More grist for Mill
Every now and then I get to pull back from my managerial duties and write a full-length piece. Today in Salon you can find my essay on John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty." It's part of the series we've been running called "Documents of Freedom" -- a look back at some of the pieces of writing and speech that form the foundation of the liberties Americans often take for granted. (Here's the full list so far.)
David Weinberger has posted an interesting response. David raises questions about what he sees as Mill's too-rational vision: "Nevertheless, Mill has always struck me, in his views on liberty as well as his utilitarianism's calm calculus of interests, as being overly rationalistic in his proposed methodologies, even while repudiating authority and legislated principle."
I think it's probably impossible that Mill, given who he was and how he was raised to be the Ultimate Utilitarian, could avoid seeming overly rational to us -- steeped as we are in all the irrationality that followed his era, in heaps of Freud and gobs of Nietzsche and decades of 20th-century horrors that have made us justifiably suspicious of Victorian progressives' optimism. And yet it's also clear to me that "On Liberty" intended to expand the boundaries of that utilitarianism in what, to Mill himself at least, probably felt like profoundly non-rational ways -- to encompass all of the eccentric traits and organically developed characteristics that make us individuals and that enrich the world without necessarily being useful in a way that Bentham would have recognized.
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