European Legal History: A Cultural and Political Perspective Book

How we all know and love our liberal freedoms - freedom of speech (if you have the money to speak!), freedom of association (that is, if your union isn't in a right-to-work state, or your political group isn't being monitored and busted by COINTELPRO), and, the libertarian favorite, freedom to do bodily harm to oneself (i.e. freedom to buy an unhealthy lifestyle on the exhilaratingly free market). In theory, these are the freedoms Mill is particularly concerned with defending in his famous essay On Liberty. Along the way, he throws in a theory of individuality, taken wholesale from the altogether superior philosopher, Wilhelm Von Humboldt, which sits uneasily next to his empiricist/positivist views on morality and social conditioning - he both says that the individual must be elicited to develop in accordance with its innate tendencies (his famous Enlightenment reference to the individual being more like a tree than a vessel), and, at the same time, says that "moral feelings are not innate, but acquired". There are more discrepancies in his defense of utilitarianism, which is a dastardly ugly and almost impossible to understand theory (there are many, for instance, who think that its emphasis on the greater good looks like communism, but this theory is really about making everyone happy through commodities, which is obvious when one looks at the quantitative aspect). The ideal utilitarian looks at results only, which is in blatant opposition to any form of individuality which must rest on principles of knowing thyself; hence, Mill merely superimposes Enlightenment posturing on top of empiricist/positivist ethics, which, since it only takes into account consequences, and one of the most inscrutable at that, happiness, one must insist that Mill did not read his Humboldt, for the latter says somewhere that those who look to make everyone happy desire them to be machines for one's purposes - precisely the predicament of individuals who are branded as consumers, who are, in effect, nothing but machines for corporate execs. Furthermore, it is surely no coincidence that the largest propoganda compaign in human history, consumer advertising, literally began right after Mill's essays collected here were published. All in all, Mill can be seen in these confusing and contradictory essays to be one of the key architects of our incredibly ugly, wonderfully modern, liberal-nightmare (where freedoms exist so long as one doesn't test them), consumer-driven mess of a society.