INTRODUCTION
John Stuart Mill (1806–73) is generally considered to have been a firm enemy of violence as a means of resolving political impasses or fostering social progress.Footnote 1 His observations on the possibilities of socialistic experiments and his qualified advocacy of producers’ cooperatives are routinely cited as evidence of a ‘gradualist’ theory of reform based on piecemeal measures, the spread of social sentiments and the truths of political economy among the working classes, and a rejection of violent action and rash agitation to redress injustice.Footnote 2
This intuitive and in many ways accurate interpretation has been undermined by recent scholarship that has pointed out Mill's often ignored advocacy of violence to spur desirable political changes.Footnote 3 Against the received view of Mill, Geraint Williams in particular has demonstrated that there were circumstances in which Mill believed that insurrection, revolution and other coercive acts intended to subvert the authority of government could bring about a greater good and be justified or excused for that reason.Footnote 4 Williams concludes that as a result Mill should not be considered ‘the arch upholder of reason’ where reason implies the non-violent resolution of conflict, but instead a qualified supporter of violence when its exercise is suggested by reason itself.Footnote 5 This persuasive argument depends, for Williams, on whether Mill's reflections on violence amount to ‘a coherent justificatory theory’, which he believes they do. If Mill simply expressed support for violence ‘at various times in his life’ with no real connection between these, Mill cannot be reconsidered in the same way.Footnote 6
Drawing on the insights of Williams and others, this article complicates claims of Mill's ‘gradualism’, especially those which tend to present Mill in a largely precast mould as a pure ‘liberal bourgeois’ opposed to revolution or as an unequivocal ‘libertarian’ opposed to coercion in all forms, by arguing that Mill's theory of social progress condoned, and presupposed, more violence than may be assumed. At the same time, I suggest that Williams and other scholars may overlook what is perhaps most interesting about Mill's views on violence. Once Mill's quite plausible position is scrutinized in detail, it reveals fundamental tensions that make it effectively unusable in its present form as a guide for the exercise of, or as a justificatory theory of, political violence. But it need not follow from this failure that Mill's stance on violence should not be reappraised. Mill's attempt to construct a theory of political violence, like many of his struggles with other philosophical problems, ended in frustration. Nevertheless, the remarkable coherence of his attempt provides more evidence for what is by now the increasingly well-supported view that Mill's general philosophical project was everywhere a systematic, if not ultimately successful or indefeasible, effort to weld together deontic maxims and the principle of utility in an indirect consequentialism that revised the theories of Bentham and John Mill.Footnote 7 The tensions in Mill's theory of violence cast new light upon his conception of social progress, his temperament, and his lifelong work as a reformer and theoretician, and they suggest a complication that any such consequentialism whose moral categories are undergirded by implicit but profound political intent may have to address.
MILL’S ‘GRADUALISM’
As Mill wrote in the posthumously published Chapters on Socialism of the ‘thoughtful and philosophic’ socialism that he considered a durable and rational means of social transformation,
it can be brought into operation progressively, and can prove its capabilities by trial. It can be tried first on a select population and extended to others as their education and cultivation permit. It need not, and in the natural order of things would not, become an order of subversion until it had shown itself capable of being also a means of reconstruction.Footnote 8
This passage exemplifies Mill's characteristic commitment to piecemeal, non-violent changes and to free experimentation to demonstrate the practicability and utility of particular reforms before they are democratically adopted or rejected by the population at large. Mill's observations on socialism and working-class agitation, and the possibilities for progress therein, tend to support this position.
For Mill, the working classes ultimately constituted the central engine of progress towards ‘a state of society combining the greatest personal freedom with [a] just distribution of the fruits of labour’.Footnote 9 His view reflected in part his Benthamite heritage, as the equality of individuals’ claims to happiness and well-being entailed that the most numerous class of society was the most important. As a young ‘philosophic radical’, Mill affirmed
[t]hat the working people being the majority of the whole population, the interests of all the other classes are of no importance compared with theirs. . . . [I]f it were necessary I would willingly suffer every person in the community to starve, rather than that they should be inadequately provided with the necessaries of life.Footnote 10
The labouring classes were, moreover, increasing in number, and undertaking more and more vigorous campaigns for reform. The gradual widening of the franchise ensured that their influence upon the affairs of government would only be felt the more strongly as time passed. Any favourable prospect of reform – indeed, the entire fate of society – was now bound up with the state of workers’ social aspirations and collective strength.
That workers would be successful in effecting reform with their present habits, however, was far from assured.Footnote 11 By the mid-1830s Mill did believe that the lively debates carried on among labourers by means of their own newspapers, their increasing independence and enlightenment, and the opportunities for their combination provided by modern means of transportFootnote 12 suggested that the working classes would soon catch up intellectually with the upper classes.Footnote 13 At present, however, the bulk of workers were patently not ready for the responsibilities of government. Labourers were usually irrational and imprudent, often lazy, and at times simply insolent or base.Footnote 14 As the Chartist movement had thrown into stark relief for Mill, they could also be given to crude impulses and intemperate excesses. Even the most advanced working people left much to be desired. Though Mill would in his later life praise English working-class leaders, some of whom he came to know personally,Footnote 15 their hard-headedness was always a far cry from the zealous enthusiasm and heroic spirit of those French who every couple of years erected barricades in the streets of their capital to fight and die for a social republic.Footnote 16 There was little evidence to suggest that workers were prepared to meet the demands of social reconstruction, or that good would follow once they gained a formal voice in government – a government that Mill already believed to be dysfunctional.Footnote 17
The middle and upper classes were left with a clear choice: help educate workers for the weighty task before them, or get out of their way.Footnote 18 Mill concluded in the early 1850s that a transition towards a cooperative economy capable of healing social strife depended only upon the ‘mental cultivation’ of workers and ‘the degree in which they can be made rational beings’;Footnote 19 thus in theory it was obstructed only by workers’ own moral and mental unreadiness. If the English upper and middle classes had little courage,Footnote 20 they could at least offer their substantial education and prudence to inform campaigns for social reform. But for Mill their objective was to guide and support, not lead or dominate, workers’ own efforts to improve themselves. Advice ought to be offered to labourers ‘as equals, and accepted by them with their eyes open’;Footnote 21 it remained for them to ‘judge for themselves of the persons who are and are not entitled’ to their deference regarding knowledge of political and economic policy.Footnote 22
If the yoke imposed upon them by their pernicious ways of thinking and acting could be lifted through the assistance of other classes and especially through education,Footnote 23 workers might prove themselves fit for a competitive economy of workers’ cooperatives and ‘the rights which Socialism would confer & the duties it would impose’,Footnote 24 or else a more equitable system of private property.Footnote 25 Mill conceived of education in a broad sense – it implied not only that workers would take advantage of the growth of libraries, schools and institutes available to them, but that they would also form salutary associations and carry out socialistic experiments on their own initiative or with the support of middle-class reformers. In this latter respect, education is better understood as trial rather than instruction.Footnote 26 By freely entering into cooperative experiments, profit-sharing schemes and socialist communities, labourers tested themselves as well as their theories.Footnote 27 Though Mill carefully followed the fortunes of cooperatives under the Second Empire, it must be remembered that it mattered relatively little whether workers did or did not succeed in such efforts. In either case, the educative gain would accrue as labourers developed their abilities and evaluated the merits of their ideas. If they proved themselves fit for socialistic reforms, their example would inspire their comrades to carry out the same projects. If workers did not, they would in time recognize their errors and, thus enlightened, pursue more realistic strategies on their path to advancement, ones that for instance recognized the necessity of limiting their numbers or the prudence of not expecting so much from ordinary people.Footnote 28
In time, education might allow workers to grasp the insights of political economy, replace their selfish mores and conformist distaste for eccentricity with social solidarity and respect for individual autonomy, and unlock a virtuous capacity to work under a more just but more demanding economic system. Without ‘such changes in their minds and habits as shall make them fit guardians of their own physical condition’, however, failure was inevitable, and social progress would not be advanced.Footnote 29 Appropriate ideals would not realize their full power unless they were articulated under the proper conditions. Conversely, it was possible that ‘the most favourable outward circumstances [would] pass by, or remain inoperative, for want of ideas suitable to the conjuncture’.Footnote 30 Progress waited on the opportune transformation of men's ways of thinking and feeling, and this depended not merely on the presence of ideals but on their gradual inculcation and the improvements which would follow.
There were hopeful signs that the introduction of nobler ideals and sentiments, ‘deeply engraven on the feelings . . . [and] firmly grounded in reason and in the true exigencies of life’,Footnote 31 was in sight. Mill's England appeared to be passing through a Saint-Simonian ‘critical period’ in which the autocratic creeds of the past were being discredited or abandoned outright. The shadow that had plunged the Continent into nightmarish reaction since the tragic setbacks of 1848 was lifting by the early 1860s, and a ‘spirit of free speculation’ had sprung up among Mill's countrymen.Footnote 32 The working and middle classes were undertaking vigorous campaigns for manhood suffrage and political reform, and Mill predicted that great changes were imminent, if the forces of democracy were able to seize the initiative.
At the same time, Mill expressly cautioned against drastic attempts at reform. Since his boyhood, Mill had crusaded for radical causes.Footnote 33 By the time he served as an MP and as President of the Land Tenure Reform Association in the late 1860s, he had acquired a ‘growing reputation as a rabble-rouser, and seemed to be enjoying it’.Footnote 34 But despite his positions on issues such as feminism and the inheritance tax, Mill's practical recommendations were always ones of relative moderation.Footnote 35 He routinely ‘urg[ed] reform in order to stave off revolution’, and the cautious nature of his proposals regarding land reform and producers’ cooperatives not a few times infuriated his working-class associates.Footnote 36 Though opposed to the principle of private property in land,Footnote 37 Mill rejected immediate land nationalization, arguing that the unprepared state of the public mind, not to mention the incompetence of the public administration to carry out such a reorganization, demanded slow, careful reform of land policy.Footnote 38 Nor did Mill ever accept the idea, then becoming popular among advanced sections of Continental labour, that land or capital should be forcibly appropriated by workers: this would entail a great injustice to the former possessors.Footnote 39 Though society certainly had the right to abrogate particular property rights,Footnote 40 this was a right that had to be exercised prudently, and in any case individual owners ought to be compensated for their losses.Footnote 41 In the final years of his life Mill therefore recommended gradual land reform and proposed that workers conserve their own capital and form cooperatives which might peacefully compete with, and perhaps eventually supersede, capitalist-owned firms. Forceful appropriation was out of the question: Mill's vision of socialist transition ‘entail[ed] few, if any, violations of core libertarian principles’.Footnote 42
Mill's sustained statement of opposition to a violent, revolutionary or otherwise non-gradual introduction of socialism was made in Chapters on Socialism.Footnote 43 While largely repeating his earlier criticisms of the proposals of thinkers like Fourier, Saint-Simon and Owen,Footnote 44 Mill for the first time engaged at length with the various tendencies of revolutionary socialism that were gaining followers across the Continent in the late 1860s and early 1870s.Footnote 45 In contrast to the far more reasonable socialists of the early nineteenth century, revolutionary socialists proposed the forcible appropriation of all social resources for the benefit of the community. This strategy – which was from the start hopeless given the impossibility of central management – took no account of individuals’ moral and intellectual readiness for this great transformation, and it did not condescend to speculate about what society should look like after the revolution. Mill could not but be reminded of the callousness and thoughtlessness of the Jacobins, and he concluded that such a project would certainly end in disaster. He also made a definitive statement about the introduction of socialism, which summarizes his ‘gradualist’ position:
Communism, to be successful, requires a high standard of both moral and intellectual education in all the members of the community. . . . [T]he passage to it from our present condition can only be slow. . . . If Communist associations show [through practical experiment] that they can be durable and prosperous, they will multiply, and will probably be adopted by successive portions of the population of the more advanced countries as they become morally fitted for that mode of life. But to force unprepared populations into Communist societies, even if a political revolution gave the power to make such an attempt, would end in disappointment.Footnote 46
There was, it would seem, little place for violence, rapid changes in the distribution of economic or political power, or the cultivation of class antipathies in Mill's vision of progress.Footnote 47 An altered distribution of property was best approached from a stable starting-position and achieved by reasoned discussion and ‘wise foresight’, as opposed to ‘a conflict of opposite prejudices’.Footnote 48 Social reconstruction aimed to enlighten and ennoble the working classes, not debase them; to resolve, rather than accentuate, the tensions between employees and employers, poor and wealthy, working and idle.Footnote 49 A moment of revolutionary tumult instigated by revolutionaries was ‘the very most unfavourable position for setting out in the construction of a Kosmos’,Footnote 50 not a tabula rasa in which democratic government could simply be thrown up. Revolutions that overturned the existing order threatened to produce ‘the worst form of barbarism produced by the dissolution of civilized life’,Footnote 51 returning society to a state of rapacious plunder and savagery not witnessed since feudal times. The prospect that chaos and rapid violence could usher in improved sentiments and forms of social organization thus looked quite dim. For, as Mill put the matter:
Sudden effects in history are generally superficial. Causes which go deep down into the roots of true events produce the most serious parts of their effect only slowly, and have, therefore, time to become a part of the familiar order of things before general attention is called to the changes they are producing.Footnote 52
From this cursory outline, it is easy to see why Mill is often considered a gradualist. His own writings on socialism and labour – not to mention those many secondary accounts that have considered his ideas on social progress in relation to those of his contemporary, MarxFootnote 53 – provide plenty of evidence for this plausible view. Yet it neglects a crucial side of Mill. There were clear circumstances in which he advocated the use of violence to spur rapid social and political changes in a manner not entirely consistent with the recommendations described above. This is ignored by accounts that have not tended to consider Mill's reactions to the events of his century. And it is true even despite his declaration that to harm another or interfere in another's affairs was to violate the most socially useful maxim imaginable, ‘more vital to human well-being than any [other] . . . and the main element in determining the whole of the social feelings of mankind’.Footnote 54
MILL AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE
‘I do not scruple to say that I have sympathised more or less ardently with most of the rebellions, successful and unsuccessful, which have taken place in my time’, Mill wrote in the mid-1860s.Footnote 55 Since his studies of the French Revolution as a teenager,Footnote 56 Mill regularly and publicly allied himself with the causes of the great democratic rebellions of his time, as well as with a number of military campaigns waged against slavery and other abuses. To a greater or lesser degree he supported the revolutions in France in 1830 and 1848, republican insurrections and weavers’ protests against the regime of Louis-Philippe, the rebellions against British rule in Canada during the late 1830s, the Polish officers’ insurrection of 1863, and the side of the Union in the US Civil War.Footnote 57 Sometimes with great zeal, Mill also supported, or excused, a number of violent protests against injustice and of assassination attempts upon tyrannical figures. Upon hearing of Louis-Napoleon's invasion of Prussia in 1870, Mill is reported to have exclaimed, ‘what a pity the bombs of Orsini missed their mark, and left the crime-stained usurper alive’.Footnote 58
It is reasonable to wonder whether such sentiments were not simply the product of rare emotional outbursts, and to doubt whether Mill ever incorporated them into a consistent theoretical structure. In fact, Mill expressed views of the above sort over the course of his entire life:Footnote 59 far from believing that the use of violence was opposed to reason as such, he outlined a clear framework for thinking about when violence ought to be employed rationally in the pursuit of desirable political or social goals. His justificatory theory has been persuasively described by Williams and other authors,Footnote 60 and can be conceptualized as stipulating two main conditions (1) and (2),Footnote 61 both of which had to be satisfied to justify the employment of violence in a given situation. The first was that of (1) justice: the cause of the individual(s) committing violence was required to be intrinsically just. Usually, this meant that the cause had to be conducive to the promotion of utilitarian goals in a general sense, that is, of ensuring the personal freedom and equal opportunity to welfare of each and every individual, regardless of race, creed or nationality. In at least one circumstance,Footnote 62 Mill specified that this condition was more demanding than it might appear, and justified only (1a) violence that aimed to end cruel and prolonged oppression, (1b) violence against a regime which removed legal and peaceable means of redressing injustices, or (1c) violence against a regime whose legal means of redress had been exhausted after some time.
Conditions (1) and (1a−c) justified a variety of activities. According to (1), violence with a patently immoral intent – for instance, insurrection on the part of Southern slaveholders – was ruled out as a matter of course. According to (1a), Mill was willing to support or excuse violence against any autocratic or arbitrary regimes that perpetuated suffering and oppression, such as against the Confederacy or the various governments in France. Notably Mill also defended insurrections against British rule in Canada in the late 1830s and against many of the regimes of Eastern Europe in the early 1860s. Of the first case Mill wholeheartedly affirmed, ‘without restriction or qualification, the justice and holiness of the cause in which these men have taken arms’ against a regime that treated them as conquered subjects,Footnote 63 and of the second declared:
[i]n the more backward countries of Europe any revolution, any bursting of the bonds by which all the energies of the people are now cramped and paralyzed, must be an improvement, must be the commencement of a new era. The resurrection of Polish nationality would at least let in the light. It would bestow a free press, freedom of public discussion, representative assemblies, national education. It would let in the ideas of civilised Europe . . .Footnote 64
According to (1b), Mill validated acts of violence against governments that restricted liberty of the press, liberty of assembly, and any other liberty that allowed citizens’ arguments to be heard, assessed through consideration and debate, and acted upon by the government and the public at large. Who can blame persons earnestly advocating their opinions through violence, such as the French who chafed under the censorship introduced by the Second Republic in 1848, ‘when that is the only means left of them obtaining even a hearing? When their mouths are gagged, can they be reproached for using their arms?’Footnote 65 A government that limited the freedom of its members to discuss their opinions and persuade others of their correctness, Mill stated unequivocally, ‘actually justifie[d] the insurrection’ against it.Footnote 66 Finally, according to (1c), Mill appears to have been willing to sanction violence against a regime deaf or hostile to the peaceable entreaties of a public that had long petitioned it. To prevent the projects of English radicals from reaching fruition during such times of great democratic aspiration may, the young Mill declared forcefully in 1824,
be fairly pronounced impossible. The only question is, Shall [change] be effected by moderate or by violent means. The people have always been and still are peaceably inclined. They seek not violence; they avoid it. May they avoid it ever, unless they are driven to it. But moderate means have been tried. Petitions without number have been poured into Parliament. If our rulers still persist in their resistance, it is they and not the Reformers, who endeavour to excite insurrection. It is true, the Reformers do not consider tranquillity as absolutely the end of government, and if the greater good, a government responsible to the people, can only be obtained by means of a commotion, no weak and feminine [sic!] humanity will induce me at least to deprecate such a result. But if (which God forbid) it should come at last to this; and if moderate means, after repeated trials, should fail to produce the desired effect; let all the evils necessarily occasioned by those commotions, which are the last and dangerous resort of the people, be on the heads of those eternal enemies of mankind, who, by their interested resistance to the spirit of the age, will have rendered such a crisis inevitable.Footnote 67
To considerations of (1) and (1a−c), addressing the moral status of violence, were joined equally important considerations of its political status. Thus the second main criterion was that of (2) expediency: the acts of violence were required to have a good chance of success at achieving their proposed political ends. Accordingly, Mill advised that (2a) violence ought not to overestimate the public's ability to support the revolution or rapid reconstruction instigated by activists, that (2b) activists ought not to underestimate the power of established habits of mind and behaviour to thwart change,Footnote 68 and that (2c) activists ought to exhaust any legal means of redressing grievances before proceeding to violence (as we have seen above).
Condition (2) generally entailed that actions needed to have some decent chance of success: a revolutionary could foment insurrection against a heinous regime, satisfying criteria of justice, yet if he had no chance at all of succeeding, his action was patently imprudent, and needlessly risked the lives of his fellows in an otherwise just defence of their collective welfare. Conditions (2a) and (2b) sought to inform activists of the necessarily great challenges Mill knew they faced in trying to bring about change, if the public were apathetic, fearful, consciously or unconsciously stubborn in resisting the introduction of the good, or simply not well prepared to follow rebels onto the barricades because it understood less and felt less about the injustices at stake. Conditions (2a) and (2b) can, perhaps, be simplified into the general proposition that activists devise violent strategies and political remedies well adapted to a given social climate, or else risk failure. The final condition (2c) followed from Mill's insistence upon the utility of respecting laws until they had been shown to be harmful and his characteristic conviction that peaceable means of public discussion and persuasion could bring about the kind of society he envisioned.
Thus informed by moral and political concerns alike and reminiscent of Aquinas's justification of tyrannicide,Footnote 69 Mill's theory of political violence appears to be coherent, and to sanction more violence than Mill is often thought to have done. There were some cases, Mill recognized, in which violence was simply required to spur democratic change and introduce new ideas and habits among the public. Vicious regimes, or governments that spurned all attempts to improve them, often could not be reformed unless force was used: the Confederacy, an institution for which Mill's hatred was indescribable, was a case in point. Mill never erred in preferring that men work out the grave social problems of their time ‘avec sangfroid’ and ‘une volonté réelle de trouver une meilleure solution de celle d’à présent’.Footnote 70 But sometimes ‘a conflict of opposite prejudices’, though it imperilled society and rarely preserved the reasonable insights of both sides, was unavoidable.
Indeed, if gradual changes in habits and institutions were historically the more durable, ‘changes effected rapidly and by force’Footnote 71 were perhaps equally inevitable, when ‘intemperate violence’ was wielded to ‘procure the redress which was denied to gentle remonstrance’.Footnote 72 Mill had after all made his predictions in the cautious Chapters on Socialism with the assumption that socialistic reform would move at the ‘ordinary pace of those great social changes which are not effected by physical violence’,Footnote 73 and ‘need not, and in the natural order of things would not, become an order of subversion until it had shown itself capable of being also a means of reconstruction’.Footnote 74 Both when Mill wrote Chapters on Socialism at the end of his life, as well as in 1852, it was rather an entirely open question whether
Europe shall enter peacefully & prosperously into a better order of things or whether the new ideas will be inaugurated by a century of war & violence like that which followed the Reformation of Luther: and this alternative probably depends on the moral & intellectual movement of the next ten or twenty years.Footnote 75
Mill sincerely hoped that the first outcome would be achieved, and he urged workers and middle-class reformers alike to work towards its realization, with a minimum of strife and embitterment. Yet if reformers generally ought to employ peaceful methods, their goals could also be approached through the careful consideration and exercise of political violence, when and where the circumstances permitted or required it. Aggression remained a grave evil, but one that could be turned against much greater evils for the obvious benefit of society, in some cases.
ASSESSING MILL’S POSITION
The principles outlined above offer proof, as Williams and others have emphasized, that Mill favoured political violence in certain definite situations, and they rule out the possibility that Mill's views were the mere product of fits of nervous enthusiasm or frustration. They also complicate the received reading of Mill as a straightforward ‘gradualist’. If he privileged piecemeal and non-violent changes as generally the most effective political strategy, Mill explicitly refused to rule out violence in those circumstances in which considerations of justice and expediency allowed that it be used.
Despite the coherence of Mill's approach and the obvious prudence of his moral and political recommendations, I would suggest that he did not succeed in developing a robust theory that could consistently guide revolutionaries or evaluate their actions, and in fact sanctioned or excused more violence than even the above suggests. The major problem in his account is its tension between justice and expediency. Mill commonly pardoned or excused acts of political violence that were entirely just but impolitic, fulfilling aspects of (1) but not (2). As in the case of John Brown, the ‘voluntary martyr’ and ‘true hero’ of American abolitionism,Footnote 76 and his raid, a bloody, abortive insurrection could be excused even from the outsetFootnote 77 if the cause were sufficiently just, and sympathy could be extended towards its instigators. Such political violence was not as moral as it would have been if successful – it did not, after all, succeed in promoting utility in any absolute sense – but Mill nevertheless thought it sufficiently moral to be excused, and in Brown's case appears to have justified such violence fully. As long as an agent were motivated by selfless justice – that is, by this desire to redress a cruel wrong committed against society as a whole – his action could, in theory, receive more or less exoneration even if it failed. Though an act of just vengeance, carried out to subvert an oppressive regime or punish a tyrant who set himself above the law, ‘has nothing moral in it’,
what is moral is, the exclusive subordination of it to the social sympathies, so as to wait on and obey their call. . . . [W] hen moralized by the social feeling, it only acts in the directions conformable to the general good: just persons resenting a hurt to society, though not otherwise a hurt to themselves, and not resenting a hurt to themselves, however painful, unless it be of the kind which society has a common interest with them in the repression of. . . . [A] person whose resentment is really a moral feeling, that is, who considers whether an act is blameable before he allows himself to resent it – such a person, though he may not say expressly to himself that he is standing up for the interest of society, certainly does feel that he is asserting a rule which is for the benefit of others as well as for his own.Footnote 78
It is not immediately obvious what such acts of political violence have to do with expediency, besides being, morally speaking, of a socially minded character and considering the interests of all. Mill here cited Kant's Categorical Imperative approvingly to support his position on enlightened vengeance, reading it as an essentially consequentialist form of reasoning by which men act with ‘the interest of mankind collectively’ in mind and in accordance with rules ‘which all rational beings might adopt with benefit to their collective interest’.Footnote 79 But there is little reason to assume that thusly enlightened violence – for example, the attempts of maltreated peasants upon a murderous lord – will ‘only’ tend towards good outcomes. Such virtuous acts are motivated more by the maxim fiat justitia, pereat mundus than by the felicific calculus, and could easily have the disastrous consequences that condition (2) aimed to prevent:Footnote 80 Mill's era after all witnessed countless more or less creditable acts of political violence whose ironic result was a dramatic increase in state repression and the limitation of civil liberties as opposed to the furthering of progress.Footnote 81 Yet Mill was quite willing to judge the actions of some rebels and assassins – abolitionists, French republicans, democratic agitators in the backwaters of the Continent – as morally neutral or morally good when such actions could easily fail and bring more evil into the world rather than diminish it. In this respect, Mill appears to excuse or partially sanction political violence by the deeply oppressed, whose acts approximate to Kantian assertions of collective dignity that offer little or no chance of fulfilling condition (2) in any respect and provide a strong basis for (1) alone.
Of course Mill elsewhere specified that there was a difference between political expediency, or policy, and moral expediency, or morality. For Mill it was not ‘a necessary consequence that because a thing [in this case, political violence] might rightfully be done, it [was] always expedient to do it’.Footnote 82 Actions could be moral while remaining impolitic,Footnote 83 and as a result Mill cautioned revolutionaries to act only with a good prospect of success, that is, with reference to (2). Yet it is not clear why Mill, in some cases, should still have offered any sanction at all to noble but imprudent actions. It is self-evidently indeterminate whether a rule that tells citizens to pursue violence against an oppressive regime will promote the good, unless it is undergirded by considerations of set (2); but then Mill appears to have been willing to defend the right of political violence, when rights presumably were justified by ‘no other reason than general utility’,Footnote 84 for rules of this sort that lacked a reasonable prospect of increasing utility. The fact that Mill recommended to rebels and revolutionaries that they have a good chance of success or undertake prudent preparations, but did not always require them for these individuals’ actions to be morally excused or justified, suggests a distinct right to engage in just violence.
The tension between justice and expediency also cuts in the opposite direction, for Mill appears to have countenanced the redress of an unpleasant political state of affairs, though one not particularly onerous and thus not satisfying (1a), (1b) or (1c), through the exercise of violence. Actions much more expedient than just were able to receive some amount of moral sanction if they ignored available means of legal redress or were not directed against an unequivocal evil, as long as they afforded stupendous improvements to society in such a context. Mill virtually always cautioned against violent activities in his home country,Footnote 85 and denied that England's political and economic climate constituted the kind of oppressive circumstances which might justify revolt. Yet he admitted to Austin in 1847 that
I often think that a violent revolution is very much needed, in order to give that general shake-up to the torpid mind of the nation which the French Revolution gave to Continental Europe . . . England has never had any general break-up of old associations & hence the extreme difficulty of getting any ideas into its stupid head.Footnote 86
It is more likely that Mill was expressing a fantasy here, as opposed to suggesting policy. Yet this observation, when read alongside his similar comments on the plight of Eastern Europe – a much less free place where ‘any revolution . . . must be an improvement . . . [and] let in the ideas of civilised Europe’ – suggests that there were fairly broad circumstances in which political violence might be pursued with the overriding aim of providing a useful shaking-up of individuals’ habits of thinking and acting, with less reference to considerations of set (1) and more appreciation for the benefit violence would bring about via considerations of set (2). More abstractly, Mill's account may have been willing to sanction political violence so long as it could be shown to be truly expedient, i.e. promoting the good as Mill defined it, in the long term.
Yet the standards Mill gave for how and when the legitimacy of an act was to be judged were quite permissive. In his writings on violence, Mill provided no meaningful distinction between an objective standard of success and agents’ own subjective perception of their prospects in respecting condition (2). Mill asserted that revolutionaries must have ‘a reasonable prospect of success’ in their endeavour.Footnote 87 Alternatively, they must think they do. As Mill recounted in the Autobiography his successful effort to conciliate the activists of the Reform League in mid-1866:
I told them that a proceeding which would certainly produce a collision with the military, could only be justifiable on two conditions: if the position of affairs had become such that a revolution was desirable, and if they thought themselves able to accomplish one.Footnote 88
The difference between what agents think their chances are and what they indeed are is by no means trivial. Because Mill did not appear to differentiate between these propositions, in theory agents with a good subjective indication of their success, but in reality a poor prospect of it, may act just as morally relative to agents who are undertaking campaigns that, objectively, will most likely be successful.Footnote 89 Mill did not specify who was to judge these matters, and in criticizing working-class leaders’ appeals to force in pursuit of political aims, he clearly offered his own opinion of the situation, presumably not one shared by his audience of radical suffrage advocates.
Nor did Mill specify the temporal limits within which acts of political violence were to be evaluated. Mill had seen during his lifetime that a revolutionary moment might give way to despotism, and that an abortive protest in the present could lead to durable, positive changes in the future. But from this it follows that what looks good or evil today may, someday, be judged as helping to effect its opposite. If an imagined assassin fails in his attempt on a tyrant's life or did not otherwise have appropriate ex ante prospects for his attempt, he acted with only partial moral licence, failing to respect condition (2). Yet we can posit that Mill would have found such an action fully (or almost fully) justified ex post if the tyrant were to flee, fearing for his safety, and republican government was instituted thereafter, or some other positive changes followed as a result. Mill indicated something of this sort when he praised the abortive efforts of the upright Canadian rebels, who, though Mill was ‘not prepared to vindicate the wisdom of their conduct’, had achieved ‘success’ without a military victory by virtue of bringing their plight to the attention of the British people.Footnote 90 Mill's account appears to imply that an act of political violence carried out with the intention of promoting a greater good but a poor chance of achieving it can be considered to have little or no licence, while the same act, once it has led to good consequences at a much later date, can be considered more or less justifiable. In this case it is possible to speculate that if the intrinsic justice or the expedient potential of political violence increases after the fact, the act also becomes more legitimate. If, for instance, Louis-Napoleon's rule were to become more onerous after Felice Orsini's attempt on the Emperor's life (though not as a result of the botched assassination), the assassin's act could perhaps be viewed more favourably, for though it was not necessarily motivated by the abuses of the regime in the present, it would still have prevented or mitigated them, had it succeeded. Mill's account thus makes it difficult to judge whether one has legitimately employed political violence in a particular ‘battle’, so to speak, because acts are interpreted in terms of what they contribute to a long-standing ‘war’ whose outcome is indeterminate.
Such tensions between moral and political concerns are considerable enough to doubt that Mill's account is an indefeasible justificatory theory of political violence, in its present form. It is not a reliably utilitarian account, because it appears to give moral licence partially or fully to acts of vengeance that are better considered Kantian assertions of individual and collective dignity, carried out with little or no regard for their consequences. Moreover, its prudent conditions of expediency can be read as collapsing into a vulgar consequentialism whereby ‘the ends justify the means’ and any act of violence can be committed so long as the result is, at some date and by the evaluation of some particular actor(s), a good one.
RECONSIDERING MILL’S ‘GRADUALISM’
In light of these considerations, what are we to make of Mill's views on social progress and on political violence as a means of fostering it? Mill believed that progress would best be served by gradual, piecemeal measures carried out by working people with the support of earnest activists and educated reformers. The cultivation of new moral and intellectual capacities was necessarily slow, requiring constant sacrifices of ordinary people; and this process of enlightenment usually eschewed resort to strife, civil war or class hatred. Nevertheless, Mill did outline definite conditions for the exercise of political violence, and clearly joined together considerations of morality and policy to form a coherent and plausible framework that accompanied his ‘gradualism’. The question of political violence then became, to a substantial degree, a question of means and ends. Gradual reform was the recipe for England because its relative freedoms and lack of immiseration and oppression did not warrant revolution, and because Mill's countrymen could not handle anything more. In France and some other parts of the world where traditions were more sympathetic to democratic insurrection and citizens suffered injustices of much greater intensity and scale, however, violence could be a more appropriate means. In such circumstances rapid reforms and violent methods, however regrettable, might be necessary to combat greater evils, such as slavery and oppression; the civil war of a righteous people against an ignominious government was always just, however unfortunate.
It is perhaps tempting to conclude, according to the still popular but no longer dominant view of Mill as ‘an eclectic and transitional’ interpreter of others’ opinions,Footnote 91 that Mill's account was ultimately incoherent. In fact, Mill's approach to the problem of political violence was methodical, and clearly sought to avoid the excesses that French republicans’ appeal to an abstract ‘Revolution’ permitted.Footnote 92 Mill stipulated that violence be pursued only when suggested by the dual dictates of morality and policy, and set explicit conditions – such as (2a−c) – so that even the most just cause would be guided by those prudent considerations that would ensure its success. Instead of positing that evil simply be used under any condition to bring about a greater good, or that moral utility be pursued as the immediate goal of one's agitation, Mill cautioned revolutionaries that the good was best promoted through adherence to quasi-deontic rules. His recommendations were thus analogous to those in his other works. With political violence as with state and social interference in On Liberty and as with ethics in Utilitarianism, Mill made a programmatic effort to posit an indirect consequentialism whereby the promotion of happiness and the prevention of pain, as the teleological but implicit function of all moral action, was best achieved by respecting maxims whose observance tended to promote utility.Footnote 93 Mill did not posit the principle of utility itself as a guide for political violence, or for action generally, because he believed that utility, paradoxically, would be most increased if individuals forwent acting as if such were their practical guide. This is why Mill appended qualifications to criterion (2) – stipulating that individuals have some possibility of success, not expect too much of individuals to aid them or change their ways, and exhaust legal means before acting – and at least one time recommended not simply that a cause be just (1), but that it fulfil demanding conditions of justice (1a−c). These caveats were clearly intended to create a justificatory theory that did not fall into a single-tier consequentialism whereby virtually any consideration of an imagined greater good could be used to permit violence, which Mill certainly believed would be grossly inexpedient. Revolutionaries’ noble pursuit of utility, the only good that was worthwhile, ought rather to be enlightened by those reasonable considerations that would ensure its success, and make reference to policy as well as morality.
Perhaps because the question of when political violence can be used legitimately is so intractable and because Mill spent relatively little time examining it, his recommendations more quickly betray the difficulties his two-tiered formula faces than in, for example, On Liberty,Footnote 94 and can in their unrevised state sanction more political violence than Mill would have probably thought appropriate. Once it can be shown that adhering to Mill's maxims will lead to ‘an uncompensated loss of utility’, these difficulties can be logically defeated and appeal can be made directly to the principle of utility.Footnote 95 Thus, as we have seen, considerations of justice, prudence and ‘gradualism’ can be summarily tossed to one side or de-emphasized, so long as the exercise of violence will result in a particularly valuable end. In the case of condition (1c), which allows for the employment of political violence when legal, peaceable means have been exhausted and thus been shown to be inexpedient, for example, it would not be difficult for activists to demonstrate, under a particular set of circumstances, that using such means of redress would be inexpedient and possibly disastrous even though they have not yet been exhausted, and to ground the legitimacy of political violence upon utility itself.
Conversely, justice could also trump expediency in some cases, and permit what could be entirely disastrous, but virtuous, acts. An expression of self-determination against a truly onerous political status quo could be partially or fully legitimate even if it failed to achieve its immediate end, as in the case of the Canadian uprisings or the abolitionists’ campaigns; in such cases, Mill appears to have been willing to posit a utilitarian function even for inexpedient acts of vengeance. This suggests that Mill was at times zealously committed to the cause of justice more or less for its own sake, even when its actual tendency to further moral utility was doubtful.Footnote 96 Moreover, it raises the problematic of whether Mill's programme amounted, in a broad sense, to much more than moderate reform domestically and progressive violence abroad.
Though conflicting theoretical demands and an implicit political intent eviscerate the cogency of Mill's theory as an indefeasible philosophical framework, it offers ample proof of Mill's own belief in the centrality of historical and moral progress in theory-construction.Footnote 97 Simply put, Mill's sympathy for the cause of the oppressed and for the heroic reformers of his century led him to articulate, so far as he was able, a practical and flexible guide to be used in service of the change Mill perhaps thought, and certainly hoped, was imminent. In staking its allegiance to the side of democratic progress, Mill's account at times affirmed a teleology of utility even for essentially abortive acts of righteous political violence, and set down only loose conditions of prudence for its exercise. The result was a theory for which violence was sometimes a means to achieve a greater social good even when justice might not demand it, and sometimes virtually an end unto itself, a righteous assertion of the collective good against tyranny. Though untenable in this form, Mill's account of political violence suggests that his sympathy for the insurrections of his time and his dedication to see progress furthered, despite the theoretician's almost unwavering prudence and opposition to violent change, were more deeply felt than is sometimes suggested. It furthermore points to challenges that Mill and utilitarians of various kinds have grappled with in trying to square a ‘value-free’ moral theory with clear, and often quite radical, political commitments within the struggles of their respective times. Mill's passion to be ‘a reformer of the world’,Footnote 98 whether this required piecemeal measures or assassinations, was then perhaps premised in some way upon a diverging and not always compatible commitment: to fight tooth and nail against those who did ‘the devil's work’,Footnote 99 whatever, indeed, the consequences.Footnote 100
