2006
The Paradox of Liberty
0 Comments
by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberal educators accord to John Stuart Mill's essay "On Liberty" the status of holy scripture. Mill's particular version of liberty, essentially that of the ACLU, is a prescription for anarchy degenerating into tyranny.
American academic liberals (not to be confused with the original version of liberalism represented by Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and by our own Constitution) have long employed Mill's essay to inculcate in callow students the idea that actions to subvert society's traditions are both heroic and socially progressive.
Mill notes that English liberty originally meant limitation of the sovereign's arbitrary powers, the ethos undergirding our own War of Independence.
But, says Mill, that principle having been long since established, the modern (1859 in his case) definition of liberty must be expanded. "It is now perceived that such phrases as 'self-government,' and 'the power of the people over themselves,' do not express the true state of the case. The 'people' who exercise power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised….. there needs protection also against the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them."
Mill's ringing summation is, "The sole object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle…… that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection."
Libertarians will find nothing to disagree with in that statement. But, as James Madison noted in Federalist No. 51, experience has taught mankind the need for auxiliary precautions.
Click to read more …
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
