Comment: “The worth of a State …… is the worth of individuals composing it.” (J. S. Mill) (1995, 1996, 2011)
The line closes chapter V (“Applications”) of John Stuart Mill‘s On Liberty (1859). In full it reads: the worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it. A state that dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished. It is Mill’s verdict on how far the state should act even where no liberty is infringed, and it makes the state’s value derivative.
The Argument Behind the Sentence
Chapter V lists three objections to government action that does not violate liberty:
- Efficiency. Individuals usually do their own business better than officials.
- Education. Jury service, local institutions and voluntary associations are a mental education that trains citizens’ active faculties.
- Power. If roads, railways, banks, universities and charities all became branches of government, freedom would be nominal, and a bureaucracy would absorb the nation’s talent.
The ideal is the greatest dissemination of power consistent with efficiency, while information is centralised. A government cannot have too much of the activity that aids and stimulates individual effort. It goes wrong when it substitutes its own activity for theirs.
What the Statement Claims
- Individualist, not organic. The state has no worth of its own; it is a means whose value is measured by the persons it forms. This rejects Plato’s subordination of the individual to the polis.
- Developmental. Worth lies in mental expansion and elevation, not in administrative skill. Considerations on Representative Government (1861) likewise judges governments by their effect on the intelligence and virtue of the governed, and so rejects even a good despot.
- Prudential. A state that trades vitality for smooth machinery loses the adaptive capacity it will one day need: its machinery will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power.
Why It Endures
Amartya Sen‘s Development as Freedom (1999) treats expanding capabilities as both the end and the chief means of development. Mahbub ul Haq‘s Human Development Index (1990) measures nations by the lives of their people, not by output alone. India builds the idea into its Constitution through the right to education (Article 21A, 2002). Article 51A(h) makes developing the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform a citizen’s duty. The 73rd and 74th Amendments (1992) create the local self-government Mill prized as a school of public spirit.
Critiques
- Idealist. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Philosophy of Right, 1820) sees the state as the actuality of ethical life, in which individuals first become free. Bernard Bosanquet (The Philosophical Theory of the State, 1899) adds a real will exceeding the sum of private wills. For both, a state is worth more than an aggregate.
- Aristotelian and communitarian. For Aristotle the polis is prior to the individual, so the worth of individuals is itself the state’s achievement. Mill’s formula risks circularity.
- Marxist. Karl Marx would ask which individuals. In a class society the “worth” of the propertied is bought with the stunting of workers, and the state secures that arrangement.
- Institutional. Constitutions, courts and public goods carry value beyond any generation of citizens.
- Mill’s own inconsistency. He allowed despotism over “barbarians” for their improvement, dwarfing whole peoples in the name of the beneficial purposes the sentence condemns.
Conclusion
The idealists are right that individuals are formed in and through the state, but that strengthens Mill’s test rather than refuting it. A state earns its worth by enlarging its citizens’ capacities, and loses it when it buys docility, however efficiently.