Head's Blog | With liberty | Embley School, a private school in Hampshire

In an act of fairly unsurprising (given the time) injustice to its co-author, John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty was originally published without listing his wife’s contribution. This was only corrected decades later. So I guess credit for the ideas ‘On Liberty’ but perhaps just as well it wasn’t ‘On Fairness’. Ok, it was and has been for some time unfair and unacceptable that female authors did not have their fair share of acclaim and credit. In fairness to Mill, he acknowledged his wife’s contribution, but the publishers had other ideas. Historically, convention dictated how publishers worked and societal norms gradually evolved to something much more enlightened. That to one side, my thinking, such as it is today, is less on the gender inequality issue and more on Liberty, the subject of the essay.Mill’s thinking on Liberty has been highly influential. Don’t worry dear reader, I am not about to burden you with a pocket history of the thinking around Mill, but he is grappling with a pretty fundamental issue. How does the individual regulate themselves within the context of the group? Indeed, more pressingly for Mill is the question of how the group regulates itself such that the individual is free? So, an individual should be able to think freely, to be free to act so long as their action does not harm others and they should be free to belong to groups or associations (again, as long as the members of such groups are free in choosing to belong). You will no doubt be familiar with Mill’s concern that the individual should be guarded from suffering the tyranny of the majority. Again, he is looking at how the ‘group’, society, etc (call it what you will) may agree on a course of action; but while agreed by the collective, may still be wrong. At this point, I'm betting all the utilitarians are pointing fingers saying don’t have a pop at us, we are just trying our best.
 
The debate Mill engages with is current, contemporary and not an outmoded historical political science or moral philosophical parlour game. In considering what makes us free, we might well think it is about the potential to act or is it about capacity. OK, there are clear examples of this. I can choose where to walk and what to do. There will be consequences of both, but I am free to do them. Suppose I throw a curve ball and ask you reader to consider the limit of that capacity. Before I decide to act, there is a thought process. What forms that process? What are the mechanics of my thinking? How am I doing it and what criteria or considerations am I using to make such decisions?
 
Is our thinking limited? Our capacity to reason is contained within a paradigm; or as Durkheim put it - context conditions consciousness. If this is the case, then how do I consider myself free if my thinking is constrained by my context? Remember reader the problem of Mrs Mill at the outset. How did right minded intelligent publishers think it appropriate or acceptable to disregard her contribution? Why was Jane Austen so revolutionary or Mary Wolstonecroft? Mill recognises the development of societies and accepts that so called underdeveloped societies needed and accepted benign dictators who knew better. This is a paternalism that we have outgrown, but do we need to think about the corrective we have in place to avoid the tyranny of ‘group think’, the tyranny not of the majority per se but of the prevailing zeitgeist, the prevailing opinion?
 
Our children need the capacity to see through the can’t of debate and the critical thoughtfulness to understand a reasonably held position from cosmetic posturing. They need the critical awareness not only to justify sources in school but in life. The fact checking that academic study requires and the evidence filtering is the stuff of modern living as we challenge the limits of the thinkable. All of this is required if we are to live authentically, to broaden our realm of the thinkable, the better to think not only on but with liberty.