Comment: “Mill was the prophet of an empty liberty and an abstract individual”. (Barker) (2004)
The verdict comes from the introductory chapter of Ernest Barker‘s Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day (1915; later reissued as Political Thought in England 1848–1914). Barker grants that John Stuart Mill moved beyond Benthamism, prizing representative institutions for the character they develop and admitting trade unions and even social regulation of distribution. Yet Mill, he concludes, left liberty without content and the individual without society. The charge fits Mill’s vocabulary better than his substance.
What the Charge Means
- Empty liberty. In On Liberty (1859) freedom is the absence of interference, fenced by the harm principle. Barker’s objection is that Mill had no clear philosophy of rights, the only route by which liberty acquires concrete meaning. Being left alone tells the illiterate or the destitute nothing about what they can do.
- An unstable boundary. The line between self-regarding and other-regarding conduct is arbitrary. Almost any act can be redescribed as affecting others, so the “absolute” private sphere protects little. At the unsafe bridge Mill even appeals to what the man really desires, an idealist move.
- Abstract individual. Mill had no idea of the social whole in which the false antithesis of state and individual disappears. His agent arrives complete, not formed by language, family, class and custom.
The Idealist Alternative
Barker’s remedy was the idealism of Thomas Hill Green. For Green freedom is a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying (“Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract”, 1881). Rights recognise a common good, and the state removes obstacles to self-realisation. Karl Marx (On the Jewish Question, 1843) had called the rights of man those of egoistic man. Michael Sandel‘s “unencumbered self” and Charles Taylor‘s critique of atomism (1979) renew the attack, and feminists add that the abstract individual is tacitly a propertied man.
The Case for Mill
- Liberty with content. Chapter III of On Liberty values freedom for individuality; human nature is a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides. That positive ideal is why Isaiah Berlin saw Mill’s arguments outrunning non-interference.
- A socially formed self. His chief enemy, the despotism of custom, shows an acute sense that society makes and unmakes individuals.
- Positive tendencies. He demanded compulsory education and refused to let a person sell himself into slavery. He called distribution a matter of human institution solely (Principles of Political Economy, 1848), and backed workers’ co-operatives, taxation of the unearned increment in land and curbs on inheritance.
Indian Illustration
B. R. Ambedkar warned the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949 that India was entering a life of contradictions: political equality amid social and economic inequality. The Constitution answers Barker’s point by pairing Millian liberties in Part III with Directive Principles and, since the 86th Amendment (2002), the right to education in Article 21A, which echoes Mill’s own case for compulsory schooling.
Conclusion
Barker judges Mill by a philosophy of rights he never wrote, not by the concessions he made. The label fits his definition of freedom, not his programme; he is better read as a transitional liberal whose exceptions mark exactly where positive liberty would enter.