In the early 1800s liberalism remained a revolutionary force. In South America lib-eral ideas helped to inspire struggles for independence in the Spanish colonies. Even in France, the dictatorship of Napoleon did not mean a return to the ancien régime.
In his revision of the French laws, the Napoleonic Code, Napoleon gave lasting approval to the principle of civil equality: the aristocrats kept their titles but lost most of their economic and political privileges. While he reestablished Catholicism as the official religion of France, Napoleon also guaranteed freedom of worship to
Adam Smith (1723–1790)
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Protestants and Jews. Some Europeans even welcomed Napoleon’s conquests of their countries as liberation from the old aristocratic social order. Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussian army in 1806, for instance, led Prussia (later part of Germany) to undertake many reforms, including the abolition of serfdom.
On the European continent, however, Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 marked the beginning of thirty years of reaction against these revolutionary changes.
Monarchs and aristocrats reasserted their hereditary rights. Ironically, the country most responsible for Napoleon’s defeat, England, was also the country in which lib-eralism had made its greatest gains.
At the beginning of the 1800s, the British Empire was still expanding. The thir-teen American colonies had gained their independence, but Britain continued to control India, Canada, and Australia, and it was soon to acquire vast territories in Africa as well. The Industrial Revolution was also making England the world’s first great industrial power. Beginning about 1750, the invention of new machinery, the discovery of steam power, and the development of assembly lines and other mass-production techniques brought about a remarkable increase in productive power.
English merchants thus were able to import raw materials, such as cotton, and to manufacture goods to be sold at home and abroad for handsome profits. With its combination of empire and industry, Great Britain became “the workshop of the world”—and the world’s greatest imperial power—in the nineteenth century.
But power comes at a price, and in Britain the price was a society more sharply divided along class lines. Although the landed aristocracy was still the dominant force in the early 1800s, middle-class merchants and professionals made enormous political and economic gains during the first half of the century. The same cannot be said of the men, women, and children of the working class. Poor and numerous, they toiled in the mines, mills, and factories that sprang up during the Industrial Revolution, and their situation was bleak indeed. Without unemployment compen-sation, or regulation of working hours or safety conditions, or the legal right to form trade or labor unions, they worked for very low wages under extremely harsh and in-secure conditions. Just how harsh is suggested by a bill proposed in Parliament early in the century to improve the workers’ position. The bill forbade factories to employ children under the age of ten, to put anyone under eighteen on night work (i.e., 9P.M. through 5 A.M.), or to require anyone under eighteen to work more than ten and one-half hours a day. Even this bill did not pass until, after years of debate, it had been so weakened as to be ineffective.20
In economic status and in political power, too, the working class fell far behind the middle class in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Reform Bill of 1832 lowered property qualifications enough to give middle-class males the right to vote, but most adult males and all women were still denied suffrage. This situation was a matter of some concern to the leading liberal writers of the day, a group known then as the Philosophic Radicals and later as the Utilitarians.
Utilitarianism
Jeremy Bentham. The original leader of the Utilitarians (or Philosophic Radicals) was the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). Society must be made more rational, he insisted, and the first step in this direction is to recognize that people act
out of self-interest. Moreover, everyone has an interest in experiencing pleasure and avoiding pain. As Bentham put it, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”21 This is simply a fact of human nature, he thought, and there is nothing we can do to change it. But once we
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
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understand that all people seek pleasure and avoid pain in everything they do, we can take steps to be better pleasure-seekers and pain-avoiders.
Bentham did not mean that we should seek pleasure in immediate gratification—
in getting drunk, for example—because the pain we experience during a hangover or others suffer from our obnoxious drunken behavior later will probably outweigh the short-term pleasure. He meant, rather, that we should seek utility. Something has utility—a hammer for a carpenter, for instance, or money for almost everyone—if it helps someone do what he or she wants. Because people want to be happy, utility promotes happiness.
Bentham recognized that people will sometimes fail to see what does and does not have utility for them—someone who drops out of school may not appreciate the utility of education, for example. He also admitted that, in pursuing our own plea-sures, we may bring pain to others. But the purpose of government is to solve these problems. In Bentham’s words, “The business of government is to promote the happiness of society, by punishing and rewarding.”22 By punishing those who cause pain to others and by rewarding those who give pleasure, in other words, govern-ment can and should act to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
From this Bentham drew two general conclusions about government. The first was that government could often, though not always, promote the greatest hap-piness of the greatest number simply by leaving people alone. Individuals are usu-ally the best judges of their own interests, so government should usuusu-ally let people act as they see fit. For this reason Bentham accepted the laissez faire arguments of Adam Smith. His second conclusion was that government is not likely to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number if it is controlled by a small segment of society. In the pursuit of utility, Bentham declared, everyone is to count equally. In calculating the greatest happiness of the greatest number, “each [individual person is] to count for one, and none for more than one.”23 Thus government cannot favor the rich over the poor, men over women, or be partial to any particular individual or group. Government must weigh everyone’s interests equally, and this requires that almost everyone be allowed to vote. Although Bentham’s views on voting are not al-together clear, he did support universal male suffrage and, with certain reservations, the vote for women as well.24
In retrospect it is scarcely surprising that what has been called the age of demo-cratic revolution25—the late eighteenth century—produced a democratic revolution in moral and political philosophy. Utilitarianism, democratic inasmuch as it is majoritar-ian (“the greatest happiness of the greatest number”) and revolutionary inasmuch as its egalitarian ethos (“each to count for one and none for more than one”), challenges the older aristocratic ethos of inequality. But it remained for followers of Bentham to iron out the kinks and work out the details. Foremost among these was James Mill.
James Mill. Bentham’s chief disciple and propagandist was James Mill (1773–1836), a dour Scotsman who had been educated for the Presbyterian ministry, lost his faith, and moved to London. There he met Bentham and became his most ardent ally and spokesman. Bentham the wealthy and eccentric bachelor and Mill the harried and hardworking father of eight made an odd but effective team. When the critic William Hazlitt heard that one of Bentham’s books had been translated into French, he asked jokingly, “But when will someone translate Mr. Bentham into English?”
That, in effect, is what James Mill did: he turned Bentham’s wordy and prolix prose into his own clear and plain English. His brief essay Government (1820) is the most succinct statement of Benthamite political theory.26 Mill maintains that the aim of government is to promote the greatest happiness of the entire community and of the individuals composing it. All those individuals are motivated by self-interest, and in particular the interest in experiencing pleasure and avoiding pain. It is the nature of humans to not only desire happiness but to expend as little effort as possible in obtaining it. Labor being the means of obtaining happiness, and our own labor be-ing painful to us, we will, unless prevented, try to live off the labor of others. It is the job of government to prevent this outcome by protecting the fruits of our labor from the predations of others. Mill’s essay is the classic statement of the protection-ist theory of democracy.
James Mill was the father, and Bentham the godfather, of another and even more eminent philosopher, John Stuart Mill.
John Stuart Mill. The views of John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) in some respects re-sembled and in others repudiated those of Bentham and his father. Like them, he professed to be a Utilitarian; but he believed that the protectionist theory of democ-racy was incomplete and insufficient, and that his father’s and godfather’s version of Utilitarianism did not go far enough in protecting and promoting the liberty of all individuals, including women, to live their own lives as they see fit. The most influ-ential Utilitarian of his day, the younger Mill championed a number of controversial causes. Whether supporting women’s rights or arguing that government should set minimum educational standards for all, Mill’s greatest concern was to defend and extend individual liberty. This concern is most evident in his essay On Liberty.
When Mill published On Liberty in 1859, liberalism seemed to have triumphed, at least in England and the United States. The old enemies—ascribed status, reli-gious conformity, and absolute government—were no longer the obstacles to indi-vidual liberty they once had been. Yet Mill was alarmed by what he took to be a new threat to liberty in the growing power of public opinion. In the old days, Mill said, the chief enemy of freedom was the government; but now that we elect representa-tives, the government is more responsive to the desires of the people. It is respon-sive, however, to the majority of the people, or at least the majority of those who vote, and this allows them to use the government to restrict or take away the liberty of those who do not share the majority’s views. Moreover, the majority can bring social pressure to bear on those who do not conform to the ordinary, conventional ways of life. Without going through the government or the law, the “moral coercion of public opinion” can stifle freedom of thought and action by making social out-casts of individuals who do not conform to social customs and conventional beliefs.
Like Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America he greatly admired, Mill was worried about “the tyranny of the majority.”
Unfortunately, Utilitarianism, in its original Benthamite formulation, not only includes no adequate safeguards against this new kind of tyranny, it could conceiv-ably aid and abet it. The problem arises in this way. Suppose that a majority of the members of a community decide that what would make them happy is to torment or even torture an unpopular individual or minority. What, on Utilitarian grounds, is to stop them and thereby protect the liberty and promote the happiness of the
unpopular individual or minority? To this question Bentham had no adequate an-swer. Mill set out to rectify what he saw as a defect in democracy and Utilitarianism:
the possibility in both of majoritarian tyranny.
On Liberty was Mill’s attempt to deal with this new form of tyranny. There he ad-vanced “one very simple principle”: “The only purpose for which power can be right-fully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”27 According to this principle—sometimes called the harm principle—every sane adult should be free to do whatever he or she wants so long as his or her actions do not harm or threaten to harm others. Government and society, then, should not interfere
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
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with an individual’s activities unless that individual is somehow harming or threaten-ing to harm others. Government has no business prohibitthreaten-ing the sale of alcohol, for instance, on the grounds that drinking harms the drinker; but government should certainly prohibit drunken driving on the grounds that this poses a serious threat of harm to others.
In formulating the harm principle Mill in effect formalizes an idea expressed by Thomas Jefferson some seventy-five years earlier. “The legitimate powers of govern-ment,” Jefferson wrote, “extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”28 I might find my neighbor’s opinion offensive or upsetting; but unless its expression causes demonstrable harm to me or to someone else, government has no legitimate role in outlawing its expression, however offended or upset some people might be.
Mill defended his principle by appealing not to natural rights, as most of the early liberals had done, but to utility. Freedom is a good thing, he argued, because it promotes “the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.”29 By this he meant that both individuals and society as a whole will benefit if people are encouraged to think and act freely. For the individual, freedom is vital to personal development. Our mental and moral faculties are like muscles, Mill said.
Without regular and rigorous exercise, they will weaken and shrivel. But people cannot exercise their minds and their powers of judgment when they are con-stantly told what they can and cannot do. To be fully human, then, individuals must be free to think and speak for themselves—as long as they neither harm nor threaten harm to others.
It is possible, of course, that people who speak and act freely will make others, perhaps even the majority of society, uncomfortable and unhappy. But in the long run, Mill argued, the ideas of nonconformists such as Socrates, Jesus, and Galileo—
however upsetting or offensive their views were at the time—work to the benefit of society. Progress is possible only when there is open competition between different ideas, opinions, and beliefs. As in economics, a free marketplace of competing ideas yields a greater variety to choose from and allows people to distinguish good ideas from bad. Without freedom of thought and action, society will remain stuck in the rut of conformity and will never progress.
Mill’s desire to promote individual liberty also led him to recommend repre-sentative democracy as the best possible form of government. In Considerations on Representative Government (1861) he maintained that political participation is one of the best forms of exercise for the mental and moral faculties. Only in a de-mocracy, he argued, is this kind of exercise available to all citizens. In this respect Mill’s argument for democracy differed from Bentham’s, who thought that de-mocracy is valuable as a means of protecting individuals’ material interests. That is, in so far as everyone has an equal vote in a democracy, then every voter has an equal say when voting for or against proposed policies or candidates for office—
an equal say that Bentham believed that voters would use to protect their personal interests. Mill agreed that “self-protection” is a valuable feature of democracy, but he held that “self-development” is even more valuable, as democratic partici-pation can promote the civic education of citizens by broadening their horizons and sympathies through discussion, debate, and public service, such as jury duty.
In this way Mill stressed educative theory of democracy rather than the protec-tionist theory that his father and Bentham espoused.30 Even so, Mill’s fear of “the tyranny of the majority” kept him from embracing democracy wholeheartedly, in an era when most voters were ill- or uneducated and many were even illiterate.
Among other things, he favored a form of plural voting in which every literate man and woman will have a vote, but some—those with higher levels of educa-tion, for instance—will have two, three, or more. Plural voting thus would enable everyone to enjoy the benefits of political participation, yet allow more enlight-ened and better-informed citizens to protect individual liberty. Such a system was necessary, Mill believed, at least until the overall level of education was high enough to remove the threat of majority tyranny. Like his father, Mill was a life-long employee of the British East India Company and, with some qualifications and limitations, a defender of British imperialism. As such, he argued that neither liberty nor democracy would be appropriate outside “civilized” Western societies for some time to come. “Despotism,” he wrote, “is a legitimate mode of govern-ment in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvegovern-ment, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.”31 We must remember that in the context of Mill’s own time, this seemingly illiberal and even shocking statement was markedly more liberal than the views expressed by many if not most of Mill’s contemporaries.
As for economic matters, Mill began his career as a staunch defender of laissez faire capitalism. Toward the end of his life, however, he called himself a socialist.32 This shift in his thinking was one of the first signs of an even greater shift on the part of many liberals in the latter part of the nineteenth century—a shift that divided liberalism into rival camps.