John Skorupski's Why Read Mill Today? rewards both newcomers to John Stuart Mill's philosophy and scholars who know it intimately. To newcomers, it presents both a concise, elegant overview of Mill's work and a strong case for its contemporary relevance. To scholars whose attention is usually drawn to detail, it offers an illuminating survey of the basic principles that unify Mill's entire philosophical corpus.
Skorupski has been publishing important scholarship on Mill for decades, and he knows Mill deeply. More than almost any other scholar of Mill, he attends simultaneously to the many different dimensions of Mill's philosophy – to Mill's epistemology and psychology as well as his moral, political, and economic theory. In presenting these dimensions side by side, he clarifies each of them. He also allows readers to see the full scope of Mill's philosophical accomplishment – a scope which, as Skorupski rightly observes, puts Mill in the company of the other great, systematic thinkers of the nineteenth century: Hegel and Marx.
Skorupski begins the book with a chapter on ‘free thought’, which he calls the most fundamental liberal ideal. ‘Free thought’, writes Skorupski, ‘is thought ruled by its own principles and by nothing else; in other words, by principles that it discovers by reflecting on its own activity’ (p. 6). These lines alone reveal some of the value of Skorupski's book. It does not simply summarize Mill's major philosophical works; rather, it uses them to distill Mill's basic commitments. ‘Free thought’ is not, after all, among the explicit themes of Mill's most important books. It is, nonetheless, an excellent point of entry into Mill's mind.
Both Mill and Kant, says Skorupski, were committed above all to the ideal of free thought, but they understood this ideal differently. Kant, writes Skorupski, understood free thought to be ‘radically presuppositionless’ (p. 7). To vindicate free thought, Kant therefore felt he had to answer the Cartesian skeptic who worried that thinking was tainted unless it could be liberated from all presupposition. For Mill, on the other hand, free thought meant simply thought ‘unconstrained by any authoritative source external to it’ (p. 7). Unlike Kant, Mill was unmoved by Cartesian skepticism, which he thought led to nihilism. He held that thinking begins, necessarily, with unverified assumptions, and that the best we can do is to proceed critically, with an awareness of their fallibility. He also urged us to learn patiently from the way people ‘actually reason’: ‘we should never have known by what process truth is to be ascertained’, writes Mill, ‘if we had not previously ascertained many truths’ (Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. VIII, 1974, p. 833). No a priori method could be discovered. Skorupski calls this view ‘thinking from within’ and uses it to shed light on, among other things, Mill's justification of utilitarianism.
Skorupski is no less insightful when discussing the more familiar aspects of Mill's thought. His treatment of Mill's celebrated ‘harm principle’, for instance, is subtle and clarifying. Skorupski rightly resists Mill's invitation to treat it as ‘one very simple principle’ and instead distinguishes three key claims. First, all paternalist justifications of state coercion are illegitimate. The state may not, for instance, require motorcycle helmets simply for the safety of their users. Second, personal freedom cannot be restricted in order to avoid offending other people's feelings. Third, there is a common-sense distinction between harming others and ‘omitting to benefit’ them, and while benefitting others is morally praiseworthy, it cannot generally be required, either by morality or by law. To require it would be a form of ‘liberticide’ (p. 48). Throughout this discussion, Skorupski gestures adroitly at both the complexities and the lacunae in Mill's reasoning, and his helpful examples make this familiar topic seem fresh.
Skorupski is generous to Mill throughout the book; he defends Mill against persistent misreadings and suggests a number of friendly amendments to his philosophy. But Skorupski is by no means uncritical. He doubts, for instance, that Mill's Enlightenment psychological theory – ‘associationism’ – is fully compatible with his liberal ethics. Mill celebrated individuality, by which he meant self-realization attained through free experiment and reflective self-authorship. He believed, however, that human beings had certain ‘determinate potentials’ and that they ‘flourished insofar as these potentials are realized’ (p. 76). Despite our many individual differences, Mill thought that we could all find ‘higher’ pleasure in the cultivation of certain faculties – among them the moral, aesthetic, and intellectual faculties. There are ‘common features’, writes Skorupski, ‘in the good life for all human beings’ (p. 78). This view of human nature is not easily squared with associationist psychology, which suggests the radical plasticity of the human psyche.
The highpoints of the book lie, however, in the brief conversations that Skorupski stages between Mill and other important philosophers. Reading them is like finding a good map of difficult terrain – a map that immediately helps one orient oneself more surely. I have already briefly mentioned Skorupski's comparison of Mill and Kant. Later in the book, Skorupski laments the fact that Mill never read and responded to Hegel, for he argues that there are ‘striking similarities’ between the two (p. 74). He focuses mostly on their respective conceptions of freedom – the value that both philosophers placed at the very center of their moral and political theories. They largely agree, says Skorupski, on the importance both of ‘liberty of the person enshrined in the rights of person, property and contract’, and on ‘the old moral ideal of freedom as rational self-determination’ (p. 68). They disagree over what Hegel called ‘objective freedom’: ‘the freedom one reaches when one is not confronted by a limiting and alien social reality but achieves insightful at-oneness . . . within a community that is and is seen to be rational’ (pp. 68–9). Mill was always attentive to the political importance of ‘social allegiance’ and ‘historical continuity’, as well as the salutary effects of engaged and responsible citizenship, but like other liberals he refused to elevate solidarity to a position of high ethical import, or to assimilate any form of it to the idea of freedom. In fact, Mill thought that individuality required some measure of social alienation – in this, he was closer to Nietzsche than to Hegel. Skorupski's helpful discussion gets to the fault lines that divided (and still divide) liberal from communitarian conceptions of human flourishing.
Skorupski's comparison of Mill and Nietzsche is also compelling. Unlike Nietzsche, of course, Mill was committed both to moral impartiality and to equality. He also embraced a more bounded ideal of ‘self-development’, as against purely voluntaristic self-creation. What both men shared was ‘a passion for human greatness and a real fear of modern mediocrity’ (p. 94). Interestingly, Skorupski too worries that democracy may contain an ‘inbuilt populist drift, which eventually cuts down all great and serious ideals to a “tolerant” equality’ (p. 98). He urges us to learn, from both Mill and Nietzsche, to defend the aspiration to moral and aesthetic excellence against such incipient, self-righteous mediocrity.
Skorupski also takes Mill's side against one of the dominant, contemporary liberal self-conceptions. He is skeptical of the Rawlsian view that the liberal state should rigorously avoid embracing any particular ‘conception of the good’, and even more of the notion that this commitment to public neutrality should be understood as a defining principle of liberalism. ‘The trouble is’, writes Skorupski, ‘that Rawls takes his neutralism to the point where it becomes not a pragmatic policy but a political dogma, and his influence has made people think this dogma virtually definitive of liberalism’ (p. 104). Unlike Rawls, of course, Mill did not forbid the liberal state from holding a certain ethical ideal ‘among its core allegiance-inspiring values’ (p. 104).
If there is any weakness in the book – and one has to look hard to find one – it is perhaps in Skorupski's unenthusiastic treatment of Mill's utilitarianism. Skorupski doubts that utilitarianism can serve as a foundation for liberalism; he therefore wishes Mill had given up ‘hedonism, sum-total maximization’, and even ‘the idea that morality should be derived from the good’ (pp. 37–8). He is right to highlight some of the tensions between these two systems of thought, but he could have done more to explain why Mill thought them compatible. Mill was deeply skeptical about the state's capacity to engineer individual happiness. He was skeptical not only because the state could not possibly know enough about individual lives to be capable of judicious action, but also because he was pessimistic about the motives of both politicians and democratic majorities. The first two chapters of On Liberty, in fact, can be read as commentaries on the irrepressible human will to dominate others. Mill thought that individuals could never be fully shielded from this will. Even when government was tightly bound by liberal restraints, people would use the softer power of public opinion to censure and ostracize one another, to demand conformity to their own ways. The strongest bulwark against this tendency was a habit of self-restraint; Mill therefore urged his readers to learn not to interfere in other citizens’ lives, even (and perhaps especially) with the aim of improving them. The specter of domination shaped Mill's understanding of how, as a practical matter, to maximize utility, both in public and in private. In both domains, but especially in the public, Mill's was a chastened utilitarianism, wary of licensing domination under the guise of moral improvement. The flagrant exception to this tendency was, of course, Mill's defense of colonial rule for undeveloped societies. But in modern polities, the liberal ideal of limited government, with as much space as possible for individual ‘experiments in living’, seemed to him quite consistent with utilitarian morality.
