Week 10 John Stuart Mill
On Liberty Notes in the Margins (Norton Anthology 7th. edition, Volume 2B, Victorian)
Introduction. John Stuart Mill asks the fundamental questions of social and political science:
1) what is human nature? (Organic)
2) how can we best educate and develop it? (Freedom and variety of situations)
3) what is the ideal society? (One that embraces development and liberty)
4) who can lead us towards it? (Eminent thinkers)
Mill proposes a model of development, so he must specify the agent that will change things as they now stand. What forces are repressing liberty and impeding progress today?
1146. Mill quotes Wilhelm von Humboldt on human nature: “the end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole....” This is a reformulation or modification of Greek and Renaissance ideals about self-development. It is not a formulation that the utilitarian Mr. Gradgrind would understand. Mill continues that, “Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth, as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience. But it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way.” Mill of course favors education, but insists upon specificity with regard to the goal towards which the educator should strive. Ultimately, he wants balance in all things, and education is a central way to achieve that.
1147. Mill seems to agree with John Milton that “reason is but choosing.” He says, “The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice.” Custom is the enemy of genuine individualism. Again, “He who lets the world... choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the apelike one of imitation.” To what extent, we might ask, would Mill countenance the consumer imitation model of bourgeois liberalism? It seems clear that he challenges this model, whereby we link our sense of self to material objects, and mistake the accumulation of owned objects for true progress.
Mill insists that “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” As he said just above, a perfect society built by automatons would not be a good thing. Humanity is constituted by potential that requires experience to realize and actualize itself. This basic romantic principle cuts against liberal economics, and certainly opposes the atomistic and mechanical conception of human nature we find in Jeremy Bentham.
1148. As for our emotional side, Mill writes as follows: “Yet desires and impulses are as much a part of a perfect human being, as beliefs and restraints: and strong impulses are only perilous when not properly balanced... It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.” Mill demands the same freedom and exercise for impulses and desires that William Blake does. He is all in favor of “energy,” but with the addition of a need for balance. Mill defines the word character as belonging to a “person whose desires and impulses are his own.” He refers -- probably consciously -- to Thomas Carlyle’s phrase “steam engine universe.” Then he goes on to criticize Carlyle rather directly if politely: “In some early states of society, these forces might be, and were, too much ahead of the power which society then possessed of disciplining and controlling them. There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess... To overcome this difficulty, law and discipline... asserted a power over the whole man... But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.” Therefore, Carlyle’s feudalism is anachronistic and cannot supply the needed pattern for contemporary life -- it proposes to deal with inauthenticity by imposing an anachronism on everyone.
1149. “In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves -- what do I prefer?... They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of the station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary.” Middle-class conformity is the enemy -- the same bourgeoisie against which Carlyle takes aim. But the idea is that this middle-class has come by a much more tear radical and effective means of control -- not violent repression but rather the persistent and forced internalization of socially acceptable thoughts, until it is no longer necessary to think at all. I am reminded of Marcus Aurelius’ comment in his meditations that it is necessary not even to think what would offend others in our inmost thoughts. So much for romantic interiority. Mill continues with his critique of Carlyle, saying that such conformism is only acceptable on the “Calvinistic theory.” In that theology, “the one great offense of man is self-will.” So Calvin stands in for Carlyle here -- Mill’s criticism is largely against Carlyle’s social vision in Past and Present. Further notes -- Friedrich Nietzsche shows much contempt and yet a certain admiration for this trickery whereby the human animal is branded into making promises and keeping them, and of perceiving things the same way everyone else does. It might also be worth mentioning Michel Foucault’s idea that it is not so much repression that makes societies go as production and enumeration or definition, with subsequent control and shape in a non-humanistic way.
1150. Mill says that “‘Pagan self-assertion’ is one of the elements of human worth, as well as ‘Christian self-denial.’ There is a Greek ideal of self-development.” This kind of statement seems to flow from Mill’s understanding of Goethe -- a modern version of classical humanism. Pericles is the ideal -- full development of all the person’s faculties, all human potential. Mill says that “In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others.” His social theory argues that richer “units” will lead to a richer mass of people. This brand of individualism takes account of larger social needs, so Mill is not a collectivist like Carlyle.
“To be held to rigid rules of justice for the sake of others develops the feelings and capacities which have the good of others for their object. But to be restrained in things not affecting their good, by their mere displeasure, develops nothing valuable, except such force of character as may unfold itself in resisting the restraint.” Mill opposes the excess of restraint for social conformity, though he recognizes that such restraint is a powerful force to be reckoned with. The need to resist against unnecessary constraints, Mill would agree with Sigmund Freud, accounts for a lot of misdirected individual and social energy. He promotes self-development, culture -- but thanks to the economic and social context in which he sets forth his theory, it will be taken as one idea among others in the marketplace of ideas. That is a very difficult problem to resolve.
1151. Custom versus genius: custom turns us into machines. “Persons of genius…are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.” Genius is something that Mill insists upon “emphatically”; it requires freedom and variety as its atmosphere. This is hardly an argument invoking “mass culture” as Walter Benjamin would, and it differentiates him markedly from Carlyle, who shows little interest in it—his heroic ideal isn’t about genius but about the worship of force and personal charisma or energy. Mill is more genuinely indebted to the romantic authors he has been reading. Well, fashion is one major challenge to this organic model of genius and development. Fashion links individual expression to an ever-recylable system of objects—generating a sense of self that stems from endless repetition and consumption. We identify with an image of ourselves, and take all necessary (economic) steps to conform to that image, but the image keeps giving way to another one. This model of the self mechanizes and harnesses the old romantic “problem of desire,” stripping it of its link to organic theory, to three-dimensional humanistic conceptions of human nature. Mill is concerned about the broad social forces bearing down upon us all—public opinion is like fashion, only in ideas. There is much inventiveness in fashion, inventiveness in “retailoring” what is out to make it in again. Carlyle responds against flunkeyist “fashionism” on its own terms, and thinks that his Clothes Philosophy provides a “recycling” alternative to flunkeyism, but how accurate is that faith?
1154. “The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement…The progressive principle, however, in either shape…is antagonistic to the sway of Custom…” Mill doesn’t see liberty and improvement as necessarily opposed. The enlightened person should always be aiming to improve. The important thing is to oppose complacency. In his book, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, C.B. MacPherson points out that there is nothing inherently developmental about bourgeois liberal democracy. The accumulation of objects is not development, and so liberal democracy all too easily betrays its foundations in Whig gentility, whereby society is something like a gentlemen’s agreement to let progress take its slow course towards the spiritual and intellectual betterment of all. Materialist capitalism annuls this kind of “slow time” in favor of perpetual immediacy. Mill’s borrowings from the romantics may commit him to the infinite deferral of improvement, and to a tacit cultural elitism. I should end by mentioning once more the system of self-object identification inherent in fashion-based consumer culture, and suggest that perhaps we need not stress Mill’s kind of “genius” and “character” (admirable though they are) so much as insist that we must think our own thoughts even as we are subjected to others’. This is something like Greek strength as a model of resistance and progress, and I would have to admit that it largely cedes the possibility of rapid and massive changes in the social order. But that seems unlikely anytime soon. My point is that rejection of consumer culture may not be very convincing or effective. Probably the best you can do is inflection with a balanced self as the goal. Mill sees democracy as work, not as a perfect system.
Autobiography
1166. “From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object.” In the beginning, Mill pursued a vague, general object -- reform, the happiness of others. I like the following passage: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And of course the answer is no. The negation here is similar to the effect of Carlyle’s steam-engine universe rolling over a person’s inner being. Mill says that he had nothing left to live for when he heard this “Everlasting No,” and he must have felt that he had lived as an automaton. His foundation for personal happiness was only an abstraction, what Francis Bacon would call a philosophical cobweb. It was a utopian vision based on a mechanical view of human nature.
1167. “My course of study had led me to believe that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another... through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience.” James Mill had taught his son that the goal of education was “to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it.” James Mill followed a scientific model of the individual, and utilitarian education presupposes that character develops along the lines of mechanical association. If you identify your personal happiness with the general good, the idea goes, so long as you are working towards the general good you will be happy. But this is no better than middle-class conformity. It is not the way lasting human connections are made; it requires a shallow, flattened notion of human happiness and individuality.
1168. “Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling.” It was not so much what Mill read but how he was taught to read it. The word analysis can mean “freeing up” the object of study, but that is not usually how we understand the term. The ordinary understanding is closer to the one Wordsworth condemns -- “We murder to dissect.” Bring up the famous definition of a horse in Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times: “graminiverous quadruped.” The young John Stuart Mill seems to have been a victim of “dissociation of sensibility.” Helping other people is not a bad object, but you must first determine the grounds of human connection -- they are organic, not mechanical. You cannot superimpose upon the passions a scientific utopian scheme.
1169. “I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s Memoires, and came to the passage which relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them....” Spontaneous emotion proves to be the key to his recovery. Mill describes a Wordsworthian moment in the form of an accidental encounter with a literary text, an autobiographical text written by Marmontel. This accidental encounter escapes Bentham’s and James Mill’s scheme concerning the formation of salutary associations. So the example is a rebuke of straightforward Benthamite utilitarianism-- the young Marmontel made a key emotional bond with others, forgetting himself for the moment. What we find described is not a mechanical “I ought” but a genuine outpouring of sympathy. Mill says that after reading this passage, he never again reached the depths of depression he formerly experienced.
1170. “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it...” happiness is still the goal here, but it is not to be directly pursued. The point is to stop analyzing happiness and start working on something you find meaningful for its own sake. It is best not to think of everything you say and do in light of ultimate purposes or end-states of consciousness. Mill has learned to ask Walter Pater’s question -- “what is this activity or thing or person to me?” It is not good enough to pursue some abstract notion of the general good and to claim that you are achieving an equally abstract kind of happiness by doing so; the activity must be meaningful to you personally prior to the attachment of any such abstract notion. Mill has not rejected the idea that happiness flows from activity, but it makes all the difference in the world whether that activity is do-gooding or intrinsically and intimately valuable to the person pursuing it. For example, if I have an inclination to tinker with computers, building them from scratch and solving whatever problems come up as I do so, I may by such means become happy, at least for a while. The same goes for things like reading a Jane Austen novel -- you don’t sit down to read thinking, “my goal in reading this book is to be happy.” If you did, you would become morbidly prone to checking your emotional state every other sentence to register your level of happiness or unhappiness. This kind of obsession resembles both heavy Puritan examination of the state of one’s soul and the associational theory of happiness promoted by Mill’s father and his tutor Jeremy Bentham. It is best to allow your consciousness to be directed towards an object other than your own interior states.
This is profoundly good advice, but if we want to criticize it, we might say that it is an evasion of romantic troubles concerning the problem of desire. It is this problem that caused Carlyle to reject happiness altogether in favor of self-annihilation leading to meaningfulness, awe, and collective belonging. Don’t we invariably reflect back upon our states of consciousness, whether we mean to or not? And if we cannot avoid doing so, the kind of happiness Mill describes will not satisfy us for long -- human beings even get tired of being happy after a while.
In any case, on the same page Mill emphasizes the need for balancing the sway of our faculties -- feelings and intellection are both important: “I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities... The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to me of primary importance.” A many-sided personality needs many-sided experiences to develop and be free. Feeling is not mechanical, not associational. The self is not an isolated atom but rather an organic construct. Happiness comes from pursuing intrinsically meaningful activities and from allowing “passive susceptibilities” to operate freely. By this term, I believe Mill means self-culture, the patient development of our individual potential until we achieve a balanced, harmonious self.
1171. Mill reiterates the point he made earlier about basic utilitarianism’s unbalanced, mechanical view of human nature -- simply rendering people “free and in a state of physical comfort” and removing all hardships from life really would not make a community happy. Then he goes on to discuss Wordsworth’s significance for him: “This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event in my life.”
1172. “What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind.” Wordsworth teaches John Stuart Mill the true sources of happiness, and shows him the value of contemplation, of “wise passiveness” as a corrective for the analytic habit, which in modern times has reached the level of an obsession.
My Lecture Notes--Long, But Perhaps Useful
Mill is criticizing some of the flaws in utilitarianism to save that philosophy from itself. Utilitarianism is the corollary of C19 market economics, so that’s the first thing to discuss. We know the basics: the philosophers of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith and beyond, say something like the following: Rather than try to centralize a nation’s economy, the rulers should allow ordinary people to exercise their own initiative in producing, selling, and buying the material things that improve their standard of living. The less interference there is—consonant with preventing monopoly—the faster the people’s standard of living will improve. Supply and demand regulate the social order—people will buy what they want, and there will be someone to sell it to them at the right price, thanks to competition.
Let’s give the theory its due. In Smith’s formulation, capitalism is an Enlightenment-based, optimistic way of viewing human affairs: the market will harness otherwise selfish desires for gain and pleasure, and, as by an Invisible Hand, arrange human affairs in the best and fairest possible way. You don’t need the King to do it for you—your own desires and choices will bring order from chaos. Maybe we can’t change our nature and become angels, but that need not keep us from producing and consuming our way to a free and equitable society. And we will have done it by our own efforts, not like immature dependents on the will of some god or monarch. Kant said that Enlightenment consisted in humanity’s growing up and taking responsibility for its affairs; that’s what Smith wants us to do.
In addition to helping us achieve the age-old dream of “the good life” in material terms, capitalism is admirable in creating a space where all the ancient prejudices no longer tyrannize over us, or cause us to tyrannize over others. Consider how apt a given society is to mistreat the few or the disadvantaged, to discriminate against people because they don’t look like the majority, behave like the majority in certain matters, share the same religion or even quite the same strand of a religion, and so forth. Capitalism doesn’t care about anything like that—if you walk into a big department store, the merchant only wants to serve you, deliver a product, and get some of your green money in return. It doesn’t matter what color you are, whether you’re straight or gay, whether you’re a Christian, Jew, Moslem, Hindu, or Buddhist. Everybody’s money looks and talks the same. At least in theory, a capitalist system should be absolutely amoral. (That is, so long as fanatics and ignoramuses don’t import their extra-system values into the market and use the market to enforce those values, as in “we don’t serve ‘coloreds’ in this here diner.” Inherited wealth is another possible problem—it promotes something like the principle of aristocracy by birth.) Money flattens out a lot other “values” to a single quantitative standard—it liberates us from belief systems long used to treat others unjustly and strip them of their freedom. In this way, capitalism is as dynamic and revolutionary in the moral sphere as it is in the material realm of production.
Utilitarianism, which Ruskin despises and Carlyle disdainfully calls “Benthamee Radicalism,” is the corollary of market economics. Utilitarianism agrees with Adam Smith’s capitalists that individual choice-making and pursuit of happiness leads to social harmony, which Benthamees call “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” It’s a philosophy for a society of individuals who produce and consume commodities for one another, gaining their happiness in large part through the satisfaction of desires for comfort, sensory stimulation, and so forth.
Further, in its promotion of self-gratification, utilitarian philosophy further legitimizes capitalism’s deep indebtedness to the realm of desire as the source of social order and progress. Why? Well, we can probably agree with Carlyle that even the humblest nobody—the shoeblack, for instance—in the social order just keeps on conceiving one desire after another right up to his dying breath. The brilliant thing about market economics is that it generates not only objects to satisfy basic desires, it generates or “manufactures” new desires at a really stunning pace. We in our so-called post-industrial, service-based, new-age, information-superhighway (use your own phrase) society and economy know this even better than Marx. It’s evident in the realm of fashion, which recycles old desires in new and exciting packages, or even comes up with altogether new desires, which we either indulge as “wants” knowingly, or mistake for absolute needs. Capitalism thrives upon turning what we want into what we need, or think we need. The whole system is based upon desire for gratification of one sort or another—if we all became ascetics and decided to avoid everything not directly related to our survival and lcd comfort, capitalism would collapse instantly. People made fun of Bush 41 as “King George” when he said people should fix the recession by “just buying something,” but in a sense his majesty had it about right. “O reason not the need!” as another famous king said….Or if you don’t like 41 or King Lear, how about Oscar Wilde? “It’s only the superficial things in life that matter—man’s deeper nature is soon found out.” In this view, life is all about how many ever-so-slightly different shades of peach lipstick you currently own, how many unnecessary creature comforts, what the tail fins on your car look like, what color your hair is this week, and so forth.
No wonder we worship Hollywood actors and sports stars. And no wonder sex (that multifarious set of practices that we decadent westerners especially engage in mostly for fun) is the vehicle that drives advertising—it’s only slightly glib to say that advertisers sell sex even more than they sell particular products. Convince someone that he or she will “get more” by using a certain toothpaste or buying a certain car or cell phone, and profits flow.
Well, Utilitarianism is the philosophical handmaid of capitalism’s egalitarianism and choice-maximizing. People make fun of Bentham for being a one-dimensional man and for saying that “pushpin is as good as poetry.” But that’s his genius: he refuses to go beyond mechanistic formulae and paeans to quantitative pleasure because he’s convinced that it’s none of his business what you’re up to so long as you don’t harm anyone else. Pleasure is pleasure. Some people like opera; others like world wrestling federation matches. Some like both. So what? Who is to judge “quality” here, without either an elite few tyrannizing over the majority of lowbrow pleasure-seekers, or the lowbrows tyrannizing over the high-cultures? The best society, for the utilitarian, can be arrived at by the operation of the market: lots of happy people possessing and doing things that make them as happy as possible, and not trying to prevent others from achieving the same goals.
As for politics, capitalism and democracy are said to go well together: the “rational consumer” model of subjectivity, with its utilitarian imperative of pleasure, posits exactly the kind of bourgeois, self-interested individual who demands the democratic right to have a say in the way the country is governed. A society based upon the production and consumption of gratifying objects requires maximum freedom to make choices about which objects gratify one. Coercion is, simply put, bad for business! Also, markets need the kind of “stable dynamism” that comes with long faith in the democratic process: you can’t fulfill your needs consistently under a Stalin or Hitler, even if they provide “order” of a static sort. Authoritarians tend to deemphasize the pursuit of pleasure and push the idea instead that we must work like slaves towards some allegedly higher goal, generally an abstraction like “the people’s good,” which sometimes, though not always, translates into a vile particular like “the ruler’s bank account.” (Generally, authoritarians preach self-annihilation, or rather they channel the individual’s unconscious and “libidinal” desires to belong to something larger than themselves—the Reich, Pol Pot’s agrarian utopia, whatever.)
Briefly, Marx’s critique of all this optimism about the market is as follows:
The human relation to commodities is “fetishism”—we produce material objects and invest the objects themselves with value, eliding the fact that human labor makes them valuable. When you make a fetish or totem object, you worship it and let it determine what you do and think because it somehow contains the power of dead ancestors, etc. So the commodity becomes the determining power in human life, and humanity is reduced to a bunch of little cogs in the great machine that produces commodities. The capitalist sees humanity in abstract and mechanical terms—we are merely production-units, and the things produced come “alive.” In this way, any pleasure we get from objects is purely incidental: the system exists to perpetuate and augment itself; it really doesn’t serve humanity’s needs in any but the most superficial way.
Marx’s view follows Hegel: we produce our humanity and our world through the labor we perform. As Carlyle and Ruskin would say, work is what binds us together into a community, and what gives us our sense of dignity as human beings. But under capitalism, work is not even something we want to do—the circulation of commodities is all that matters, and ordinary people remain profoundly alienated from the labor they perform and from the results of it. It is meaningless or worse, and keeps them from becoming fully human. Further, the system by no means creates equality: those who own the means of production have all the capital, and they hire the workers’ labor on very unfair terms, paying them about as much as it takes just to stay alive and bury their troubles in drunkenness. Indeed, the vision of utopia is cruel in that the ordinary man and woman see the great wealth they’ve helped to produce all around them, but they can’t share in the benefits. The coal miner heats the rich man’s home, but shivers in his own hovel when the winter comes. Immoral! Unfair! Class inequity in its most unsustainable and vicious form. And capitalist “free-market” ideology sanctions it all with pious hypocrisy, declaring that the losers deserve exactly what they’re getting, while the self-righteous winners enjoy the fruits of others’ labor.
Well, Mill offers his own criticism of Utilitarianism—he focuses on what he perceives as the inadequacy of the assumptions made by Bentham and his father James Mill concerning human nature. He demonstrates the effects of his semi-mechanical, if benignly administered, education. The result is a nervous breakdown and deep reexamination of the basis of human happiness. Happiness is still the aim of life, but the issue of quality now becomes vital. And along with it, of course, comes the whole issue of who gets to decide on quality. Who will tell us when we’re attaining the right kind of happiness by the right means? Evidently Bentham and James Mill were not setting forth a tenable path for their protégé. But Mill doesn’t have easy answers about how progress is to be made—certainly, as he points out in On Liberty, we don’t want the vulgar middle class to become absolute in their opinions, as they’re threatening to do. Neither do we want political authoritarianism. The best Mill can offer is the notion that “those who stand on the higher eminences of thought” might prove to be the agents of improvement and change. This is still a deep problem for us today—to what extent are we right to be dissatisfied with our culture and expressions of unenlightened political will? Who decides value? Is there any authority principle higher than “the people and their desires and tastes”? Does a society need to have a sense of direction, or is that actually a mistaken demand? But doesn’t a society tend to ratify its majoritarian values as the only possible ones, and insist that its directionality flows from such values? So then we would need critics to break up what Mill calls “the hostile and dreaded censorship” imposed by the middle-class bourgeois majority. He’s responding to the fact that just as monopoly is a dangerous tendency in capitalist economics, so is cultural monopoly a threat when one group begins to dominate the production and consumption of culture.
Introduction. John Stuart Mill asks the fundamental questions of social and political science:
1) what is human nature? (Organic)
2) how can we best educate and develop it? (Freedom and variety of situations)
3) what is the ideal society? (One that embraces development and liberty)
4) who can lead us towards it? (Eminent thinkers)
Mill proposes a model of development, so he must specify the agent that will change things as they now stand. What forces are repressing liberty and impeding progress today?
1146. Mill quotes Wilhelm von Humboldt on human nature: “the end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole....” This is a reformulation or modification of Greek and Renaissance ideals about self-development. It is not a formulation that the utilitarian Mr. Gradgrind would understand. Mill continues that, “Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth, as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience. But it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way.” Mill of course favors education, but insists upon specificity with regard to the goal towards which the educator should strive. Ultimately, he wants balance in all things, and education is a central way to achieve that.
1147. Mill seems to agree with John Milton that “reason is but choosing.” He says, “The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice.” Custom is the enemy of genuine individualism. Again, “He who lets the world... choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the apelike one of imitation.” To what extent, we might ask, would Mill countenance the consumer imitation model of bourgeois liberalism? It seems clear that he challenges this model, whereby we link our sense of self to material objects, and mistake the accumulation of owned objects for true progress.
Mill insists that “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” As he said just above, a perfect society built by automatons would not be a good thing. Humanity is constituted by potential that requires experience to realize and actualize itself. This basic romantic principle cuts against liberal economics, and certainly opposes the atomistic and mechanical conception of human nature we find in Jeremy Bentham.
1148. As for our emotional side, Mill writes as follows: “Yet desires and impulses are as much a part of a perfect human being, as beliefs and restraints: and strong impulses are only perilous when not properly balanced... It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.” Mill demands the same freedom and exercise for impulses and desires that William Blake does. He is all in favor of “energy,” but with the addition of a need for balance. Mill defines the word character as belonging to a “person whose desires and impulses are his own.” He refers -- probably consciously -- to Thomas Carlyle’s phrase “steam engine universe.” Then he goes on to criticize Carlyle rather directly if politely: “In some early states of society, these forces might be, and were, too much ahead of the power which society then possessed of disciplining and controlling them. There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess... To overcome this difficulty, law and discipline... asserted a power over the whole man... But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.” Therefore, Carlyle’s feudalism is anachronistic and cannot supply the needed pattern for contemporary life -- it proposes to deal with inauthenticity by imposing an anachronism on everyone.
1149. “In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves -- what do I prefer?... They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of the station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary.” Middle-class conformity is the enemy -- the same bourgeoisie against which Carlyle takes aim. But the idea is that this middle-class has come by a much more tear radical and effective means of control -- not violent repression but rather the persistent and forced internalization of socially acceptable thoughts, until it is no longer necessary to think at all. I am reminded of Marcus Aurelius’ comment in his meditations that it is necessary not even to think what would offend others in our inmost thoughts. So much for romantic interiority. Mill continues with his critique of Carlyle, saying that such conformism is only acceptable on the “Calvinistic theory.” In that theology, “the one great offense of man is self-will.” So Calvin stands in for Carlyle here -- Mill’s criticism is largely against Carlyle’s social vision in Past and Present. Further notes -- Friedrich Nietzsche shows much contempt and yet a certain admiration for this trickery whereby the human animal is branded into making promises and keeping them, and of perceiving things the same way everyone else does. It might also be worth mentioning Michel Foucault’s idea that it is not so much repression that makes societies go as production and enumeration or definition, with subsequent control and shape in a non-humanistic way.
1150. Mill says that “‘Pagan self-assertion’ is one of the elements of human worth, as well as ‘Christian self-denial.’ There is a Greek ideal of self-development.” This kind of statement seems to flow from Mill’s understanding of Goethe -- a modern version of classical humanism. Pericles is the ideal -- full development of all the person’s faculties, all human potential. Mill says that “In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others.” His social theory argues that richer “units” will lead to a richer mass of people. This brand of individualism takes account of larger social needs, so Mill is not a collectivist like Carlyle.
“To be held to rigid rules of justice for the sake of others develops the feelings and capacities which have the good of others for their object. But to be restrained in things not affecting their good, by their mere displeasure, develops nothing valuable, except such force of character as may unfold itself in resisting the restraint.” Mill opposes the excess of restraint for social conformity, though he recognizes that such restraint is a powerful force to be reckoned with. The need to resist against unnecessary constraints, Mill would agree with Sigmund Freud, accounts for a lot of misdirected individual and social energy. He promotes self-development, culture -- but thanks to the economic and social context in which he sets forth his theory, it will be taken as one idea among others in the marketplace of ideas. That is a very difficult problem to resolve.
1151. Custom versus genius: custom turns us into machines. “Persons of genius…are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.” Genius is something that Mill insists upon “emphatically”; it requires freedom and variety as its atmosphere. This is hardly an argument invoking “mass culture” as Walter Benjamin would, and it differentiates him markedly from Carlyle, who shows little interest in it—his heroic ideal isn’t about genius but about the worship of force and personal charisma or energy. Mill is more genuinely indebted to the romantic authors he has been reading. Well, fashion is one major challenge to this organic model of genius and development. Fashion links individual expression to an ever-recylable system of objects—generating a sense of self that stems from endless repetition and consumption. We identify with an image of ourselves, and take all necessary (economic) steps to conform to that image, but the image keeps giving way to another one. This model of the self mechanizes and harnesses the old romantic “problem of desire,” stripping it of its link to organic theory, to three-dimensional humanistic conceptions of human nature. Mill is concerned about the broad social forces bearing down upon us all—public opinion is like fashion, only in ideas. There is much inventiveness in fashion, inventiveness in “retailoring” what is out to make it in again. Carlyle responds against flunkeyist “fashionism” on its own terms, and thinks that his Clothes Philosophy provides a “recycling” alternative to flunkeyism, but how accurate is that faith?
1154. “The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement…The progressive principle, however, in either shape…is antagonistic to the sway of Custom…” Mill doesn’t see liberty and improvement as necessarily opposed. The enlightened person should always be aiming to improve. The important thing is to oppose complacency. In his book, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, C.B. MacPherson points out that there is nothing inherently developmental about bourgeois liberal democracy. The accumulation of objects is not development, and so liberal democracy all too easily betrays its foundations in Whig gentility, whereby society is something like a gentlemen’s agreement to let progress take its slow course towards the spiritual and intellectual betterment of all. Materialist capitalism annuls this kind of “slow time” in favor of perpetual immediacy. Mill’s borrowings from the romantics may commit him to the infinite deferral of improvement, and to a tacit cultural elitism. I should end by mentioning once more the system of self-object identification inherent in fashion-based consumer culture, and suggest that perhaps we need not stress Mill’s kind of “genius” and “character” (admirable though they are) so much as insist that we must think our own thoughts even as we are subjected to others’. This is something like Greek strength as a model of resistance and progress, and I would have to admit that it largely cedes the possibility of rapid and massive changes in the social order. But that seems unlikely anytime soon. My point is that rejection of consumer culture may not be very convincing or effective. Probably the best you can do is inflection with a balanced self as the goal. Mill sees democracy as work, not as a perfect system.
Autobiography
1166. “From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object.” In the beginning, Mill pursued a vague, general object -- reform, the happiness of others. I like the following passage: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And of course the answer is no. The negation here is similar to the effect of Carlyle’s steam-engine universe rolling over a person’s inner being. Mill says that he had nothing left to live for when he heard this “Everlasting No,” and he must have felt that he had lived as an automaton. His foundation for personal happiness was only an abstraction, what Francis Bacon would call a philosophical cobweb. It was a utopian vision based on a mechanical view of human nature.
1167. “My course of study had led me to believe that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another... through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience.” James Mill had taught his son that the goal of education was “to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it.” James Mill followed a scientific model of the individual, and utilitarian education presupposes that character develops along the lines of mechanical association. If you identify your personal happiness with the general good, the idea goes, so long as you are working towards the general good you will be happy. But this is no better than middle-class conformity. It is not the way lasting human connections are made; it requires a shallow, flattened notion of human happiness and individuality.
1168. “Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling.” It was not so much what Mill read but how he was taught to read it. The word analysis can mean “freeing up” the object of study, but that is not usually how we understand the term. The ordinary understanding is closer to the one Wordsworth condemns -- “We murder to dissect.” Bring up the famous definition of a horse in Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times: “graminiverous quadruped.” The young John Stuart Mill seems to have been a victim of “dissociation of sensibility.” Helping other people is not a bad object, but you must first determine the grounds of human connection -- they are organic, not mechanical. You cannot superimpose upon the passions a scientific utopian scheme.
1169. “I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s Memoires, and came to the passage which relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them....” Spontaneous emotion proves to be the key to his recovery. Mill describes a Wordsworthian moment in the form of an accidental encounter with a literary text, an autobiographical text written by Marmontel. This accidental encounter escapes Bentham’s and James Mill’s scheme concerning the formation of salutary associations. So the example is a rebuke of straightforward Benthamite utilitarianism-- the young Marmontel made a key emotional bond with others, forgetting himself for the moment. What we find described is not a mechanical “I ought” but a genuine outpouring of sympathy. Mill says that after reading this passage, he never again reached the depths of depression he formerly experienced.
1170. “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it...” happiness is still the goal here, but it is not to be directly pursued. The point is to stop analyzing happiness and start working on something you find meaningful for its own sake. It is best not to think of everything you say and do in light of ultimate purposes or end-states of consciousness. Mill has learned to ask Walter Pater’s question -- “what is this activity or thing or person to me?” It is not good enough to pursue some abstract notion of the general good and to claim that you are achieving an equally abstract kind of happiness by doing so; the activity must be meaningful to you personally prior to the attachment of any such abstract notion. Mill has not rejected the idea that happiness flows from activity, but it makes all the difference in the world whether that activity is do-gooding or intrinsically and intimately valuable to the person pursuing it. For example, if I have an inclination to tinker with computers, building them from scratch and solving whatever problems come up as I do so, I may by such means become happy, at least for a while. The same goes for things like reading a Jane Austen novel -- you don’t sit down to read thinking, “my goal in reading this book is to be happy.” If you did, you would become morbidly prone to checking your emotional state every other sentence to register your level of happiness or unhappiness. This kind of obsession resembles both heavy Puritan examination of the state of one’s soul and the associational theory of happiness promoted by Mill’s father and his tutor Jeremy Bentham. It is best to allow your consciousness to be directed towards an object other than your own interior states.
This is profoundly good advice, but if we want to criticize it, we might say that it is an evasion of romantic troubles concerning the problem of desire. It is this problem that caused Carlyle to reject happiness altogether in favor of self-annihilation leading to meaningfulness, awe, and collective belonging. Don’t we invariably reflect back upon our states of consciousness, whether we mean to or not? And if we cannot avoid doing so, the kind of happiness Mill describes will not satisfy us for long -- human beings even get tired of being happy after a while.
In any case, on the same page Mill emphasizes the need for balancing the sway of our faculties -- feelings and intellection are both important: “I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities... The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to me of primary importance.” A many-sided personality needs many-sided experiences to develop and be free. Feeling is not mechanical, not associational. The self is not an isolated atom but rather an organic construct. Happiness comes from pursuing intrinsically meaningful activities and from allowing “passive susceptibilities” to operate freely. By this term, I believe Mill means self-culture, the patient development of our individual potential until we achieve a balanced, harmonious self.
1171. Mill reiterates the point he made earlier about basic utilitarianism’s unbalanced, mechanical view of human nature -- simply rendering people “free and in a state of physical comfort” and removing all hardships from life really would not make a community happy. Then he goes on to discuss Wordsworth’s significance for him: “This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event in my life.”
1172. “What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind.” Wordsworth teaches John Stuart Mill the true sources of happiness, and shows him the value of contemplation, of “wise passiveness” as a corrective for the analytic habit, which in modern times has reached the level of an obsession.
My Lecture Notes--Long, But Perhaps Useful
Mill is criticizing some of the flaws in utilitarianism to save that philosophy from itself. Utilitarianism is the corollary of C19 market economics, so that’s the first thing to discuss. We know the basics: the philosophers of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith and beyond, say something like the following: Rather than try to centralize a nation’s economy, the rulers should allow ordinary people to exercise their own initiative in producing, selling, and buying the material things that improve their standard of living. The less interference there is—consonant with preventing monopoly—the faster the people’s standard of living will improve. Supply and demand regulate the social order—people will buy what they want, and there will be someone to sell it to them at the right price, thanks to competition.
Let’s give the theory its due. In Smith’s formulation, capitalism is an Enlightenment-based, optimistic way of viewing human affairs: the market will harness otherwise selfish desires for gain and pleasure, and, as by an Invisible Hand, arrange human affairs in the best and fairest possible way. You don’t need the King to do it for you—your own desires and choices will bring order from chaos. Maybe we can’t change our nature and become angels, but that need not keep us from producing and consuming our way to a free and equitable society. And we will have done it by our own efforts, not like immature dependents on the will of some god or monarch. Kant said that Enlightenment consisted in humanity’s growing up and taking responsibility for its affairs; that’s what Smith wants us to do.
In addition to helping us achieve the age-old dream of “the good life” in material terms, capitalism is admirable in creating a space where all the ancient prejudices no longer tyrannize over us, or cause us to tyrannize over others. Consider how apt a given society is to mistreat the few or the disadvantaged, to discriminate against people because they don’t look like the majority, behave like the majority in certain matters, share the same religion or even quite the same strand of a religion, and so forth. Capitalism doesn’t care about anything like that—if you walk into a big department store, the merchant only wants to serve you, deliver a product, and get some of your green money in return. It doesn’t matter what color you are, whether you’re straight or gay, whether you’re a Christian, Jew, Moslem, Hindu, or Buddhist. Everybody’s money looks and talks the same. At least in theory, a capitalist system should be absolutely amoral. (That is, so long as fanatics and ignoramuses don’t import their extra-system values into the market and use the market to enforce those values, as in “we don’t serve ‘coloreds’ in this here diner.” Inherited wealth is another possible problem—it promotes something like the principle of aristocracy by birth.) Money flattens out a lot other “values” to a single quantitative standard—it liberates us from belief systems long used to treat others unjustly and strip them of their freedom. In this way, capitalism is as dynamic and revolutionary in the moral sphere as it is in the material realm of production.
Utilitarianism, which Ruskin despises and Carlyle disdainfully calls “Benthamee Radicalism,” is the corollary of market economics. Utilitarianism agrees with Adam Smith’s capitalists that individual choice-making and pursuit of happiness leads to social harmony, which Benthamees call “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” It’s a philosophy for a society of individuals who produce and consume commodities for one another, gaining their happiness in large part through the satisfaction of desires for comfort, sensory stimulation, and so forth.
Further, in its promotion of self-gratification, utilitarian philosophy further legitimizes capitalism’s deep indebtedness to the realm of desire as the source of social order and progress. Why? Well, we can probably agree with Carlyle that even the humblest nobody—the shoeblack, for instance—in the social order just keeps on conceiving one desire after another right up to his dying breath. The brilliant thing about market economics is that it generates not only objects to satisfy basic desires, it generates or “manufactures” new desires at a really stunning pace. We in our so-called post-industrial, service-based, new-age, information-superhighway (use your own phrase) society and economy know this even better than Marx. It’s evident in the realm of fashion, which recycles old desires in new and exciting packages, or even comes up with altogether new desires, which we either indulge as “wants” knowingly, or mistake for absolute needs. Capitalism thrives upon turning what we want into what we need, or think we need. The whole system is based upon desire for gratification of one sort or another—if we all became ascetics and decided to avoid everything not directly related to our survival and lcd comfort, capitalism would collapse instantly. People made fun of Bush 41 as “King George” when he said people should fix the recession by “just buying something,” but in a sense his majesty had it about right. “O reason not the need!” as another famous king said….Or if you don’t like 41 or King Lear, how about Oscar Wilde? “It’s only the superficial things in life that matter—man’s deeper nature is soon found out.” In this view, life is all about how many ever-so-slightly different shades of peach lipstick you currently own, how many unnecessary creature comforts, what the tail fins on your car look like, what color your hair is this week, and so forth.
No wonder we worship Hollywood actors and sports stars. And no wonder sex (that multifarious set of practices that we decadent westerners especially engage in mostly for fun) is the vehicle that drives advertising—it’s only slightly glib to say that advertisers sell sex even more than they sell particular products. Convince someone that he or she will “get more” by using a certain toothpaste or buying a certain car or cell phone, and profits flow.
Well, Utilitarianism is the philosophical handmaid of capitalism’s egalitarianism and choice-maximizing. People make fun of Bentham for being a one-dimensional man and for saying that “pushpin is as good as poetry.” But that’s his genius: he refuses to go beyond mechanistic formulae and paeans to quantitative pleasure because he’s convinced that it’s none of his business what you’re up to so long as you don’t harm anyone else. Pleasure is pleasure. Some people like opera; others like world wrestling federation matches. Some like both. So what? Who is to judge “quality” here, without either an elite few tyrannizing over the majority of lowbrow pleasure-seekers, or the lowbrows tyrannizing over the high-cultures? The best society, for the utilitarian, can be arrived at by the operation of the market: lots of happy people possessing and doing things that make them as happy as possible, and not trying to prevent others from achieving the same goals.
As for politics, capitalism and democracy are said to go well together: the “rational consumer” model of subjectivity, with its utilitarian imperative of pleasure, posits exactly the kind of bourgeois, self-interested individual who demands the democratic right to have a say in the way the country is governed. A society based upon the production and consumption of gratifying objects requires maximum freedom to make choices about which objects gratify one. Coercion is, simply put, bad for business! Also, markets need the kind of “stable dynamism” that comes with long faith in the democratic process: you can’t fulfill your needs consistently under a Stalin or Hitler, even if they provide “order” of a static sort. Authoritarians tend to deemphasize the pursuit of pleasure and push the idea instead that we must work like slaves towards some allegedly higher goal, generally an abstraction like “the people’s good,” which sometimes, though not always, translates into a vile particular like “the ruler’s bank account.” (Generally, authoritarians preach self-annihilation, or rather they channel the individual’s unconscious and “libidinal” desires to belong to something larger than themselves—the Reich, Pol Pot’s agrarian utopia, whatever.)
Briefly, Marx’s critique of all this optimism about the market is as follows:
The human relation to commodities is “fetishism”—we produce material objects and invest the objects themselves with value, eliding the fact that human labor makes them valuable. When you make a fetish or totem object, you worship it and let it determine what you do and think because it somehow contains the power of dead ancestors, etc. So the commodity becomes the determining power in human life, and humanity is reduced to a bunch of little cogs in the great machine that produces commodities. The capitalist sees humanity in abstract and mechanical terms—we are merely production-units, and the things produced come “alive.” In this way, any pleasure we get from objects is purely incidental: the system exists to perpetuate and augment itself; it really doesn’t serve humanity’s needs in any but the most superficial way.
Marx’s view follows Hegel: we produce our humanity and our world through the labor we perform. As Carlyle and Ruskin would say, work is what binds us together into a community, and what gives us our sense of dignity as human beings. But under capitalism, work is not even something we want to do—the circulation of commodities is all that matters, and ordinary people remain profoundly alienated from the labor they perform and from the results of it. It is meaningless or worse, and keeps them from becoming fully human. Further, the system by no means creates equality: those who own the means of production have all the capital, and they hire the workers’ labor on very unfair terms, paying them about as much as it takes just to stay alive and bury their troubles in drunkenness. Indeed, the vision of utopia is cruel in that the ordinary man and woman see the great wealth they’ve helped to produce all around them, but they can’t share in the benefits. The coal miner heats the rich man’s home, but shivers in his own hovel when the winter comes. Immoral! Unfair! Class inequity in its most unsustainable and vicious form. And capitalist “free-market” ideology sanctions it all with pious hypocrisy, declaring that the losers deserve exactly what they’re getting, while the self-righteous winners enjoy the fruits of others’ labor.
Well, Mill offers his own criticism of Utilitarianism—he focuses on what he perceives as the inadequacy of the assumptions made by Bentham and his father James Mill concerning human nature. He demonstrates the effects of his semi-mechanical, if benignly administered, education. The result is a nervous breakdown and deep reexamination of the basis of human happiness. Happiness is still the aim of life, but the issue of quality now becomes vital. And along with it, of course, comes the whole issue of who gets to decide on quality. Who will tell us when we’re attaining the right kind of happiness by the right means? Evidently Bentham and James Mill were not setting forth a tenable path for their protégé. But Mill doesn’t have easy answers about how progress is to be made—certainly, as he points out in On Liberty, we don’t want the vulgar middle class to become absolute in their opinions, as they’re threatening to do. Neither do we want political authoritarianism. The best Mill can offer is the notion that “those who stand on the higher eminences of thought” might prove to be the agents of improvement and change. This is still a deep problem for us today—to what extent are we right to be dissatisfied with our culture and expressions of unenlightened political will? Who decides value? Is there any authority principle higher than “the people and their desires and tastes”? Does a society need to have a sense of direction, or is that actually a mistaken demand? But doesn’t a society tend to ratify its majoritarian values as the only possible ones, and insist that its directionality flows from such values? So then we would need critics to break up what Mill calls “the hostile and dreaded censorship” imposed by the middle-class bourgeois majority. He’s responding to the fact that just as monopoly is a dangerous tendency in capitalist economics, so is cultural monopoly a threat when one group begins to dominate the production and consumption of culture.
posted by Alfred J. Drake at
6:00 PM
<< Home