Abstract

John Stuart Mill is commonly interpreted as a classic defender of negative liberty. According to this view, which has been common among liberal theorists from Locke to Rawls, freedom entails the absence of constraints and it is diminished whenever power is exercised. My thesis is that Mill actually develops a profound challenge to this view by illuminating the positive and negative aspects of freedom along with the complementary character of the relationship between freedom and power. I show that he develops a far-reaching theory of freedom that builds upon a provocative theory of social power. His theory highlights both positive and negative aspects of power and locates social power, along with practices of freedom, within economic, educational, gender, and family relationships, as well as within the institutions of the state. In addition, I show that insufficient attention to Mill's theory of social power has led previous interpreters to misconstrue important aspects of his theory of freedom, such as the role of his famous defense of individual liberty within it. The study thus offers both a new interpretation of Mill's political philosophy and a Millian challenge to the prevailing view that there is an inverse relationship between freedom and power