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Millian Liberalism and Colonial Oppression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

D.G. Brown
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Extract

In nineteenth-century Europe …. [w]ith rare exceptions liberals approved of colonialism and provided it with a legitimizing ideology …. Liberalism became missionary, ethnocentric, and narrow, dismissing non-liberal ways of life and thought as primitive and in need of the liberal civilizing mission.

This is the judgement passed by Professor Bhikhu Parekh in his 1994 essay “Decolonizing Liberalism.” His deference to John Stuart Mill is shown in his making Mill not one of the exceptions, but rather the central object of attack. It would seem indeed that if the charges can be made good against Mill they will hold against nineteenth-century liberalism in general, and perhaps in some degree against twenty-first-century liberalism.

Simple piety moves me to offer some defence of Mill's own good judgement, particularly in relation to India. But, in dealing with a phenomenon like liberalism, we need always to maintain a distinction which tends to blur. Doctrines and assertions are one thing. Historical movements and trends in a society are another.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 25: Civilization and Oppression , 1999 , pp. 79 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1999

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References

1 Parekh, Bhikhu ‘Decolonizing Liberalism,’ in The End of” Isms“?, ed. Stromas, Alexander (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 85–103 (quotation from the abstract, p. 85)Google Scholar. His ‘Liberalism and Colonialism: A Critique of Locke and Mill,’ in The Decolonization of Imagination, ed. Nederveen, Jan and Parekh, Bhikhu (London: Zed Books, 1995), 83–98Google Scholar, adds a few twists in coupling this account with that of Locke, and contains the clearest statement of the view I am questioning: “Mill's defence of colonialism was based on his theory of man as sketched above” (94).

2 For example, the rich account of tangled British attitudes to India in the introductory chapter of Stokes, EricThe English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959)Google Scholar, should caution anyone trying to identify “nineteenth century liberalism.” On Stokes’ assignment of a relatively minor role to the influence of John Mill, see Zastoupil, LynnJohn Stuart Mill and India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 3, 169-70Google Scholar.

3 Mills, CharlesThe Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

4 On Liberty, chap. I, par. 10, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, gen. ed. Robson, John M. 33 vols. (Toronto: Toronto Universtiy Press, 1962-91)Google Scholar [cited hereafter as CW], XVID 224.

5 Zastoupil, Lynn ‘J.S. Mill and Indian Education,’ Utilitas 3 (1991): 69–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Here and in note 16 I cite two articles by Zastoupil, as they may be more available, and offer some more condensed statements of his view. These, however, are only fragments of the thoroughgoing and magisterial account given in his book (see note 2 above). That work seems to me to give also a balanced assessment of the shortcomings in Mill's view of India, and thereby judicious recognition of such truth as there is in Parekh's critique.

6 Cited by Zastoupil, ‘J.S. Mill and Indian Education,’ 75–76Google Scholar, from J.S. Mill, ‘Recent Changes in Native Education,’ P.C. 1828, L/P&J /1/92, India Office Library and Records, British Museum, para. 13.

7 Zastoupil, ‘J.S. Mill and Indian Education,’ 79Google Scholar, Mill para. 20; also cited in Zastoupil, Mill and India, 44.

8 The Petition of the East India Company (1858), CW XXX 81.

9 ‘The British Rule in India’ and ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’ [written in English], in Marx, Karl and Engels, FrederickSelected Works in Two Volumes (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 345-58Google Scholar, reprinted in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed., ed. Tucker, Robert (New York: Norton, 1978), 653-64Google Scholar;.this passage 346-47 = 654-55.

10 Ibid., 350-51 = 657-58.

11 Ibid., 350 = 658.

12 For the record, the sequence seems to be: Ryan, Alan ‘John Stuart Mill's Art of Living,’ The Listener 74 (21 October 1965): 620-22Google Scholar, and The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (London: Macmillan, 1970); Dryer, D.P. ‘Mill's Utilitarianism,’ introductory essay in CW X (1969)Google Scholar; Brown, D.G. ‘Mill on Liberty and Morality,’ Philosophical Review 81 (1972): 133-58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Mill's Criterion of Wrong Conduct,’ Dialogue 21 (1982): 27-44; Lyons, David ‘Mill's Theory of Morality,’ Nous 10 (1976), 101-20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David Copp, ‘The Iterated Utilitarianism of J.S. Mill’ and Sumner, L.W. ‘The Good and the Right,’ both in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume V (1979): 75–98 and 99-114 resp.CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berger, Fred R.Happiness, Justice, and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), chap. 3Google Scholar; Gray, JohnMill on Liberty: A Defence (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), chap. 1 and 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skorupski, JohnJohn Stuart Mill (London: Routledge, 1989), chap. 9Google Scholar. The only recent dissent I have seen is by Crisp, Roger in Mill, J.S.Utilitarianism, ed. Crisp, Roger (Oxford: Oxford University Press [Oxford Philosophical Texts], 1998), 140-42Google Scholar, and his Mill on Utilitarianism (London: Routledge, 1997), chap. 5; but I find his textual evidence unconvincing.

13 For a fuller account see my articles referred to in note 12. Skorupski, John reinvents this wheel in his ‘The Definition of Morality,’ in Ethics: Philosophy Supplement 35, ed. Griffiths, A.P. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 121-44Google Scholar. Unfortunately he follows Lyons in making guilt and blame central to the analysis, and his convoluted problems about blame are difficulties not for Mill's account but for Lyons’ misinterpretation of Mill's text. Such psychologizing of moral criteria may have merit that escapes me, but has little as interpretation of Mill.

14 Hume, DavidEnquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Sec. IX, in Enquiries (Selby-Bigge), ed. Nidditch, P. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 272Google Scholar.

15 Brown, D.C. ‘Mill on Liberty and Morality,’ Philosophical Review 81 (1972): 158CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Zastoupil, Lynn ‘J.S. Mill and India,’ Victorian Studies 32 (1988): 31–54Google Scholar. Excerpts From 44-46.

17 CW XVIII 119-47.

18 Marx, Selected Works, 323 [Tucker, 663)Google Scholar.

19 I am grateful for helpful comments on a draft of this paper from the editor and from Leonard Angel, Rodger Beehler, and Paul Russell.