Mill's religion of humanity: consequences and implications.

• Author: Raeder, Linda C.
• Position: John Stuart Mill - Critical Essay

One of the more remarkable, if controversial, developments in Anglo-American society over the past century has been the transformation of liberal politics from a commitment to limited government toward the progressive expansion of governmental direction of the social process. John Stuart Mill was a pivotal figure in that transformation. His self-avowed "eclecticism" allowed him to retain something of a commitment to classical liberalism, and he never completely abandoned the belief in a limited political sphere that characterizes that outlook. But Mill muddied the waters of classical-liberal philosophy and practice by his conviction that the end of government is the all-encompassing "improvement of mankind" and not the preservation of individual liberty-under-law, as well as by his self-conscious embrace and advocacy of the "social" moral ideal. Moreover, Mill's ambition to replace the theologically oriented society of the Western tradition with one grounded in and oriented exclusively toward Humanity necessa rily entailed a departure from classical liberalism. For individual liberty-under-law. as historically understood in the West, is crucially and inseparably wed to the belief in a law higher than the enactments of mankind, as well as to the sanctity of the person that derives from his or her source in God. In short, Mill's attempt to replace God with Humanity not only eviscerates the higher-law tradition crucial to the preservation of individual liberty and limited government but their spiritual foundation as well. For it is the transcendent spiritual purpose of each human being that, historically and existentially, engendered and sustains resistance to the pretensions of merely political power. When "Humanity" is elevated to the ultimate source and end of value, the political rulers become, in effect if not in name, the new gods.

Mill's influence on the development of the liberal tradition, then, is crucially bound up with his religious views and related thought. Mill's successful incorporation of the doctrines associated with French Radicalism into the Anglo-American liberal tradition is bound up with the transformation of liberalism from classical-liberal constitutionalism to "advanced-liberal" progressivism. This in turn is related to the tension in Mill's thought created by his lingering commitment to a classical-liberal defense of individual freedom and limited government and his even more passionate commitment to the establishment of an intramundane social religion. As Maurice Cowling has suggested, in the end a proper evaluation of Mill's thought turns on the question of whether his apparently "libertarian" politics are not in fact "subordinate to the religious Mill."' Benthamite/Millian utilitarianism was in continuity with the attempt of various French thinkers to create a secular, social, or political religion to provide the spiritual substance thought to be essential to the maintenance of social unity and political order. It should not be forgotten that the precursor of Millian Humanitarianism was the religious skepticism of the eighteenth-century philosophes and the radical anti-Christianity of the French Revolution. Through Mill's influence this rampant hostility to traditional religion was incorporated into the Anglo-American tradition. In short, Benthamite/Millian utilitarianism should be regarded as a less virulent manifestation of the anti-theological impulse that impelled revolutionary forces in eighteenth-century France to overthrow Christianity in the name of the Goddess Reason and Humanity. Mill's goal, like that of his predecessors, involved the implicit divinization of Humanity as well as the elevation of "service to Humanity" to the ultimate end of religious aspiration. It also involved the equally important, if less dramatic, insinuation of Benthamite/Comtean "altruism" and its notion of the superiority of "social " to personal morality into modern Anglo-American consciousness.

Mill's attempt to weave the "social"-ist aspirations of the Continental thinkers into the essentially individualist tradition of Anglo-American liberal thought accounts for much of the notorious inconsistency of his corpus, for the two traditions and ideals are essentially irreconcilable. (2) The actual result of his unsuccessful attempt to knit together the incompatible elements of individualism and socialism was the curious and unstable hybrid of "modern liberalism," which attempts to promote the socialist moral ideal of collective service to Humanity through expansive, activist government and this in the name of the very individual freedom classical liberalism was concerned to secure. It is not surprising that Mill's views are most vigorously championed by modern liberals who advance such a view, for the spiritual and moral ethos he championed is that which has impelled the rise of modern-liberal collectivism. Mill, in perhaps his most important incarnation, is the first "modern liberal."

"The Meeting of the English and the French Mind" (3): The Transformation of Liberalism

F.A. Hayek is one of the chief proponents of the view that modern liberalism is an incoherent and unstable hybrid engendered by the conflation of two essentially distinct and opposing traditions, namely, what he, with Mill, refers to as Continental and Anglo-American Liberalism. (3) At the age of 14, Mill was sent to spend a year in France with the family of Sir Samuel Bentham, Jeremy's brother. To this experience, Mill said, he owed not only a command of the language but also"... a strong and permanent interest in Continental Liberalism, of which I ever afterwards kept myself au courant, as much as of English politics: a thing not at all usual in those days with Englishmen, and which had a very salutary influence on my development, keeping me free from the error always prevalent in England, and from which even my father with all his superiority to prejudice was not exempt, of judging universal questions by a merely English standard." (4)

Opinions may differ with respect to the salutariness of the Continental influence on Mill's development. There is no question, however, that Mill played a significant role in the mingling of the two "liberal" traditions and must receive a prominent place in any future research that attempts to disentangle them. He was a close student of French political developments and wrote a series of weekly articles on French politics for The Examiner during the 1830s, eventually establishing himself as the contemporary English expert on French affairs. He wrote extensively on Armand Carrel, Michelet, Guizot, and Alfred de Vigny, as well as on the French Revolution (Mill had originally planned to write its history, but eventually turned over all his material to Carlyle, whose book on the subject established his reputation, with Mill's considerable assistance). Mill ran to Paris at the outbreak of the 1830 July Revolution, impelled by apocalyptic expectations-he thought the Time of Man had arrived. In 1848 he responded to Tory critics of French developments with his "Vindication of the French Revolution of 1848."

Mill's correspondence with Auguste Comte indicates that a merger of what Mill himself regarded as the essentially competing traditions of English antirationalism and French rationalism was one of his, as well as Comte's, explicit goals. In 1842 he wrote to Comte about "another idea to which, almost alone among my compatriots, I have always adhered: like yourself, I am thoroughly convinced that the combination of the French and the English spirit is one of the most essential requirements for our intellectual renewal... . The French spirit is necessary so that conceptions may be generalized; the English spirit to prevent them from being vague." Mill found the "lucidity and systematic spirit which are truly French" more to his taste than the plodding practicality of his English compatriots. (5) What Mill himself loved was "abstract speculation," which he identified with French thought. He often reproached the English for their lack of interest and sympathy toward French speculative thought, and especially toward the philosophies of history developed by such Continental thinkers as St. Simon and Comte and which played such a prominent role in Mill's own thought. For Mill, his fellow Englishmen, fouled as they were by the "stench of trade," were little more than a dead weight on his soaring rationalist-Romantic spirit. (6) And, perhaps most importantly, Mill was the chief carrier of the-illiberal-- ideas of the St. Simonians and Comte into Anglo-American society St. Simon is widely understood as a fountainhead of the totalitarian ideologies that flourished in his wake, and even Mill would finally renounce Comte's schemes as "spiritual despotism." (7)

We have suggested that the conventional characterization of Mill as the last great spokesman for the classical-liberal tradition is misleading. Victorian England did of course represent the heyday of classical liberalism. Moreover, Mill's deep immersion in that tradition, as well as his self-conscious eclecticism, insured that his philosophy and outlook were informed by various authentically liberal elements. Nevertheless, as Hayek has said and as Mill himself acknowledged, Mill was very far from representative of his age and tradition and, indeed, was often in violent opposition to them. As Mill wrote to Comte in 1846," ... I have stood for quite some time in a kind of open opposition to the English character, which arouses my animosity in several respects; and all in all, I prefer the French, German or Italian character ..." (Corr, 365). Leslie Stephen described Mill as "an alien among men of his own class in English society." (8) Hayek thinks Mill "acquired ... contempt ... for English society, [as well as ] ... for contemporary development of English thought." (9) Joseph Hamburger identifies Mill as the prototype of the modern "alienated...