Ebeling in Brief is a weekly series, published every Saturday, of shortened chapters from economist Dr Richard M. Ebeling’s Liberty and the History of Economic Ideas: From the Ancients to the Austrian Economists (2026).
This is instalment No. 1: John Stuart Mill.
Dr Richard M. Ebeling is an American libertarian author who was the president of the Foundation for Economic Education from 2003 to 2008.
John Stuart Mill’s famous essay On Liberty, originally published in 1859, remains one of the most enduring and powerful defences of individual liberty ever penned. Both advocates and enemies of personal freedom have challenged either the premises or the logic in Mill’s argument. They have pointed out inconsistencies or incompleteness in his reasoning, but the fact remains that well over a century and a half after its appearance, few essays continue to justify being read and pondered with the same care and attention as On Liberty.
Mill’s essay takes on particular significance at the present time when governments around the world, including in the United Kingdom, are extending their power and control over the economic and social affairs of ordinary men and women. Everywhere we look, government is claiming the duty to care for us in our old age, manage our healthcare and regulate our industry and the wages we earn. The government controls what we eat, oversees what we buy, and paternalistically restricts our habits and vices with price controls, sin taxes and advertising bans. The government also educates our children and determines what they learn.
The Importance of Freedom of Thought and Action
John Stuart Mill focused on several dangers to our liberty. He started with the importance of freedom of thought and went on to analyse the dangers from the tyranny of the minority, the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of rigid customs and traditions that stifle the individual’s ability for self-expression and action.
Mill defended freedom of thought on several grounds. First, we should accept the fact that none of us can claim an infallibility of knowledge or a final and definite insight into ultimate truth. Thus, we should value and defend liberty of thought and argument because a dissenter or a critic of conventional and generally accepted views may offer reasons for disagreeing that correct our own errors of knowledge and mistakes in judgement.
Second, sometimes the truth about things exists as half-truths held by different people, and through debate the truth in the parts can be made into a unified truth of the whole. And, third, even if we are really certain that we have the truth and a correct understanding of things, unless we are open to challenge and to rethink that which we take for granted, our ideas and beliefs can easily become atrophied dogmas. The people in each generation must be taught to think and reason for themselves. If ideas and beliefs are to remain living and meaningful, people must arrive at their own conclusions through reflection and thought.
Mill defended not only freedom of thought but also liberty of action. To make men conform to a uniformity in their conduct would prevent that which is an inherent hallmark of each of us as a human being: our individuality. Every man must have personal freedom to have the ability to form, test and act on his own choices for any sort of development of his own personality to take place. He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.
The Tyranny of Minorities and Majorities
This raises the question of what can stifle or prevent an individual from exercising his personal freedom in the manner he wants. Mill argued that there were historically three forms of tyranny that had endangered liberty through the ages.
The oldest was the tyranny of the one or the few over the many, when a single dictator or ruling oligarchy prohibited or commanded certain forms of behaviour over most of society. The spontaneous individualism and individuality of each person were denied. The one or the few determined how others might live and what they might say and do, and therefore in what forms their human potential would be allowed to develop.
The newer form of tyranny, Mill said, was the rule of the many over the one. The revolt against the tyranny of the one or the few resulted in the growing idea that the people should rule themselves. And since the people, surely, could not tyrannise themselves, the unrestrained will of the people became the ideal of those who advocated unlimited democracy.
However, in practice, this inevitably became the rule of the majority over the minority. Individual freedom was denied purely on the basis of numbers, that is, on the basis of which group or coalition of groups formed that larger number of people dominating the political process. Their ideas, ideals and values were to be imposed on all those representing less than 50 per cent of the electorate.
But whether it was the tyranny of the few over the many or the many over the few, the source of their tyrannical power was the control and use of political coercion. State power enabled some to deny liberty to others. The threat or the use of force by government is what enabled freedom to be taken away from individuals who believed in ideas, ideals or values different from those holding the reins of political power.
The “Tyranny” of Custom and Tradition
Mill also said that there was a third source of tyranny over the individual in society, the tyranny of custom and tradition. He argued:
“The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than the customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement…. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom…. All deviations… come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature.”1
Mill argued with great passion that societal customs and traditions could, indeed, very often be the worst tyranny of all. They were binding rules on conduct and belief that owed their force not to coercion but to their being the shared ideas of what was right and proper held by the vast majority in the society. They represent what the Athenian statesman Pericles referred to as “that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace”.2
Customs and traditions weigh down on the individual: they stifle his sense and desire to be different, to experiment with the new, to creatively design ways of doing things that have not been tried before and to break out of the confinement of conformity. Custom and tradition can be the straitjacket that restricts a person’s cry for his peaceful and non-violent individuality.
But while customs and traditions may hold such power over men because of their fear of disgrace and ostracism by family, friends and neighbours, they still do not constitute coercion. No matter how strong a hold custom and tradition may have over men’s minds and therefore their conduct in society, an individual can still choose to go his own way and be the eccentric and outcast if he is willing to pay the price in terms of the disapproval of others in his community. In this case, political force is not the weapon that ensures obedience. Rather, the power of custom and tradition comes from social and psychological pressure and the human desire to avoid being shunned by those whose association is wanted.
Individuals Know Their Own Interests Better Than Government
Like other liberals, Mill believed that individuals have a far greater understanding of their own surroundings in terms of enterprise decisions than any government agents and bureaucrats could ever possess. Even if one were to imagine that they possessed the same knowledge as all the actors in the different corners of the division of labour, those representatives of the government would never have the same incentive to use that knowledge as productively and profitably as the separate individuals in the market arena. Said Mill:
“The ground of the practical principle of non-interference must here be, that most persons take a juster and more intelligent view of their own interest, and of the means of promoting it, than can either be prescribed to them by a general enactment of the legislature, or pointed out in the particular case by a public functionary.”3
Moreover, Mill pointed out that there is more knowledge in the minds of all the members of a society combined than any one or group of government officials could ever know or master. Thus, it was better to leave the use of such dispersed and personal knowledge to those who possessed it rather than the government taking on commercial and enterprising tasks for which it was not competent:
“It must be remembered, besides, that even if a government were superior in intelligence and knowledge to any single individual in the nation, it must be inferior to all the individuals of the nation taken together. It can neither possess in itself, nor enlist in its service, more than a portion of the acquirements and capacities which the country contains, applicable to any given purpose. [Thus] the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of the government, than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves.”4
Mill on the Principle of Equal Rights
Mill was also a strong advocate of equal rights for both sexes, as argued in The Subjection of Women (1869). For most of human history, women had been kept legally, politically and socially in subservient roles in society. Women were as much distinct human beings as men, and as such, they were deserving of the same legal rights and social standing as the male members of society, Mill insisted. Not only was this justice for women, but by extending such liberty to the other half of the human population, all mankind would gain and be better off.
It should, perhaps, not be too surprising, therefore, that as an advocate of equal rights for women and a defender of individual liberty against the tyrannies of either minorities or majorities, John Stuart Mill also demanded an end to human slavery and other coercive relationships.
In the heated and sometimes angry exchanges over the history of slavery and the place of liberalism in the great contest between freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century, we should not lose an appreciation of how determined, dedicated and publicly vocal many of those classical-liberal thinkers in Europe and the United States were in their calls for an end to the institution of slavery.5
Indeed, the classical-liberal premise was that each individual is a distinct and unique human being, deserving of the right to his life and liberty. Rather than feeling the need to apologise and atone for the evils of the past, we should acknowledge that many liberals were among those who insisted on slavery’s end.
Mill, John Stuart. ([1859] 1977). “On Liberty.” Reprinted in Essays on Politics and Society, 213–310. Vol. 18 of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by J. M. Robson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Thucydides. ([c. 400 BC] 1874). The History of the Peloponnesian War. Translated by Richard Crawley. London: Longmans, Green and Co.
Mill, John Stuart. ([1909] 1976). Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. Fairfield, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley.
Mill, John Stuart. ([1909] 1976). Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. Fairfield, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley.
Senior, Nassau. (1856). American Slavery: A Reprint of an Article on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts.
This is so true:
"Mill defended freedom of thought on several grounds. First, we should accept the fact that none of us can claim an infallibility of knowledge or a final and definite insight into ultimate truth. Thus, we should value and defend liberty of thought and argument because a dissenter or a critic of conventional and generally accepted views may offer reasons for disagreeing that correct our own errors of knowledge and mistakes in judgement."
I was fired from my job at a UK university, for writing a book criticising Islam. It was written in my own time, and published at my own expense.
During my enforced unemployment I have written numerous additional books, criticising Islam!
https://hellish2050.substack.com/about
It is quite tough trying to subsist without a salary, after being cancelled. But I would not have been able to live with my conscience if I had caved in to their demands. We must uphold our freedoms, even if it comes with personal sacrifice. This is not theoretical, it is the stark reality that we face.
Every generation needs to be reminded of Mill. The present one, it seems, is not listening.