1 Marcuse, H., One-Dimensional Man (London, 1970), p. 3.Google Scholar

2 We have in mind here analysis of the various — and often hidden — faces of power: the lack of free and fair competition, economic and otherwise, within pluralist systems; the systematic — though in some form and to some degree inescapable — destruction of options, alternatives and possibilities. Wright Mills saw liberalism as lacking a tenable theory of society and any effective means of action. It had failed to consider the structural conditions of social life and the need to change them, and had therefore degenerated into a useful defence of the status quo. The Marxists (New York, 1962), pp. 28-9. The general critical points, descriptive and normative, may apply equally strongly to non-liberal and non-capitalist societies.

3 Those for Mill, as they portray him, include J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy and I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (see especially the essay entitled “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life“). The strong critics of Mill and liberalism include, in addition to those cited in the following footnote, J. Hallowell, Main Currents of Political Thought, R. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man and M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. For a discussion of some mid-century conservative opposition to liberalism, see Coker, F. W., “Some Present-Day Critics of Liberalism”, The American Political Science Review, 47 (1953), 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 For example, C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, The Real World of Democracy and Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval; R.P. Wolff, “Beyond Tolerance”, in Wolff, Moore and Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance; Lichtman, R., “The Facade of Equality in liberal Democratic Theory”, in Socialist Revolution, 1 (1970), 85–126Google Scholar (published earlier in Inquiry, 12 (1969)); and E.M. Wood, Mind and Politics. An approach to the meaning of liberal and socialist individualism. While these writers appear to share certain assumptions about liberalism, they do not focus on the subject or develop their argument in precisely the same way, and they differ in passion, historical sense and sophistication.

5 See Mannheim, K., Ideology and Utopia (London, 1976), pp. 104–130,Google Scholar & 197-206.

6 Lichtman, “The Facade of Equality in Liberal Democratic Theory”, p. 124.

7 Ibid., p. 126 — emphasis ours.

8 Of course, it is often held that such a function is best served by blurring the divisions between social groups, in order to prevent revolutionary situations from developing. A fudging ideology will the more easily incorporate the claims of subordinate groups.

9 The Rise of European Liberalism, p. ii.

10 The criticisms made by Keith Thomas of Macpherson's reading of Hobbes are relevant here, as they point to the dangers of using simple images of political theories and simple models of class structure, interests and appropriate behaviour. Thomas writes: “Most previous commentators have …. had to proceed with a priori models of conduct appropriate to different social classes. These models have sometimes been elaborately Justified, sometimes taken for granted, in either case they have necessarily been inadequate, so long as the basic sociological analysis of seventeenth century English society remains to be carried out, and so long as the association of different ethical codes with different social classes is an unproved assumption. At the moment, therefore, any move to reconstruct the social affiliations of Hobbes’ political thought must necessarily be of a tentative kind”. “The Social Origins of Hobbes’ Political Thought”, Hobbes Studies, ed. K.C. Brown (Oxford, 1965), p. 186. His exhaustive investigation of some of the social groups from which Hobbes derived his assumptions and to which his recommendations were likely to have appealed led him to the view that aristocratic, bourgeois and popular elements were closely interwoven. He properly rejects the automatic and simplistic characterisation of Hobbes' thought as bourgeois.

11 See Lukes, Steven, Individualism (Oxford, 1973).Google Scholar

12 Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1955) p. 94.

13 Macpherson understands the liberal-democratic tradition in political thought as expressing a system of ideas which he categorises as possessive individualism and summarises in seven closely related assumptions about man and society. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford, 1962), pp. 263-4.

14 “On the Jewish Question” ,Early Writings, ed. T.B. Bottomore (London, 1963) p. 26.

15 Ibid., pp.25·26.

16 “Beyond Tolerance”, op. cit. p. 27.

17 Ibid., p. 26.

18 Ibid., p. 28.

19 Ibid., p. 29 — our emphasis. Why the ‘even'? Mill clearly recognises the reality of such feelings and firmly supports institutions and processes which might strengthen them.

20 Ibid., p. 29.

21 Ibid., p. 33.

22 Wood, E.M., Mind and Politics. An approach to the meaning of liberal and socialist individualism. (Berkeley, 1972), p. 41.Google Scholar Cf. also Hollis, Martin, “J.S. Mill's Political Philosophy of Mind”, Philosophy, 47 (1972), 334-47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Ibid., p. 49.

24 Ibid., p. 31. Cf. again, p. 123: “According to the liberal conception of the relationship between individuality and sociality, ‘the two are antagonistic and individuality is self-annihilating in the sense that it demands a sociality ultimately inimical to it. In short, this is a conception in which there is an eternal tension inherent in individuality and between individuality and sociality, and neither the one nor the other can ever be fully realized”.

25 Ibid., p. 10.

26 Ibid., p. 18.

27 Ibid., p. 62.

28 For Dr. Wood's Justified complaint, see pp. 6-7.

29 See Lukes, op. cit., pp. 8 & 18.

30 On this last point, see McCloskey, H.J., “Mill's Liberalism”, Philosophical Quarterly, 13 (1963), 143-56CrossRefGoogle ScholarHalliday, R.L., “J.S. Mill's Idea of Politics”, Political Studies, 18 (1970), 461-77CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Ryan, A., “Two Conceptions of Politics and Democracy: James and John Stuart Mill” In Fleisher, M., ed. Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (London, 1973).Google Scholar

31 “Against Method”, in Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science, Vol. IV, p. 112, note 52.

32 For a brief discussion of ‘The Abstract Individual', see Lukes, op. cit., pp. 73-8.

33 For example, Mill writes that:

The laws of phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing but the laws of the actions and passions of human beings united together in the social state. Men, however, in a state of society are still men: their actions and passions are obedient to the laws of individual human nature. Men are not, when brought together, converted into another kind of substance, with different properties … Human beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the laws of the nature of individual men.

A System of Logic (London, 1930), p. 573.

35 A System of Logic, VI, x, section 7. Ellen Wood uses this passage to show an alleged tendency of liberals to make conformity the source of order and a substitute for community (see pp. 109-10). But while this is undoubtedly a coercive use of public opinion — similar perhaps to the way public opinion is conceived in certain Communist countries — Mill seems to regard it as necessary in a low state of human development. As with Rousseau (see p. 121), it is not ‘the ultimate principle of social unity', nor ‘an inevitable consequence of man's nature'. Conformity is not for Mill a substitute for community. And it clearly challenged some forms of individualism in his own time.

36 See especially Mill, on Bentham and Coleridge (London, 1959), pp. 68–74,Google Scholar and A System of Logic, Ill, xiii, section 7 and VI, viii, section 3.

37 Utilitarianism (London, 1960), p. 29.

38 It seems to us that Mill's individuality does not simply mean ‘atomism or privatization', and that Mill's conception of the growth towards maturity and rationality is rather like the process as it seemed to Wood's Piaget, who is summarised approvingly — a tendency “toward a desire for equality, autonomy, cooperation, and solidarity with his fellow-men, rather than inequality, heteronomy, competition, and egoism” …. Wood, op. cit., p. 14, note 12.

39 And may go as far as to find him a moral authoritarian, or even a moral totalitarian. See, for example, M. Cowling, Mill and Liberalism. However, moral totalitarians may see men in egoistic and atomistic terms.

40 Berlin, , “John Stuart Mill and the Ends of life”, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969), p. 183.Google Scholar

41 Principles of Political Economy (Toronto, 1965), IV, VI, 2, p. 754.

42 Capital (Moscow, undated), I, pp. 610-11.

43 Lichtman, op. cit., p. 112.

44 Ibid., p. 106.

45 Ibid., p. 111.

46 Ibid., p. 109.

47 For a more detailed discussion, see Duncan, Graeme, Marx and Mill (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 217 ff.Google Scholar

48 See Wood, p. 158, for an elaboration of this somewhat misleading criticism.

49 Ibid., pp. 106-7.

50 “Post-Liberal-Democracy?” in Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford, 1973), p. 184.

51 Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval, pp. 99-100.

52 The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, p. 267. Wood comments as follows on the conception of the free contract shared by Locke and all liberals until T.H. Green: “freedom is considered to be unaffected by the unequal constraints and the subordination of one man to another that are necessarily imposed on men by the realities of their social and economic status, by property and class differentials”. Op. cit., p. 114.

53 Ibid., p. 269.

54 The target shifts a little, but not enough to cause problems — it is, for Macpherson, either the capitalist market system, the market society, the market economy or the property institutions of capitalism.

55 Principles of Political Economy, II, i, section 1, p. 200.

56 Ibid., II, i, section 4, p. 214.

57 The authors differ over the character and implications of a truly free enterprise system. For Duncan's views, see Marx and Mill, and for those of Gray, as follows: Mill's theory of morality and human nature is discussed in “John Stuart Mill on Liberty, Utility and Rights” (forthcoming in Nomos, Human Rights); his account of property and Justice in “John Stuart Mill's liberal doctrine of property” (forthcoming in The Idea of Property in the Western Tradition, published by the Calgary Institute of Humanities); and Mill's complex ideas about freedom and autonomy in John Stuart Mill's Conception of Freedom (forthcoming).

58 Wood, op. cit., pp. 14 and 45. Throughout the book the Kantian-dialectical notion of freedom as pure self-activity, which is incompatible with subjection to objective forces external to the individual, is described sympathetically.

59 Mill was at times a visionary, vaguely discerning futures marked by a sharp diminution in the role of force in social life, the disappearance of classes and substantial inequalities, etc., and he often insisted that human nature and human possibilities could not be read off existing behaviour. See Auguste Comte and Positivism (Michigan, 1961), pp. 82-3 and “Chapters on Socialism” (posthumous), Fortnightly Review, XXV, N.S., 1879, pp. 222-4.