J.S. Mill Makes the Case for Totalitarian Government

John Stuart Mill’s classic of libertarian philosophy, On Liberty, presents a bit of a logical conundrum to students of Mill’s ideology. Mill’s assertion that the only need for intervention in one’s private affairs by the State is those actions taken by the individual which directly negatively impact the abilities of another individual to pursue his or her interests. This is the entire predicate for the argument in favor of the State from the libertarian ideology, that the State’s role must be incredibly limited in order to foster political and economic freedom, while at the same time fulfilling the role of peacemaker and contract enforcer between the interests and dealings of individuals within society. This argument, simultaneously in favor and opposed to the concept of the State, falls under the weight of its own logic and one’s interpretation of it.

“So long as it is at their own risk and peril”, individuals should not be constrained from any actions (Mp. 58). Whether these actions have any effects, good or bad, on the individual in question is irrelevant to Mill as regards to the powers of the State. The State’s power should be limited only to affect those actions that effect the actions or safety of other individuals, and thus, to take this to its logical conclusion, even a suicide could be perceived as an action which the State would not be able to hinder, as the effects of the action could be seen to affect only the individual in question. Yet, it is precisely a circumstance such as this that could be used by one of an oppositional point of view on the role of the State to argue in favor of more, not less, control over the individual. In fact, an argument for authoritarian governance is embedded within the entire concept.

Let us return to the hypothetical suicide. The individual in question has decided to end his own life, why does not matter, and therefore sets out to do so. Now, this person may have family. Are their rights and abilities not hindered by the loss of their family member? But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that this man is orphaned completely and has no family to speak of, and, to continue this line of thought further, no friends or any connections. Should this individual be allowed to cause himself to lose his own life? It would seem there is no chance of this action having an impact on any individuals outside of the one committing suicide. But a closer look at the situation shows that, indeed, the action of the individual of suicide leads to consequences upon the abilities of the individuals he may not even know to pursue their freedom and interests.

How is this possible, one might wonder, that the suicidal actions of one individual might affect the individual pursuits of another individual within society, despite potentially great distances between them? The answer lies within the makeup of society itself, once a society reaches a level of interconnectedness such that it would be at the level of industrial England. Within such a society, the people within it are increasingly dependent on the actions of those who also are within the society for subsistence. Thus, their individual pursuits are, from a certain point of view, somewhat dependent on the pursuits of others and the actions of others. So, to bring it back to our suicidal friend, his decision, though culturally amoral and tragic, has a very real possibility of affecting in a very negative fashion the individual desires and aims of another individual, whose life may not be parallel with, and whose path may never cross with, our poor depressed friend.

It is this extreme abstraction of the hypothetical that shows the lie in Mill’s individualist manifesto, and sets up the argument for the authoritarian governmental control of every aspect of life that he deplored. If the reason for government is to protect the rights of the individual from molestation from the actions of other individuals, then it is apparent from our theoretical experiment that those with aims antithetical to the liberty of free men and women can use the very words of their champion in mid-nineteenth century Britain to propose the exact opposite of his utopia. For the rights of the individual to proceed along the path the individual sets out upon, the actions of other individuals must be constrained, otherwise they have the potential to disrupt the aims and desires of other individuals, yet, this disrupts the individual aims and desires for the individuals whose will is being put upon, and so on, until every interference in the affairs of each individual is wrapped up in an apologia that has its roots in the very theoretical work that wished to defeat it once and for all.