On Liberty

Summary

In Our Time: On Liberty

BBC Radio 4 | Aired: February 12, 2026
Host: Melvyn Bragg
Guests:

• Helen McCabe (Professor of Political Theory, University of Nottingham)
• Piers Turner (Associate Professor of Philosophy, Ohio State University)
• Mark Philp (Emeritus Professor of History and Politics, University of Warwick)

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Episode Overview

This episode of "In Our Time" explores the enduring impact and philosophical intricacies of On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill’s seminal text on liberty, individuality, and the limits of authority. Joined by three leading experts, Melvyn Bragg delves into Mill’s intellectual biography, the critical arguments of On Liberty, and the ongoing relevance of its ideas for democratic societies.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Mill’s Early Life and Intellectual Formation

• [03:23] Mark Philp: Mill’s upbringing was highly controlled by his father, with little room for emotional development. He was treated as a “tabula rasa...a blank slate,” and intensely educated from a young age.
  • Quote: “His father comes from the Age of Enlightenment, that it’s just about reasoning and nothing else.” (04:28, Philp)
• The lasting impact was a lack of emotional fulfillment, leading Mill to later integrate Romantic concerns for feeling and self-development into his thinking.

2. Bentham and Utilitarianism

• [05:19] Mill was deeply influenced by Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism—the principle of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.”
• Through a period of crisis in his twenties, Mill reinterpreted happiness as the development of individual capacities, rather than just the balance of pleasure over pain.

3. Mill’s Mental Crisis

• [07:05] Helen McCabe: In his twenties, Mill underwent a profound mental health crisis, realizing that achievement of his reformist ideals wouldn’t bring happiness.
  • Quote: “The end had ceased to charm and so thus also had the means.” (08:06, McCabe)
• He recovered, in part, by reconnecting with feelings and simple pleasures, illustrating the need for affect and self-development.

4. Partnership with Harriet Taylor

• [09:53] Mill’s relationship with Harriet Taylor was both personally and intellectually transformative; together, they sought alternatives to the narrow Benthamite worldview.
• Taylor, a radical reformer herself, contributed greatly to the ideas that shaped On Liberty.
  • Quote: “He talks about On Liberty as being the thing that they really authored most together...a product of two minds.” (15:24, McCabe)
• Recent scholarship and computational analysis support co-authorship, especially in the chapter on individuality.

5. Writing and Aims of On Liberty

• [12:21] Piers Turner: Driven by concerns over “liberticide”—the suppression of liberty not by tyrants, but by societal pressures and consensus—they sought to identify principled limits on authority, including the tyranny of the majority within democracies.
  • Quote: “Democracy does not guarantee liberty...there was still the possibility of a tyranny of the majority.” (13:10, Turner)
• Principal aim: Defend social diversity and individuality against pressures for conformity.

6. Major Threats to Liberty

• [17:04] Mark Philp: On Liberty attacks direct limitations—like Sabbatarianism and mandatory oaths—and the deeper threat of stifling conformity and intolerance of dissent.
  • Quote: “His deep worry is the sense that society more generally is becoming more and more intolerant of diversity of opinion.” (17:41, Philp)
• Mill distinguishes between genuine freedom and merely being left alone by formal laws.

7. The Harm Principle

• [19:26] Central to Mill’s argument: individuals’ actions can only rightly be limited to prevent harm to others.
  • Quote: “Harm is whatever might set those interests back... detriment to these important interests that allow us to progress.” (19:39, McCabe)

8. Core Arguments for Liberty

• [23:43] Piers Turner:
  • Value to Society: Individuality enables “experiments in living,” fostering societal progress.
  • Value to Individuals: Self-development and self-direction are crucial for happiness and fulfillment.
  • Quote: “…there are as many possible centers of improvement as there are people…that’s just an engine of social progress.” (24:19, Turner)
• Mill (and Taylor) connect this to utilitarianism by arguing these conditions make society happier overall.

9. Freedom of Thought and Expression

• [26:07] Mark Philp: Mill’s fourfold defense:
  1. Suppressed opinions might be true.
  2. Suppressed opinions might be partially true.
  3. Engaging dissent refines our own understanding.
  4. Truth needs to be vigorously tested to remain vital.
  • Quote: “They’re making a case for protecting opinion as a special kind of category, different from action...” (27:10, Philp)
• Still, at a certain threshold (e.g., inciting immediate violence), intervention is justified (27:49).

10. Ambiguities and Limits of the Text

• [28:46] Helen McCabe: The text may be unfinished; last edits by Harriet Taylor were missing due to her death. The “applications” chapter is less developed, highlighting real-world complexities.

11. Defining the Limits of Personal Freedom

• [31:14] Piers Turner: The harm principle’s strength depends on definitions of “harm.” Importantly, society is cautioned against paternalistic interference or enforcing mere social norms.
  • Quote: “Any interpretation of the harm principle says that society should not be interfering with you for paternalistic reasons...” (32:08, Turner)

12. Mill’s Context and “Barbarous Societies”

• [33:13] Mark Philp: Mill views his principles as suited for Britain and societies “capable of being guided by their own improvement.”
• [35:22] Mill was in dialogue with European contemporaries, shaping liberalism in response to diverse political realities.

13. Reception & Legacy

• [37:03] Helen McCabe: On Liberty’s arguments for tolerance and individuality have had lasting intellectual and cultural influence, being repeatedly revived in changing historical circumstances. Mill anticipated its enduring impact.

14. Is On Liberty The Text of Liberalism?

• [38:30] Piers Turner: It’s one of liberalism’s most important texts—a “baseline” for pluralistic societies, compatible with various political outlooks, including some socialisms.
  • Quote: “It sets out a baseline that’s consistent with quite a range of views.” (39:23, Turner)
• [40:12] Mark Philp: Distinctive for its optimism and focus on living together as a community, not just government mechanics. Yet, Mill is also elitist and sets high expectations for individual development.
  • Quote: “It’s a richer, more pluralist, more optimistic view of how we can live together than many other forms of liberal doctrine.” (40:21, Philp)
• Mill and Taylor’s egalitarian reform aspirations (e.g., women’s rights, anti-racism) are inseparable from their arguments for liberty (42:10).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Mill’s Upbringing:
  “His father comes from the Age of Enlightenment, that it’s just about reasoning and nothing else.”
  —Mark Philp [04:28]

• On Mill’s Crisis:
  “The end had ceased to charm and so thus also had the means.”
  —Helen McCabe [08:06]

• On Co-Authorship:
  “He talks about On Liberty as being the thing that they really authored most together...a product of two minds.”
  —Helen McCabe [15:24]

• On Liberty’s Purpose:
  “Democracy does not guarantee liberty...there was still the possibility of a tyranny of the majority.”
  —Piers Turner [13:10]

• On the Harm Principle:
  “Harm is whatever might set those interests back...detriment to these important interests that allow us to progress.”
  —Helen McCabe [19:39]

• On Individuality and Society:
  “…there are as many possible centers of improvement as there are people, right? We explore the world in our own way...that’s just an engine of social progress.”
  —Piers Turner [24:19]

• On the Defense of Freedom of Expression:
  “They’re making a case for protecting opinion as a special kind of category, different from action, which needs to be protected even when it causes harm.”
  —Mark Philp [27:10]

• On Liberalism’s Reach:
  “It’s a richer, more pluralist, more optimistic view of how we can live together than many other forms of liberal doctrine.”
  —Mark Philp [40:21]

• On Egalitarianism and Reform:
  “He was most famous for...being a radical egalitarian reformer, not just on women’s equality...On Liberty is also about social equality and for everyone…”
  —Piers Turner [42:10]

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Important Timestamps

• Mill’s Unusual Childhood: [03:23–05:19]
• Crisis and Emotional Awakening: [07:05–09:53]
• Harriet Taylor’s Influence and Co-Authorship: [09:53–16:53]
• Threats to Liberty; Societal Conformity: [17:04–19:26]
• The Harm Principle: [19:26–20:48]
• Core Liberal Arguments – Individuality/Progress: [23:43–25:49]
• Defense of Free Thought and Speech: [26:07–28:33]
• On Liberty’s Unfinished Nature: [28:46–31:07]
• Limits to Personal Freedom: [31:14–32:46]
• Mill’s Historical Context: [33:13–37:03]
• On Liberty’s Legacy and Liberal Tradition: [38:20–41:39]
• Egalitarianism and Social Reform: [42:10–43:11]
• Roundtable on Relevance Today: [43:24–45:32]

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Closing Reflections

The panel agrees that On Liberty remains a foundational text, offering both a principled guide to social diversity and a practical challenge in managing difference, authority, and individuality. Its arguments for experimentalism, freedom of thought, and the celebration of individuality remain urgent in pluralistic societies—though ambiguities remain, particularly in real-world application and the delicate balancing of harm and liberty.

Standout Closing:

• “It’s really about all of us committing to those social conditions that allow us to continue to make progress by learning from each other.” —Piers Turner [44:54]

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For further exploration: See transcript segments [46:00–50:48], where the guests discuss edge cases, the four principles underlying On Liberty, and the tension between toleration, elitism, and true pluralism.

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Next week: The Mariana Trench.

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Produced by: Simon Tillotson
BBC Studios

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This summary captures the core content and intellectual spirit of the "On Liberty" discussion, providing both context and substance for further engagement with Mill’s landmark work.

Transcript

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[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description Wherever you're listening, I hope you enjoy the program. Hello On Liberty is one of the most important works in the history of liberalism. The philosopher John Stuart Mill rushed it out in 1859 after the death of his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill. They'd been working on it together for some years, and their message was urgent. They feared that personal liberty was under threat not from tyrants, but from stifling public opinion, from consensus on how to behave, think and live societal pressures that made it impossible to be truly individual when it was that very diversity of individuals that made society strong. It became enormously popular then and has been ever since. With me to discuss on Liberty are Helen McCabe, professor of political theory at the University of Nottingham, Piers Turner, associate professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University, and Mark Philp, emeritus professor of history and politics at the University of Warwick. Mark Phelp, Let me come to you first. What do we need to know about his childhood? Because for one of the fathers of liberalism, the. There wasn't too much liberty in evidence at home, was there?

[Mark Philp]

There certainly wasn't. So Mill was brought up on a design of his father's that treated him as a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which Mill Sr. Could write everything that he thought Mill needed to know. He taught him Greek by the age of three. Mill then was required to learn Latin in order to teach his sisters. He became an adept at chemistry and mathematics. He had an extraordinary wide reading. If you read his autobiography, it's a list of the great books of Western civilization, all before the age of 14. His autobiography is absolutely clear that he thinks that this was. In many respects it equipped him extremely well. He also says that he didn't think he was in any way exceptional as a child. And in fact, Mill's protestations of his lack of exceptionality go on throughout his whole life.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

He must have been emotionally stunted, though.

[Mark Philp]

Surely he himself came to think of his father's method as of failing his emotional side. So he ends up thinking that his father comes from the Age of Enlightenment, that it's just about reasoning and nothing else. And in his 20s and 30s, he comes to embrace a more romanticist concern with feeling and self development, self direction and so on, which he thinks is a necessary complement to the kind of education he received. His autobiography shouldn't be trusted. It's pretty clear that he's accurate about what he says, but he's making a case. He doesn't want to be thought of as somebody who is simply crammed. He wants to be thought of and he wants to be someone who has mastered this material and made it his own.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Now, one of the other people who influenced him a lot, of course, was Jeremy Bentham, his godfather. Bentham, of course, being the founder of utilitarianism, which argued that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, that is the measure of right and wrong. What impact did that have on Mill intellectually and emotionally over the years?

[Mark Philp]

So he spent a lot of time with Bentham as a child. Bentham invited James Mill and John Stuart Mill down to his house in Somerset on a regular basis. When Mill was in his late teens, he worked with Bentham on Bentham's review of judicial principles. And that, I mean, Mill has ended up being accorded an author's contribution to. He was absolutely committed to utilitarianism, at least from the kind of the age of 40. There's a hiatus around his mental crisis, which was when he was about 24.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

25, and we'll come on to that in a minute.

[Mark Philp]

But Mill never really ceases to be a utilitarian. He says in his autobiography, he just came to realize that the happiness principle demands a much more complex and sophisticated understanding of the potentialities of human life. And that means that you need to think of happiness not in the Benthamite of pleasure versus pain, but in terms of the development of individuals capacities.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Yes. And when we come on to look at the text, we'll try and tease out what the real difference between utilitarianism and liberalism actually is. But let's go back, Helen McCabe, to that nervous breakdown, I suppose, or mental health crisis that Mills suffered aged about 21. Can you describe what was happening there?

[Helen McCabe]

So in the autobiography, Mill talks about how, as Marx just said, at 14, he'd read Bentham again for himself. And he had this sort of conversion to the truth of Benthamism. And he had seen his life's goal as trying to achieve all the reforms that Bentham and his dad stood for. And he'd set his goal of happiness as being that these would be achievable. And he sounds like he was quite smug about that. Cause he knew he wouldn't actually achieve that. So then he knew he had like a whole life's worth of happy pursuit of this retreating goal. And then in the autumn of 1826, 27, when he says that he was suffering from a dull state of nerves, such as anyone might have, and such as repeatedly happened to Mill through his life. He asked himself the question, if all the things you're fighting for could happen tomorrow, would you be happy? And instantly there was this resounding answer in his head that just said, no. And that's the crisis. Because then he was like, ah. He says in the. In the autobiography, you know, that it was as if the foundation of my life had fallen down and I had nothing left to live for. Because the goal that he'd set all his happiness on wasn't gonna make him happy. And then he says the end had ceased to charm and so thus also had the means. So none of the Pursuits that he had filled his life with were gonna make him happy anymore.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

So does he give up and take to his bed and not get up in the morning?

[Helen McCabe]

So I feel like he couldn't do that. Cause he was living with his dad. And he says it's very moving past his. The autobiography. He says, if I'd loved my. We had a more loving and open relationship, I maybe could with my friends, I could have mentioned that, but I didn't have friends like that. Other problems I would have taken to my dad, but I couldn't take this one because it's the. As Mark was just saying, it's the outcome of his education. It shows that the whole educative process that his dad had put so much time and effort into was a massive failure. He says, I felt like a robot. I just went through all the motions. But unfortunately for him, and I guess for us, because at one point he says he didn't think he could live for another 12 months. He felt like this all the time. He was reading some memoirs by Marmontel in which there's a moment where Marmontel's father's dying. And yes, psychologists have made a lot of this being the moment that Mill partly recovered from his crisis and Marmontel realizes he's going to step up and take on the mantle to be to his family everything that his father has been. And Mill found himself in floods of tears. And he was. I was inspired by this scene. I felt pity and empathy and sympathy and that kind of inspiration. And I realized that I wasn't an entirely emotionless being. And that I had some of what he says in the autobiography is what makes life, character worthwhile. And then he remembered or started to feel again happiness in, he says in the autobiography, you know, music, a blue sky, a walk in beautiful nature. He has this lovely account of walking near Reading and there being a wonderful sunset. And so these small pieces of things that did actually give him pleasure started to give him pleasure again. And he built up from there.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And then a few years later, he meets Harriet Taylor.

[Helen McCabe]

Yes.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

How does that relationship develop? Cause clearly there was an element of happiness there.

[Helen McCabe]

Very well. I mean, and also great tragedy. Right. And unhappiness. But yeah. So I think, as Mark was alluding to earlier, as part of the result of the crisis, Mill thinks that his dad and Bentham's philosophy isn't the complete truth. And this has real bearing for the arguments we'll come on to later in the text of unliberty. I think that they had only a partial view of the truth. And so he goes kind of looking for other different, possibly also partial truths. So in Romanticism, he gets very involved in, with Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, he starts thinking a bit more, maybe about religion and other forms of radicalism and people interested in reform who weren't in that sort of quite narrow circle around his dad and Bentham, which led him to a Unitarian chapel run by the Reverend William Johnson Fox, a member of whose chapel was Harriet Taylor at the time. So she was married to another reformer. She had two children, she was pregnant with her third when she met Mill.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And what happens is they wait until her husband dies and then they marry.

[Helen McCabe]

I guess that's the clean version. Yes, that the autobiography slightly skates over. They have this very intense friendship. Harriet Taylor, after a bit, says, look, I don't think I can see you anymore. And there's a very moving love letter being preserved in French from Mill, saying, all right, if that's your decision, then I guess I'll have to abide by it. But our paths must and will meet again. This is not the end. It isn't the end. She leaves her husband, she goes to Paris and she takes the children with her. Mil also happens to go to Paris at much the same time. And then while they're in Paris together, they decide that actually, in terms of the greatest happiness, the greatest number, they're very happy together in Paris. But the terrible impact it's having on her husband and the potential terrible impact it will have on her children. So they do come back and they have this kind of utilitarian compromise where they continue to see each other, but platonically, until the husband tragically dies.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Yeah, and we'll see later on how that. How that professional relationship, that intellectual relationship develops. But let me turn to Piers Turner now. Piers, in 1855, Mill complains to his wife, Harriet Taylor. They're married now that opinions were encroaching, and I'm quoting here, more and more on liberty and almost all projects of social reformers. A really liberty side. Now, that ugly neologism means, I presume, killing liberty. What do you understand by it? And is this what's driving their work together?

[Piers Turner]

Well, I think when he's thinking about liberticide, he's thinking largely about Auguste Comte, who had reforms in mind, but they were reforms that were going to be great impositions on many other people.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

But for many years, August Comte, of course, being the French positivist philosopher. Social reformer.

[Piers Turner]

Exactly. And he later would write a book about that philosophy where he was Quite critical of it overall, although he was a great admirer also in some respects. But for many years, John Stuart Mill had been a proponent of freedom of thought and expression, freedom of discussion. And he and Harriet had both also written things about the value of individuality in bits and pieces prior to this time. And for a long time, they had seen the value of needing to articulate the importance of open society, the importance of people being able to live their own way according to their own tastes and pursuits. And so then really, the challenge that gives rise on liberty that they present at the very beginning of the book is that they see that democracy does not guarantee liberty. So you have a situation where they were great supporters of democratic reforms. They strongly believed in this. But it was possible, just as de Tocqueville had pointed out in his great book Democracy in America, that there was still the possibility of a tyranny of the majority. And so what the Mills saw was that there needed to be limits on any kind of sovereign authority, even a democratic authority. And so what we needed to do was think about what are the principled limits that take precautions against the misuse of that sovereign authority.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Okay, so this leads up to them deciding to write On Liberty the essay. It's only about 80 pages long in a modern paperback. There's an introduction, then, four chapters on liberty of thought, on individuality, on the limits of society's power over individuals, and on applications. What was the principal aim of writing On Liberty?

[Piers Turner]

The principal aim of On Liberty was to articulate principled limits on sovereign authority and to try to explain why it should be the case that individuals should be able to make some decisions for themselves in a way that should not be intruded upon by any kind of government or other social authority. So that relates to both legal means and also to social pressures. And what kinds of limits should there be, both on the kinds of legal coercion that might exist, but also kinds of social coercion that could exist from, like, a church or other prevailing opinion on the way that people were living. So, in sum, they were trying to make a case for social diversity and individuality against pressures about social conformity.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Thank you, Piers. Before we drill right down onto this, I want to clear one thing up, Helen, and that is John Stuart Mill said in his dedication that he and his wife worked on this together, which will come as a surprise to many listeners, I would have thought, because for well over a hundred years, it was JS Mill on Liberty, and that's it. Can we now say that this essay was jointly authored.

[Helen McCabe]

So I think we can. He talks about On Liberty as being the thing that they really authored most together. They had the manuscript with them, they were married by this point, they were living together, they were working on it day by day. They went over every sentence together, he says, and also it's a product of two minds. So the ideas in it, he says, occurred spontaneously to both of them. They were discussing them and putting them together. And we see that as well through we don't have a manuscript On Liberty to look at, to sort of see both hands. But then Mill also says, when you both discussing ideas all the time, the person who puts pen to paper isn't the only author. And then there's been some recent work in digital humanities. You could train a computer programmer to sort of learn someone's style. And so that research done by some colleagues of ours in Germany shows that when you ask it to read On Liberty, it detects Mill very strongly, but it also detects somebody else particularly strongly detects somebody else in chapter three, the one on individuality, which, as Piers has also mentioned, is very strong in much earlier texts by Harriet Taylor. And so. But certainly it suggests there's somebody as well as Mill writing On Liberty. And if there is, then she's the only other person in the picture. And I guess also maybe worth emphasising the longevity of these commitments in both of their works and the way that Mill talks about how Harriet Taylor kept him from drifting towards too many of the ideas of compte and kind of over government. And she kept him on the straight and narrow. A little bit about liberalism and that very early on, on paper that's watermarked from 1831, she wrote that every human being has a right to all personal freedom, which does not interfere with the happiness of some other. And that's not exactly the harm principle, but it's quite similar.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

It comes on. We'll talk about the harm principle. Mark Philp. Okay, what are the great threats to liberty that On Liberty identifies?

[Mark Philp]

So he starts by listing things. Sabbatarianism, temperaments movements, reform of morals movement, insistence that people giving evidence in court swear on the Bible people's rights to serve as a juror, or in fact, people who had things stolen from them were thrown out of court if they didn't do this. So those are all instances of the lack of liberty of expression that Mill picks up on. But that's not really what worries him. What worries him and is what's worried him from the 1820s is the sense that society more generally is becoming more and more intolerant of diversity of opinion. And you get some of that from the Saint Simons who say in periods of organic societies, people end up with exactly the same kinds of opinions. And it's only by breaking out of that that you can get progress and change. So his deep worry is that at this particular moment that he's writing, though it's a moment that lasts probably for about 20 years. The tendency for opinion to dominate individuals is just overpowering. Even if it doesn't stop them thinking things, it stops them saying things.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Yes, he doesn't have much time for fixed moral codes like Christianity, for example, does he?

[Mark Philp]

He's perfectly happy for Christians to be Christians. He had himself no real religious upbringing, but he doesn't want Christians to tell everybody else how they ought to live. There's a really interesting letter by Engels in 1844 where Engels writes to one of his German friends saying, look, everybody praises the British constitution for the liberty that it defends, but actually when you get here you realize that people are just stultifyingly boring because they're dominated by opinion. And in many respects Mill is picking up on that kind of, sort of sense of his own society as becoming very much kind of dominated. I mean, the point of that is he really thinks unless you live in accordance with opinions that you form for yourself, it's not your life, it's an ape like existence in contrast to a life of self direction.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And he says that the important thing is not to inflict harm on others. Helen, what do we understand by harm or what do you understand by harm? According to On Liberty, Mill talks about.

[Helen McCabe]

How he doesn't want to appeal to utility except in the broader sense in unliberty. It's kind of a link with his utilitarian background and that we should understand that as man's interest as a progressive being or mankind's interests as a progressive being. And so harm is whatever might set those interests back. He has lots of examples in the book, and there's a really interesting last chapter, Applications, where he and Harriet Taylor are thinking through some exact examples of whether people's interests are being set back or not, how to balance that. But that's the broad framework in which he wants us to think about harm. So kind of detriment to these important interests that allow us to progress. And exactly what Mark was just saying, this sense of progression is really important to Mill. It's about our self progression, our development as human beings. So if you could think about it in terms of more modern political theory, about interest based accounts of rights capabilities, approaches to rights where there's certain things that we need in order to be able to perfect ourselves. There's lots of different metaphors Mill uses in On Liberty that are about sort of self perfection, self improvement, but being able to to do that we need certain kinds of circumstances and goods provided and opportunities.

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[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Asked my electrician I found on Angie.com to bury my pet hamster Nibbles in.

[Helen McCabe]

Our yard for me because I was so moved by how carefully he buried my electrical wires. I knew I could trust him to bury my sweet Nibbles after his untimely end.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Huh, Nibbles gone too soon. May he scurry in peace.

[Mark Philp]

Hey, sorry about your pet, but I just wire stuff.

[Helen McCabe]

Nibbles would have loved you like a brother.

[Mark Philp]

Connecting homeowners with skilled Pros for over.

[Piers Turner]

30 years, Angie, the one you trust.

[Mark Philp]

Define the ones you trust.

[Helen McCabe]

Find pros for all your home [e-mail].

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

So Piers, over to you. You and Mark have alluded to the tyranny of opinion, let us say, and the possible dange within majoritarian democracies and so on. So what's the core of the essay's argument for respecting individual rights as opposed to those of the majority, and are you persuaded by it?

[Piers Turner]

Well, I've spent a career so far studying mill and partly because I am very persuaded by the core case that the Mills make in On Liberty about the value sort of the kind of liberal society that they are are putting forward, we've already got on the table a few different threads. One is about the value of freedom of discussion that Mark was emphasizing. There's also the sort of harm principle proposal that the Mills introduce, saying that society shouldn't even consider interfering with an individual's life or decision making except where there's non consensual harm to others. But we've also put on the table just sort of generally this idea of the value of individuality. And I think that's what you're asking about now. And I just want to say there's sort of two main parts that the mill seem to emphasize. One is the value to society of individuality. The value to society is that when each of us are able to pursue our own lives in our own way, they say there are as many possible centers of improvement as there are people, right? We explore the world in our own way. We have these experiments in living, as they say. And then what happens is we are able to learn from each other and talk about those different experiments in living. And that's just an engine of social progress, maybe the main engine of social progress. But also, as I think Mark alluded to earlier, it's also just valuable for each of us to direct our own lives and develop our own capacities, our intellectual capacities and our emotional capacities as ways of living as rich and full a life ourselves and have it be our own life. And so in both those ways, actually now tying back to what Helen was saying about man as a progressive being. Those can be put in the context of a utilitarian argument that says, look, if you want to maximize happiness in society, we both need to have the conditions in place for social progress where we learn from each other, but we also need to have a society in which people are able to develop themselves in their own way so that they can develop their capacities and appreciate life to its fullest. And so I think big picture, that's kind of how the utilitarianism and the liberal society that they're envisioning come together.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Okay, now central to this, of course, is going to be the argument for freedom of thought and expression. What Mark? Phil, how does Mill articulate this? And again, how persuasive are those, are those arguments for freedom of thought and expression?

[Mark Philp]

Mill has a four part defense of it. He says the opinions you're trying to repress might be true, and so you've lost something. They might be partly true, so you've still lost something. They might be false, but unless you test your current opinion, you won't really understand what your current opinion is. So there's a reason for not interfering on that ground. And fourthly, and it's not altogether clear that 3 and 4 are always distinct, but the fourth one is if you want opinion to remain lively and relevant to people, it needs to be constantly tested. And the chapter runs those kinds of stories. There's a question about why you'd put that much weight on those aspects. You start by saying this essay is about defending one very simple principle, and that single principle is not referred to at all in that chapter. So what happens in that chapter and what's happening in that chapter is not the claim that these things don't do any harm. He thinks opinion can be harmful, but he's making a case, or they're making a case, which I think I should say, they're making a case for protecting opinion as a special kind of category, different from action, which needs to be protected even when it causes harm.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

So, so in a sense, that would mean that he would be against banning speech that incites violence, for example. Am I right?

[Mark Philp]

So there are cases where you would want to say you have to arrest somebody for inciting a riot, for example, he has the example of giving a speech to an angry mob in front of a corn dealer's house. And the speech says, you know, lynch him. That clearly needs interfering with. But for the most part, you shouldn't interfere with things.

[Piers Turner]

You should.

[Mark Philp]

They can be reacted to, but they're reacted to with opinion, not with legal kind of instruments. And in many respects the chapter on freedom of thought and discussion is about the defence of liberty in opinion and as far as possible.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Thanks for that clarification, Mark. Helen Mill suggests in his dedication that the work was perhaps unfinished. What do you make of that? Do you think it's an incomplete text?

[Helen McCabe]

I think he says it would have benefited from a final edit by Harriet Taylor.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

That's a different issue.

[Helen McCabe]

So they were working on it, writing together. Harriet Taylor wasn't very well. They went to the Continent to try and chat. He be so thought that warmer, softer air would. Would help her. They made it as far as Avignon and she had a final haemorrhage and she died. And the text On Liberty was probably in the room and certainly Mill published it within sort of two months. She died in November, I think 58 and he published it in January, February. 59. So obviously not much happened to the text afterwards. As he sort of says in the beginning, some people have a view that Harriet Taylor was much more left wing than Mill. So there's a view that it would have got a lot worse, would have been much less pro liberty if she had had a last go at it. Gertrude Hibble Farbe's argued that actually it might have got a lot more conservative if Millard had another go at it and not left it as it was because she has the sense that Harriet made him more liberal. I think it's very hard to tell because we don't have a manuscript to see sort of where they got to with it. But some of the things Mark was alluding to, where people picked up, you know, it asserts one very, very simple principle. Then it has a chapter on free speech. Not super clear how those fit together. Then in chapter four it talks about there'll be two maxims. Maybe those things might have been evened.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Out or thought through more or perhaps even a conclusion.

[Helen McCabe]

So I was thinking about that this morning when I was thinking about this program and I was thinking, you might think there's gonna be a conclusion on Liberty. And then I was thinking about other books by Mill and none of them have a kind of concluding chapter. And so I just wonder whether that wasn't a Victorian thing to do. But I do think that the last chapter, the Applications chapter in the autobiography, Mill says one of the real strengths that Harriet Taylor brought to their writing collaboration was that she was much better able at kind of concretizing imaginary scenarios in her head and seeing them from all different angles and working out the potential problems with them. And so I feel like the applications chapter, which is maybe less well developed, I don't know than the rest of the book or that scenario that might have had more development if they'd had another good. Especially this part where they're talking about prostitution and gambling where basically it just says not really sure which side we should come down on. And I feel like. So maybe they would have said they were sure which side they should come down on, but maybe they wouldn't. Maybe part of the point of the application section is to show, which I think is very interesting, part of nearly all of Mill's work. There's a big theoretical section, but then in practice this is going to get more messy.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Well, Piers, let me pick up with you then and say what do you understand as being the limits on personal freedom from on liberty?

[Piers Turner]

Well, the limits on personal freedom. We saw earlier that if there is non consensual harm to others, then that opens the door for society to consider interfering with someone's life choices in one way or another. Now there's a lot of disagreement about what exactly constitutes harm to others. And so I think one thing that's very interesting is to think about how strong the principle might be depending on how you interpret the notion of harm to others. So on one view of harm, you might think that any setback to others, well being constitutes some kind of a harm, although there might be weightier or less weighty harm. Or if you think harm is only a matter of like rights violations, then that, that raises the bar significantly for what counts as harm to others. And then that makes the principle a much stronger principle. It gives you much more leeway as an individual in the decisions you're making because it's only when you're violating someone else's rights that you maybe could be interfered with. So I think that's a very important thing. What they have in common though is any interpretation of the harm principle says that society should not be interfering with you for paternalistic reasons that have to do with just your own good. And they shouldn't be interfering with you just because society has some prevailing view about what's wrong where that's understood in some non harm related way. And that actually opens a really already a wide field of play and can be very challenging to anyone who wants to live in a society where people are. Where the assumption is that we would all be living in the same way according to the same principles. That's what the great challenge of on liberty really is.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Well, talking about living in different societies. Mill is quite critical or differential about different types of society. And there's one which he refers to as barbarous. Mark, I'd like to ask you, what is this issue about, what can I say? Non European, non in inverted commas, civilized societies as it was perhaps understood at the time. What is he talking about?

[Mark Philp]

He thinks the liberty principle that he's adumbrating is designed for Britain. In 1858, 59, he writes to a French friend of his, Pasquale Villari, who said, and he says in the letter to Villari, that very little of this will be applicable elsewhere. So we have to take absolutely seriously his commitment to understanding the particular historical circumstances that he's in and designing a response to those circumstances. And one of the things he says in Liberty is the principles clearly don't apply to societies in their knowledge, just as they don't apply to children when they're being educated. Until you are capable of being guided by your own improvement, by conviction and persuasion, then you don't. You're not subject to the kind of principle of liberty. Now, the question of which societies meet those criteria is a very complex one. But in our own time, we know that when we've gone into society's thinking, if you just take the despot away, then everything will be fine and everything is not fine. So we have to accord Mill at least some respect for recognizing that not all societies have the. Have yet developed the capacity to be ruled by what Mill would say, by their own kind of convictions and by persuasion.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Well, you mentioned there his exchanges with one or two Europeans, and I'm really interested in this. On Liberty is published just over a decade after the great liberal revolutions failed revolutions of 1848, but nonetheless with a huge impact. And liberalism is a big issue outside of England and Scotland at this time. To what extent is there cross fertilization? But between all the tumultuous events going on in Europe and the thinking going on in Europe and what's going on in Mill's world.

[Mark Philp]

So Mill was aware of many of those currents and was in correspondence and met with many of those people, was influenced in part by Matt Zini, who was living in London, probably not influenced much by Marx and Engels, but he really was open to a full kind of range of influences. But what that does, if you kind of, if you're interested in the Europe of that period, is it informs you that actually these societies, although they're talking a very similar language and they're using very similar terms like liberalism and socialism and communism, there's huge diversity of opinion about what those things mean and what they stand for and what the challenges are in particular places.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

So does that mean that On Liberty becomes important both in England and elsewhere, because it sets a standard, a measure of what liberalism is or might be?

[Mark Philp]

So I think Mill thought that in many European countries, they hadn't got to the stage where opinion was so dominant. They were still dealing, in many respects, with societies which were dominated by a ruling elite that didn't tolerate mass participation. Whereas he thought of England as a much more tolerant political system, but one that had become dominated by the church and opinion and by social pressure. The same thing doesn't really apply in many other kind of cases.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Nonetheless, Helen, On Liberty has become woven into the fabric of so many ideas since its publication. How did that happen? How did it develop after the publication?

[Helen McCabe]

Mill says in the autobiography, I know I keep referring back to that book, that he and Harriet Taylor felt that Liberty would be the book that sort of had the most lasting impact and would be kind of still being read many, many years after they were dead. And it's true, people do seem to keep going back to it and finding arguments in it that they want to. That they believe and they want to try and encourage to be the basis of the political system. So more tolerance of diversity, kind of celebration of individuality, defense of free speech. And so people have kind of returned to these arguments over and over again. I mean, there could be some kind of historic luck about that that, you know, it was written by somebody who was famous at the time. He became more famous after On Liberty was published. He became an mp, more very involved in the women's suffrage movement, very notorious when he was an MP and at his death. And then that had a famous author has kind of kept those ideas alive. But I also think there is something in the ideas as part of what Mill says. On Liberty itself. Right. If ideas are good, they do keep coming back through history. That doesn't mean we're allowed to persecute them, because it's fine. They'll come back anyway. But it's a sign that people will keep returning to them. And I think that is something that has happened. People do keep returning to this book and finding something meaningful in it.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Looking at the meaningfulness. I want to ask Piers, is this the foundational text of liberalism or a foundational text of liberalism?

[Piers Turner]

I'm not sure what hangs on that difference, but I do think it is certainly one of the most important books on liberalism and will remain so for a long time. As Long as we have pluralistic societies that values social diversity. This book provides a. A kind of a textbook on what we have to have in mind if we're all going to be able to live together in a society like that. And so we live in a time, again, where I think people are learning how hard it is to live together when we have very different ideas about how we ought to live. And this book is a challenge. And I will say part of its attraction is that it sets out a sort of baseline. It says freedom of discussion, certain kinds of freedom of association, the harm principle, also the value of individuality. To some extent, it sets out a baseline that's consistent with quite a range of views. Actually, you could be a very libertarian person who's interested in On Liberty. But the Mills themselves saw themselves as qualified socialists. So there are forms of even socialism that would be compatible with the principles laid out here. And I think that that's a really important feature of this book, is to just understand what the kind of baseline commitment for a progressive, liberal, open society that they're setting out that I think all of us need to understand the challenge of that and what's involved in trying to live up to that.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Mark, you've noted that Mill was building on quite a long tradition of texts. Do you see it as the culmination of something, or does it allude to a shift in our understanding of liberalism?

[Piers Turner]

Liberalism.

[Mark Philp]

It's a complicated question because liberalism isn't an English doctrine originally, it's a Spanish one. It's the liberal revolution of the 1820s that start the ball kind of rolling. What I would say is there are two aspects on liberty that I think are sort of important. One is that it's a richer, more pluralist, more optimistic view of how we can live together than many other forms of liberal doctrine. It's not just concerned with government design, which a lot of early liberalism was. It's concerned with how we live together as a community. And that's attractive for us because I think we recognize that it's not all about kind of government. But the other thing I'd say is Mill is a fantastic elitist. I mean, we have to recognize that he's a fantastic elitist. I mean, he thinks they are. He and Harriet described it as maybe a form of mental pemmican, you know.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

That is sort of do elaborate.

[Mark Philp]

Well, pemmican being the North American Indian form of food that takes you through the kind of winter. This is something that will sustain people for kind of generations. They. They really did think they were far in advance of many of the other people of their time.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Well, to be fair, I mean, you know, its influence has lasted generations.

[Mark Philp]

Absolutely. And we shouldn't hold that against him. What he is also committed to, though, is that there's an egalitarian kind of dimension to this. It's really important that everybody develops, as far as possible, the potentialities that they kind of have and that mix of. Of recognizing that there are values out there to be pursued, while at the same time recognizing that people have to work their own way to those values. That's extremely important.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Yeah, Piers, you wanted to come in there?

[Piers Turner]

Yeah, I just wanted to jump in on the point about the egalitarianism, which I think we've not spent quite enough time on here, maybe because the book is called On Liberty, but it really is important to understand this book as being something that's part of a larger egalitarian reform effort. At the time of Mill's death, what he was most famous for in the world was as being a radical egalitarian reformer, not just on women's equality, but he also resisted the rise of scientific racism, was a proponent of equal rights for former slaves in the United States after the Civil War, and more. Also, I mean, he was somewhat of a hero of the working classes. And I think if we don't really understand the way in which On Liberty is also about social equality and for everyone, and I think Harriet's inclusion. Well, then I think we're missing some of the point of the book. And I think Harriet's inclusion as a co author helps us see that women's equality is a liberty issue, and it's just below the surface of a lot of what's going on. Liberty.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Thank you, Piers. We're coming to our last question now, and it's a quick fire round to all of you. The impact of On Liberty to Death. Is it still a relevant text?

[Helen McCabe]

Yes, because we still live in a society where people are very diverse and we haven't worked out how to live together and not harm each other and make sure that everyone does achieve everything they could possibly do, being allowed to live under their own lights of what they understand their best interest to be.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Mark?

[Mark Philp]

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think as you probably. I mean, you probably read it sort of 30 or 40 years ago and.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And, you know, then again over Christmas.

[Mark Philp]

Yeah. And rereading that text constantly promotes new ideas and kind of new thinking. I think it's something that we need to engage with and that we need to discuss. I mean, one aspect we haven't talked much about is what are the rules for how we conduct our discussion. I mean, Mill thought that people could behave in a bigoted, untruthful, deceiving kind of way, but he thought that those people had to be dealt with by opinion, not by law. So working out what counts as good discursive practice in thinking through our collective future is something I think the text would prove.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Yes. What really struck me rereading it was that insistence on the need for opinions to be exchanged and seen against each other, because only then can you build towards the truth. Piers, your last thoughts on the relevance of On Liberty.

[Piers Turner]

Well, I think the book is even more important to liberals than they might realize. I think many liberals have come to focus more on the need for accommodation of different people's beliefs so that there's reasonable disagreement, and so we need to accommodate each other. But really, the overarching message On Liberty is about experimentalism. It's about exploring the world and learning from each other. It's not just about accommodating each other. So it's really about all of us committing to those social conditions that allow us to continue to make progress by learning from each other. And I'm not sure that actually liberals have sort of carried on that particular argument as well as they should have for the last few decades.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Well, we've been talking about On Liberty for the last 150 years or so, and I dare say we will in another 150 years. I certainly hope so. So my thanks to all of you, piers Turner, Helen McCabe, and Mark Philpe. Next week, we take a deep dive into the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench. Much deeper, incidentally, than Everest is high and the life that thrives there. Thank you for listening.

[Mark Philp]

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his kids guests.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Tell me, is there anything that's missing as far as you're concerned?

[Mark Philp]

So one thing I think is so harm to interests. I mean, Mill thinks that if two of you go for the same job, then somebody's interests are harmed. So we shouldn't think that. He thinks that the category of non harming is very big and that needs protecting. He thinks there are lots of cases in which there will be harm, but.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

You know, legitimate harms is what.

[Mark Philp]

Exactly. So, so there are harm. There are cases where no harm is done. There are cases where there is some harm done, but we should just ignore it because there are other kinds of benefits for it. And there are cases where There is some harm done and we should condemn it, with my opinion. And there are cases in which there's some harm done and it should be condemned by law. And working out what the balance is between those different things is a really important part of Mill's thinking. And that's. He comes back to that. And there are. In the application section. That's the sort of thinking that's driving that.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Yes. I think we could have done a bit more on the application section. Piers, I was going to ask you about that.

[Piers Turner]

Yeah, well, I think there's. There are. It's not exactly what Marc said, but there are two different questions that are important. One is what is the criterion that even allows for society to consider interfering? That has to do with sort of their rightful authority. Can society even take up a question about interference? And then there's still a further question of when is that interference actually justified? Would it be beneficial? So, for instance, there's a case of free trade that the Mills regard as a social act and therefore could be regulated by society rightfully, but shouldn't be because on balance it's better to leave trade in the commercial sector as a free exchange of goods or whatever. And so I think it's important to see that sometimes they might say interference is not justified, even though it could be rightful. And the arguments come in at different places.

[Helen McCabe]

Helen, I just want to pick up on what Piers was saying at the end and a bit of what Marxist thing as well. But not only is a really positive book, I think sometimes people say, oh, it's a bit of a naive book, but I think it is giving us this, like, much more positive vision about how we could live together and a positive rule by which to judge our behaviours. And like that. That's the. That's the aim is to really shift how we think about the reasons we make laws or the reasons we might decide to be friends with somebody or cut them in the street. Shouldn't be about sort of religious belief. It shouldn't be about the fact that I think what you get up to on a Saturday afternoon is. Is disgusting or boring. It should be about harm. And that. That is a really radical shift and perhaps doesn't seem as radical to us because we're more used to cost benefit analysis or like thinking of things on those terms, but was really radical when they came up with it. And then also Harriet Taylor has these wonderful early pieces on toleration and about the. How we need to tackle what she calls the fasces of public opinion and how trammelling public opinion can be. But she also doesn't think toleration is. Is good. She thinks toleration is kind of mealy mouthed. It's very weak. It's basically saying, well I don't really care if you burn in hell for eternity as long as you don't interfere with my soul.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

So she wanted more clearer definition.

[Helen McCabe]

I think she just wants us more kind of celebration of difference. It's not that I tolerate you. Toleration's quite a negative thing is that I say, oh, you are one of the thousand flowers. Look how beautiful you bloom.

[Mark Philp]

Mark, there's one other thing. There are actually four principles on liberty. So harm to others is one. And the speech in front of the corn dealer would be an example of that. There are duties that we have as part of living in a society together and we rightly coerced into performing those.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Which he does recognize.

[Mark Philp]

Jury service. Exactly. He also has this view about making a nuisance of yourself being offensive to others. And that's where it's a complicated case and he never really develops it, but it's. Having adulterous sex in a hotel is perfectly okay. Doing it in a public place is not okay. So intruding yourself into shared space in certain kinds of ways could also be controlled. And finally where you've got distinct obligations, so a soldier who gets drunk on duty is rightly punished. So those four principles are at work. And I think as a sort of another edit of On Liberty might have moderated the single simple principle and said, well actually there are a few other things as well.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

I trust the new edition which Piers and Helen have co edited will be clearing up some of these issues. Just one fling, Mark, that you said, which really struck me and, and Piers talked about this when talking about de Tocqueville. The elitism is part of the elitism, a sort of fear of the mob. Fear of the majoritarian.

[Mark Philp]

Majoritarian rule it is. The fear of majoritarian rule is not because of the. I mean for Tocqueville it's that they become led by demagogues. I mean it's the classic kind of critique of democracy translated into the 19th century. For Mill, I think he thinks that there are three forms of power he discusses in Spirit of the Age. I mean there's the intellectual elite, there's the church and then there's the government. When those three work together, then it's absolutely stultifying and they will lead the mass in their intolerance. And that's what we really need to avoid. And that I think is what he's most worried about, about in the 1850s. And of course, the thing we didn't really talk much about is Mill's relationship with Harriet was the source of deep controversy, much like George Eliot's relationships. And Mill was facing a kind of personal battle as to how to deal with intrusive opinion.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Piers, a final comment from you.

[Piers Turner]

Yeah. Just to put some of the elitism claims in a certain context, when you look at his considerations on representative government and his institutional design approach, it's clear on one hand that Mill is not willing to forego a kind of democratic check on power. There has to be security for good government where the people have their say. But what he's trying to figure out, and I think we're still struggling with today, is how do you maintain a democratic check on power, but then on top of that, still have representative systems that allow for competent judgment to be able to have its appropriate weight.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Oh, and here comes Simon. Would you like tea or coffee?

[Mark Philp]

Yes, coffee. Tea? Tea?

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Tea for me, please.

[Helen McCabe]

Thank you very much.

[Mark Philp]

Thank you very much.

[Helen McCabe]

In Our Time with Misha Glennie is.

[Mark Philp]

Produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production. Hello.

[Helen McCabe]

Alex von Tunzelman here with a brand new series of history's heroes.

[Mark Philp]

People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including the little known story of a famous author caught up in a horrific.

[Helen McCabe]

Accident which would require all his courage. Dickens remained in the river, helping the.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Rescue, assisting the wounded.

[Helen McCabe]

He didn't search out to be heroic. He didn't play on his heroism. Subscribe to To History's Heroes on BBC Sounds. With the American Express Platinum card, you.

[Piers Turner]

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[Helen McCabe]

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[Piers Turner]

And other limits in terms of.