”53
While judgmental disapproval is the right response to self-regarding character flaws, Mill’s principles call for a more organized form of “moral reprobation and, in grave cases, of moral retribution and punishment,” when a person’s anti-social behavior actually injures the interests of others. Mill has in mind here actions that range from “encroachment on [our rights]” to “selfish abstinence from defending [us] against injury.” More controversially, Mill also calls for some form of organized moral disapprobation of the character-traits that give rise to this type of anti-social behavior. The character traits that warrant this more punitive response include: “Cruelty of disposition; malice and ill nature; . . . envy; dissimulation and insincerity; irascibility on insufficient cause, and resentment disproportioned to the provocation, the love of domineering over others.”54 Unlike the purely self-regarding character flaws (“rashness, obstinacy, self-conceit,” and so forth), these character-traits are signs of “a bad and odious moral character” and are taken out of the self-regarding sphere. Mill does not think that such traits call for legal punishment, but they do call for us to “make … life uncomfortable” for such a person.55 In this respect, Mill appears to recognize a distinction (at least in these passages of Chapter IV if not elsewhere in the text) between actions that merely prejudice our interests and actions that harm our vital interest in security. While the latter class of actions (e.g., physical violence and robbery) calls for legal punishment, the former class calls for organized moral reprobation.
Mill’s focus on the formation of character in Chapter IV of On Liberty goes some way to qualifying his reputation as a paradigmatic liberal. Mill is certainly no enemy of the right type of social control.56 Indeed, Mill’s discussion in Chapter IV shows that his own preferred mode of toleration requires us to assume responsibility for each other’s character formation. In this respect, Mill’s mode of toleration is very different from those who envisage toleration as merely a means of securing civil order between otherwise antagonistic groups. For Mill, toleration is an educative mechanism that must be used wisely if free societies are to build the right type of characters. Viewed in this light, Mill’s mode of toleration can be understood as a contribution to, what was termed above, the progressive process of character formation in a civilized society.
It is important to recognize that the contribution of this mode of toleration to the formation of a progressive character rests upon a number of empirical claims concerning the connection between security, liberty, progress, and character-formation. Mill’s political theory is far more empirical than much of contemporary political theory, which often justifies liberty on the basis of an essentialist conception of individual well-being. Mill, in contrast, situates his justification of liberty in the empirical world. There are both advantages and disadvantages of proceeding in this empirical fashion. The most obvious disadvantage is that Mill’s empirical claims concerning the process of character formation might prove false. Perhaps people will use their freedom to develop pernicious lifestyles and base characters from which they will derive little genuine happiness; perhaps they will use their freedom to oppress each other.
For many contemporary liberals, Mill’s liberalism is too contingent and insufficiently universal to be acceptable. For Mill, the circumstances under which liberty leads to a positive form of character formation are bounded by a theory of progress. Only in a modern “civilized” society can we expect liberty to yield such positive consequences. In non-civilized, pre-modern societies, a more substantial form of state control may prove necessary. Few contemporary liberals are comfortable with this non-universalistic form of liberalism. Nor are they comfortable with Mill’s reliance upon a process of character-formation as the ultimate guarantee for security and liberty. Most contemporary liberals would prefer to rely instead on the state and the courts, not only to protect a more extensive set of individual rights, but to act as guiding lights in this process of character formation. Mill, in contrast, seems to think that a progressive process of character formation goes awry when the state assumes too much influence. Mill takes this anti-paternalist position to surprising lengths, even to the point of opposing a state monopoly on education. While he is not opposed to guiding lights, these lights, he believes, are best provided by intellectuals in and through their role as shapers of public debate. Mill appears to think that both the progressive process of character formation and, more generally, the cause of progressive liberalism will benefit from the clash of ideas, opinions, and judgments. This belief is a consequence of the line of thought he develops in Chapter II of On Liberty concerning the outcome of clashing ideas. Mill is famously optimistic about the likely outcome of the free exchange of ideas. Truth will, he thinks, prevail; liberal values will be proven right; and Gresham’s Law—at least in the realm of ideas—broken. Mill’s account of toleration, both its limits and its mode, plays a key role in allowing this exchange of ideas to take place.
In recent years, Mill’s liberalism has come in for criticism less because of its empirical uncertainties, than because of its alleged intolerance. This failing is widely believed to stem from his commitment to a controversial conception of the good and to a theory of progress. By way of conclusion, I want to show that neither the political liberal nor the radical pluralist criticisms of Mill’s alleged intolerance is warranted. Many of these recent criticisms of Mill’s liberalism reiterate Isaiah Berlin’s contention that Mill’s argument for liberty is confused and unconvincing.57 Berlin, as I have argued above, misreads Mill by suggesting that Mill seeks to justify his doctrine of liberty on the basis of a conception of “individuality.” For Mill, individuality is certainly important, but it does not enter directly into the justification of the doctrine of liberty. Mill justifies this doctrine of liberty in two steps. The first step involves an account of the individual’s vital or essential interests. The second step involves an account of character-formation in a modern civilized society. Mill’s justification for liberty turns crucially on the claim that a progressive character—by which he means a self-governing, sociable, and civically engaged character—can emerge and prosper in a free society. Mill worries that the development of this type of character will be thwarted by the spirit of conformity and leveling that has accompanied the emergence of a new Victorian middle class. His celebration of individuality might be read as an effort to resist this spirit of conformity. Mill is fully aware that only a few will live such a life to the full. But he hopes that these few will be able to stem the tide of conformity.
Berlin’s further contention that “integrity, love of truth, and fiery individualism grow at least as often in severely disciplined communities” also seems to miss the point of Mill’s own justification for the doctrine of liberty. Mill has no doubt that excellent individuals—Pericles, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius are among those he mentions—have emerged in earlier non-liberal societies. The recognition of this fact does not, however, entail (as Berlin claims) that Mill’s argument for liberty then “falls to the ground.”58 Mill’s argument for liberty turns on the claim that our vital interest in security requires the emergence of a progressive character not merely in a few individuals but on a societal scale. To appreciate the nature of this claim, it is important to read Mill’s argument in the light of his sociological theory. Mill is a social holist. He thinks that the formation of character proceeds on the basis of a “consensus” of social factors. For this reason, we cannot generally expect the character of individuals in a society to depart too far from the broader national or societal culture. For Mill, “severely disciplined communities” (as Berlin calls them) will be unable to produce in general (the odd individual aside) anything other than one-sided stunted characters. No less importantly, Mill is a theorist of progress. He sees modern civilized societies in terms of a trajectory of societal development. Both the precondition and the great achievement of such societies is their attainment of a high level of security for all their members on roughly equal terms. Consider here, for instance, the following passage from the Subjection of Women:
As society was constituted until the last few generations, inequality was its very basis; association grounded on equal rights scarcely existed; to be equals was to be enemies; two persons could hardly cooperate in anything; or meet in any amicable relation, without the law’s appointing that one of them should be the superior of the other. Mankind have outgrown this state, and all things now tend to substitute, as the general principle of human relations, a just equality, instead of the dominion of the strongest.59
For Mill, a modern civilized society can achieve a high level of security for all its members, because the members of such a society can as equals cooperate together much more effectively than the members of any hierarchical society. Mill’s historical sociology is not without its faults. But at this broad level of abstraction, Mill’s sociological claims seem more robust than Berlin’s. Mill can allow that strong independent characters have existed in disciplined non-liberal societies. But all he needs for his argument to succeed is to show that only a modern, civilized society can possess a national culture capable of mass producing characters who think of themselves as both independent and as equals. Berlin does nothing to show that Mill is wrong on this point.
Versions of Berlin’s criticisms of Mill’s political theory show up in more recent criticisms of the alleged intolerance of Mill’s liberalism. For so-called political liberals, Mill’s liberalism is flawed in its reliance upon “a comprehensive conception of the good.” “Individuality” is a perfectionist ideal—so this objection goes—that not all citizens can be reasonably required to share. Political liberals recognize that a liberal political theory presupposes some conception of the person, but they dismiss Mill’s liberalism as too thick and controversial.60 The force of the political liberal critique hinges, much like Berlin’s, on the claim that Mill’s liberalism depends upon (i.e., is justified by) the account of “individuality” in Chapter II of On Liberty. This reading of Mill’s On Liberty is not, however, persuasive. The more plausible reading justifies the doctrine of liberty merely on the basis of our vital interests in security coupled with a sociological theory concerning the formation of a progressive character. Mill’s sociological theory might be falsified on empirical grounds. Mill’s progressive character might itself be criticized as embodying a set of undesirable traits (although independence, sociability, civic mindedness are not obviously undesirable). But these traits no more define a comprehensive conception of the good than does the conception of the person that informs the writings of contemporary political liberals.
Mill’s liberalism faces an altogether more serious challenge from contemporary radical pluralists, who believe that Mill’s liberalism is unjustifiably hostile to traditional cultures in general and cultural minorities in particular. Adding force to this criticism is Mill’s personal advocacy of a form of Western imperialism.61 Without wishing to defend here Mill’s imperialism, the question remains whether his imperialism infects and invalidates all aspects of his liberalism. Radical pluralists believe that it does. Mill’s liberalism, so they maintain, presupposes a theory of progress that refuses to recognize the value of any society that does not fit Mill’s “ethnocentric” and possibly “racist” notion of “civilization.” This radical pluralist criticism draws additional force, because it focuses on a dimension of Mill’s political theory that (as fully acknowledged here) is absolutely central: namely, his theory of progress.
The most powerful version of the radical pluralist challenge to Mill’s liberalism can be found in some of John Gray’s recent writings. For Gray, there is no basis to the claim that modern liberal societies have a privileged claim to protecting their members against “generic evils” such as physical insecurity. “Who can doubt,” Gray asks “that human beings flourished under the feudal institutions of medieval Christendom? Or under the monarchical government of Elizabethan England?”62 If Gray is correct here in the suggestion that a wide range of non-liberal regimes can satisfy our need for security and other basic goods, then Mill’s justification for liberty would be in trouble. But Gray’s claims about medieval Christendom and Elizabethan England are no more plausible than Berlin’s claims about pre-modern “disciplined societies.”
The point missed by many radical pluralists is that modern liberal societies—call them “civilized” societies, if you wish—are superior to non-liberal societies in two different ways. First, modern liberal societies are wealthier than nearly all pre-existing historical societies. It is simply impossible for a society to eradicate the full range of insecurities that we face, including malnutrition and grinding poverty, unless that society has access to the benefits of a modern dynamic economy, which in turn depends upon knowledge-intensive production processes. Mill was absolutely correct when he noted that the state of knowledge is the principal determinant of social change. A society that lacks access to a knowledge-creating educative process will itself be unable to provide its citizens with a full measure of security. Second, modern liberal societies remain committed to meeting the basic needs of all their citizens on a roughly equal basis. Whereas feudal and early modern European regimes provided some people with security, the modern liberal state is premised on the idea that all citizens have an equal claim to be secure. Clearly, no one can doubt that some people flourished under the political systems of medieval Christendom. But the same might be said of almost any regime, including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Duvalier’s Haiti, and apartheid-era South Africa. The achievement of modern liberal societies is to protect all citizens on roughly equal terms against the major avoidable insecurities of life.
Mill’s political theory is quite open in acknowledging the centrality of security and equality. He believes that these values are protected by “civilized societies,” and as such are morally superior to “backward” societies where these values go ignored. If Mill wants to say that “civilized societies” (so defined) are more advanced, improved, further along the path of progress, then it is difficult to disagree. Perhaps a radical pluralist might argue that security and equality are themselves merely “Western” values, the appeal to which is “ethnocentric” and perhaps “racist.” But Gray himself does not go this far. He recognizes the existence of “generic evils” grounded in the constancies of human nature. To abandon a commitment to any form of common basic values or interests is to adopt a form of radical pluralism that is indistinguishable from a pure form of cultural relativism or a valueless nihilism. Neither of these more extreme positions has a particular objection to Millian liberalism that does not apply to any universalist moral or political theory, even the minimalist version embraced by Gray and other radical pluralists.
The second part of the radical pluralist challenge to Mill’s liberalism focuses on the situation of cultural minorities within allegedly modern “civilized” societies. It is certainly not difficult to convict Mill of cultural arrogance and insensitivity. His comments on, for instance, the Welsh are most spectacularly ill-informed.63 But the more serious allegation of radical pluralists is that Mill’s liberalism is itself unjustifiably hostile to traditional and minority ways of life. On the face of it, this criticism seems ludicrous, especially once it is recognized that Mill’s doctrine of liberty does not depend upon his account of individuality but merely on a broader account of an independent and sociable character. For Mill, the state can prohibit only those actions that affect in a significant and direct way the security interests of others. This is to set the limits of toleration at a very permissive level. There is very little that a Millian state would do to prohibit those who so choose from enjoying and preserving their traditional or minority way of life. True, Mill does not see any intrinsic value to these ways of life. But the charge of unjustified intolerance draws its force not from Mill’s personal opinions, but from some perceived failing in the Millian state.
Despite its permissiveness, there is nonetheless a point at which the Millian state will come into conflict with traditional ways of life. This point arises, when the traditional culture seeks to enforce liberty-limiting constraints on their own members or those of the wider society. Mill discusses such cases in Chapter IV of On Liberty, when he takes up such issues as the demand of Muslims that the eating of pork be legally prohibited. Here Mill reiterates his claim that security interests alone can justify coercion. Clearly, this response will not satisfy those who believe that their way of life must be propped up by the coercive apparatus of the state. Nor will it satisfy those who believe that a life led in the tracks of a traditional culture matters more than security itself. But these belief systems would set the limits of toleration at a much less permissive level than in the Millian state. Some radical pluralists are quite open in their advocacy of moving beyond the language and practice of toleration. They envisage a state where every group has its “respect” protected by the state and where all statements of group disrespect go legally punished. These radical pluralists envisage a much less “tolerant” regime than anything Mill has in mind. There is certainly no reason to accept charges of “intolerance” coming from them.
1. For excellent recent discussions of the conceptual grammar of toleration, see Rainer Forst, Toleranz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003); Catrionna McKinnon, Toleration: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2006); and Glen Newey, Virtue, Reason, and Toleration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
2. For a compendium of such criticisms, see James Fitzjames Stephens, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967 [1873]), esp. Chapter One.
3. Consider, for instance, recent criticisms of Mill’s liberalism for permitting pornography, racial and religious hate speech, and policies of cultural assimilation. For a discussion of some of these criticisms, see Glyn Morgan, “Mill’s Liberalism, Security, and Group Defamation,” in Free Speech in Hard Times, ed. Glen Newey (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).
4. Consider here, for example, the complaint that Mill was “dogmatically secularist, hence less tolerant than is ordinarily allowed.” Ira Katznelson, Liberalism’s Crooked Circle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 143.
5. Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 131; for Rawls’ critique of Mill’s “comprehensive” liberalism, see John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 37, 78.
6. See here, for instance, John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake (London: Routledge, 1995), Chapters 8 and 9; and Bhikhu Parekh, “Superior People: The Narrowness of Liberalism from Mill to Rawls,” Times Literary Supplement, 25 February 1994, 12.
7. Katznelson, Liberalism’s Crooked Circle, 143; compare also Bhikhu Parekh, Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 40–46.
8. Katznelson, Liberalism’s Crooked Circle, 138–41.
9. John Stuart Mill, “Bentham,” in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991) [hereafter CW], 8, 75–116.
10. “Bentham,” CW, 8, 99.
11. System of Logic, CW, 8, 891
12. Ibid., 876
13. Ibid., 905
14. For a discussion of this aspect of Mill’s thought, see Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 2002 [1957]).
15. System of Logic, CW, 8, 912.
16. Ibid., 927.
17. Ibid., 938.
18. Ibid., 929.
19. Ibid., 949.
20. Thus to Henry Sidgwick “we may perhaps say that prima facie the only two ends which have a strongly and widely supported claim to be regarded as rational ultimate ends are the two just mentioned, Happiness and Perfection or Excellence of human nature—meaning here by ‘Excellence’ not primarily superiority to others, but a partial realization of, or approximation to, an ideal type of human Perfection.” The Method of Ethics (New York: Dover, 1966 [Seventh edition, 1907]), 9.
21. System of Logic, CW, 8, 952.
22. Mill, to borrow Brian Barry’s distinction, thereby transforms happiness from “a want-regarding” consideration (which “takes as given the wants people happen to have”) into an “ideal-regarding” consideration (which, in Mill’s case, involves discounting some wants and treating others, such as those of a more educated character, as more valuable). Brian Barry, Political Argument (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 41–42.
23. This was a theme of Mill’s early essay “Civilization,” CW, 18, 117–48.
24. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–72.
25. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 127. The quoted passage comes from On Liberty, CW, 18, 226.
26. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 128.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. On Liberty, CW, 18, 217; 18, 220.
31. Ibid., 217.
32. Ibid., 223.
33. See, respectively, On Liberty, CW, 18, 223; CW, 18, 224; CW, 18, 225; CW, 18, 224 and CW, 18, 285; CW, 18, 224; CW, 18, 260; CW, 18, 260.
34. On Liberty, CW, 18, 225.
35. Ibid., 282.
36. Ibid., 285.
37. For Mill’s descriptions of certain interests as “rights,” see On Liberty, CW 18, 276; compare here also “Utilitarianism,” CW 10, 250–51. For sustained efforts to make sense of Mill’s account of interests and rights, see especially John C. Rees, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, ed. G. L. Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); and David Lyons, Rights, Welfare and Mill’s Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
38. On Liberty, CW, 18, 224.
39. For a penetrating discussion of this problem, see G. W. Smith, “J. S. Mill on Freedom,” in Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy, eds. Zbigniew Pelczynski and John Gray (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 182–216.
40. See John Gray, “John Stuart Mill: Traditionalist and Revisionist Interpretations,” Literature of Liberty 2 (1979), available online at http:// olldownload.libertyfund.org/EBooks/Editor%20-%20Lit%20Lib_0353.06.pdf.
41. On Liberty, CW, 18, 224.
42. Mill, “Utilitarianism,” CW 10, 250–51.
43. See here, especially, Mill’s discussion of security as a presupposition of economic development, Principles of Political Economy, CW, 4, Book III, Chapter 17, Section 5.
44. Principles of Political Economy, CW, 4, 737.
45. Thus for Stephen Holmes, “security was the idée maîtresse of the liberal tradition.” The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 236.
46. On Liberty, CW, 18, 288.
47. See, for instance, Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), and for an extended critique, see Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).
48. For useful discussions of this chapter, see Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control; and Jonathan Riley, Mill on Liberty (London, Routledge, 1998), 91–107.
49. On Liberty, CW, 18, 276.
50. Compare here Michael Sandel who juxtaposes a communitarian conception of “judgemental toleration” to the conception of “liberal toleration” defended by Rawls and other political liberals. Paradoxically, Mill—who Sandel does not mention in this article—is a paradigmatic “judgemental” tolerator. See Michael J. Sandel, “Judgemental Toleration,” in Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality, ed. Robert P. George (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 107–12.
51. On Liberty, CW, 18, 277.
52. Ibid., 278.
53. All quotations in this paragraph are from Ibid., 278.
54. Ibid., 279.
55. Ibid., 279.
56. For an extended discussion of this dimension of Mill’s thought, see Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control.
57. See here, for instance, the criticisms of Mill’s work—and the endorsement of Berlin’s critique—in the new postscript to John Gray, Mill On Liberty: A Defense, 130–58.
58. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 128.
59. “Subjection of Women,” CW, 21, 400.
60. For an account of the conception of the person that informs Rawls’s political liberalism, see Political Liberalism, 29–34, 81–85.
61. For critical discussions of Mill’s imperialism, see Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), and Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
62. John Gray, Postliberalism (New York: Routledge, 1993), 246. For a discussion of Gray’s critique of progress and liberalism, see Glyn Morgan, “Gray’s Elegy for Progress,” Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 9 (2006), 227–41.
63. Considerations on Representative Government, CW, 19, 549.