Books: Freedom How?

ON LIBERTY AND LIBERALISM: THE CASE OF JOHN STUART MILL by GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB 345 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

What a delicious irony Gertrude Himmelfarb suggests: behind every hippie crying “Do your own thing” and “Let it all hang out” stands an uptight Victorian with tics and twitches. Her Exhibit A is that pre-eminent Victorian John Stuart Mill, child protégé and author of On Liberty (1854). Himmelfarb, professor of history at the City University of New York and author of Victorian Minds, constructs a careful case about Mill as the sponsor of what she takes to be the fallacious modern argument that since liberty is good, the more liberty the better.

She begins with Mill’s revealing vocabulary. His approved words—originality, spontaneity, diversity, choice —smack of today’s obsession with individual expression for its own sake in ways she scarcely needs to emphasize. So do the proposals the words support. Mill’s gospel was that the individual could fulfill himself only in a climate of maximum freedom, and that the fulfillment of the individual was the supreme purpose in life. Could anything sound more contemporary? Indeed, Professor Himmelfarb dares to say that On Liberty has “far more” in common with our times than with Mill’s.

Why did Mill write On Liberty when he did? Contrary to still-popular opinion, Victorian England was far from a world of class suppression and psychological repression. The established church had slipped in moral authority. Even sex was under a less terrible taboo than has sometimes been assumed. That has been proven by recent explorations of the pervasiveness of Victorian pornography (albeit hidden). Mill was preaching liberty to the converted, Hirnmelfarb argues, except in the area of women’s liberation. In his essay The Subjection of Women, Mill protested that “the social subordination of women” stood out as “an isolated fact in modern social institutions; a solitary breach of what has become their fundamental law.” Mill wrote On Liberty, Himmelfarb submits, hi order to make the broadest statement of enfranchisement to that half of the human race who had not yet recognized that they had been disenfranchised.

The central figure in Himmelfarb’s thesis is Harriet Taylor, the imposing feminist whom the not so liberated Mill married two years after her first husband’s death in 1849. Mill just met her in 1830, beginning 21 long and proper years of platonic intimacy. Widow of a prosperous merchant and mother of three children, this humorless firebrand longed for the Irish to stage a revolution to match France’s, adding: “The Irish would, I should hope, not.be frightened but urged on by some loss of life.”

As Himmelfarb indicates, Mill was not only “deferential” to Harriet’s every wish but “respectful of her every opinion, quick to reverse himself on any issue.” In the dedication to On Liberty, he characterized Harriet as “the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings.” And Himmelfarb sees enough of Harriet’s single-minded radicalism in the essay to pronounce her a collaborator in its spirit if not in its prose.

Natural Feeling. Nobody reads Mill today. If people did, Himmelfarb warns, they would discover a man who is often in contradiction with Harriet’s Mill, the author of On Liberty. This other Mill spoke suspiciously of the “desires and impulses” and the “natural feeling” that the Liberty Mill so glorified. Mill understood that human nature was so far from naturally good that the ultimate object of education should be “restraining discipline.” The man to whom conformity, obedience and even law were dirty words could demand, in another mood, the retention of capital punishment and call for a penal code “strengthening our punishments” rather than “weakening them.”

In short, a conservative Mill dwelt within the liberal Mill, and in fact tended to dominate everywhere but in On Liberty. Here, Himmelfarb insists that Mill, under the goading of the formidable Harriet, became more radical than he realized or wanted to be. In extending the common piety about freedom of speech to freedom of action, he committed an act of intellectual subversion for which the 20th century has paid with the impossible drunken dream of total freedom. Lord Acton’s dictum —power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely—we have learned all too well. It is time, Professor Himmelfarb cautions, that we pay equal attention to another law: liberty too can corrupt, and absolute liberty can corrupt absolutely.