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Mills' On Liberty

Mill's On Liberty was written almost two hundred years after Hobbes's masterpiece (The Leviathan), and, as Mill says at the very beginning of his argument, by that time some liberal principles, like freedom of the press, are now so firmly entrenched that he feels no need to defend them. Certainly in America and in England, the liberal tradition deriving ultimately from Hobbes (via John Locke) had become the organizing principle of government (it is important for an understanding of Canadian law to recognize that our non-aboriginal traditions have no roots other than in modern liberalism: this helps to explain some basic things about what we believe and how we live).

Mill, however, is worried that the present development of liberalism does not create enough room in the private realm, and his essay (of which we are reading only a short condensation) is a detailed and sustained argument for maximizing personal freedom in the modern liberal state. He feels the need to do this because he perceives two great threats to the modern liberal state: excessive power of the government and its written codified laws and excessive power of public opinion and its unwritten laws (what Mill calls, borrowing the phrase from de Tocqueville, a French political thinker, the "tyranny of the majority").

The central thrust of Mill's argument is very straightforward, but it is easily misunderstood. His aim, as he tells up right away, is to make the case that we should permit individuals to say and do what they want as much as possible, subject to only one limitation, namely, that they should inflict no direct harm on other people. In all other cases, individuals should be left free to say and to do what they want, with no legal or social barriers. Only if this happens can the best people develop fully and society prosper.

It is particularly important to notice the basis of Mill's argument. He does not argue that we have a basic right to these freedoms or that the government is under...