a historiosophy delineating the development of human civilization.
That does not tell the whole story. For, as established by Prager (2005, 625), Mill’s international ideas are “outgrowths of his personal struggles” to free himself from three tyrannies: (1) the exacting education received from his father, James Mill; (2) the gossip and social ostracism triggered by Mill’s unconventional relationship with the married Harriet Taylor; (3) the oppressive relation between them in which Mill had to defer to Taylor’s opinions even when he thought her wrong. These findings suggest
a different way of understanding the hitherto neglected “empiricist”
connection between Mill’s liberal imperialism and life experiences.
Nevertheless, Prager does not exhaust this connection. Nor does he make efforts to go beyond a motivational analysis. The section is meant to take seriously the neglected empiricist dimension in Mill’s liberal imperialism and address the issue of ethnocentrism accordingly.
This involves a reading of Mill’s liberal imperialism in the light of his idea of “experiments in living” found in On Liberty (Mill 1963-91, CW XVIII, 260-61, 281). This is the passage where Mill first brings up the idea:
As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so it is that there should be different experiments in living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injuries to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when anyone thinks fit to try them (Mill 1963-91, CW XVIII, 260-61; author’s emphasis).
To be sure, this passage is meant to be an argument for liberty and individuality. And indeed Isaiah Berlin (1969, 206) understands this to be Mill’s defence for individual freedom on the grounds that liberty is a necessary condition for human beings “to choose and to experiment” – so as to realize their potential, and thereby become
“fully human”. This classic interpretation immediately casts light on how Mill understands the instrumental and the intrinsic values of individual liberty respectively. In addition, it touches on the empiricist dimension in Mill’s empiricism, and has since popularized the idea of “experiments in living”. Nevertheless, despite scholars like Ryan (1991), Gray (1983), and Wollheim (1991) having made their contributions to the development of “experiments in living”
as a concept or a doctrine so as to make sense of Mill’s theory of liberalism, they have not attempted to read Mill’s Autobiography (1973) as a report of his own experiments in living.
Elizabeth Anderson (1991) is an exception. In an article meant to reply to the widespread criticism of Mill’s distinction between the “higher pleasures” associated with the exercise of mental faculties and the “lower pleasures” derived from bodily enjoyment as evidence of his perfectionism or elitism, she suggests that the distinction should be understood as an empirical report by Mill qua an experienced man who had conducted his own experiments in living before reaching that conclusion. This reading can make sense of Mill’s famous idea of a “competent judge” found in Utilitarianism (1861) (Mill 1963-91, CW X, 213)5 – that is, a man who has experienced so much that he can be trusted to make judgment about the quality of a pleasure. Furthermore, it also bolsters the case made by Prager sketched earlier. However, more importantly, Anderson’s
5 The idea can also be found in Mill’s neglected Principles of Political Economy (Mill 1963-91, CW III, 947-50).
suggestion at once lends a perspective for us to critically reconstruct Mill’s rationale behind his support for liberal imperialism.
More than an account of Mill’s motivation for theoretical concerns, as we can see, Anderson’s reading points to the methodological dimension of Mill’s political thought. To be sure, Mill is an empiricist. Thus, one should not be surprised to find Mill’s own experiments in living led him to the discovery of the distinction between the higher and lower pleasures, and thereby refuted Jeremy Bentham’s version of utilitarianism that recognizes no qualitative difference between poetry and pushpin.6 Note that what is at stake here is how Mill’s argument is justified – or, how he has come to reach the conclusion that X is his own higher pleasure – and the way this verdict and X must be understood. Furthermore, if Anderson is right, then it is life experiences that paved Mill’s way for weaving a cognitive dimension into Bentham’s reflexive and bodily conception of pleasure – whereby the original pleasure-based Benthamite calculative idea of “utility” is transformed into a reflective mode of judgment which can only be made after an experiment in living.
Or, to take this line of reading a step further, one may also read this together with Mill’s idea of “progress” again. Truly, as elucidated by him, utility is “the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” (Mill
6 For influential discussions on this issue, see Roger Crisp (1997), Gray (1983), and Riley (1993).
1963-91, CW XVIII, 224). Mill’s refined or, more specifically, empirically verified version of utilitarianism in effect regards whatever contributes to a man’s making progress as a moral agent to be a utility. Undoubtedly, Mill would consider his own version to be an improvement – which in turn is a proof that he himself is a progressive being. Furthermore, a reflection as such might include:
(1) an appreciation of the (social) context in which experiments in living are possible; which may lead to a consideration on (2) how experiments as such can be encouraged; and (3) under what conditions can an experiment in living be deemed as valid or successful.
Arguably, anyone who reflects upon the above three questions in the capacity of a person having conducted an experiment in living would support a free and tolerant society. In any event, if experiments as such are to be encouraged, that society must cherish diversity and authenticity and allow its citizens to make wrong choices. This is the gist of On Liberty that defends freedom on the grounds of individuality as well as the idea of “fallibilism” which, as Berlin (1969, 192) notes, amounts to conferring “the right to err”
on humanity. For Mill, the England during his lifetime falls short of this vision. In addition, included in his package of reform is the institution of representative democracy, which functions as a means to fostering active citizenship – by way of helping the young to cultivate a “public spirit” and allowing the cultivated to lead and serve the rest of the society (Mill 1963-91, CW XIX, 377). Mill’s
Autobiography more than likely is a testament – written in the voice of a “competent judge” – to this public spirit as a form of higher pleasure, for the reference of the others.
However, while Mill worries about the imminent social conformism in England (Mill 1963-91, CW XVIII, 274), and therefore offers “freedom of expression” and “representative democracy” as a reform package to lift the relatively advanced nation to a higher stage of civilization, his prescription for backward nations is different, for what he sees as a problem is not conformism but their people’s general lack of a “habit or capacity of dealing with interests common to such communities” (Mill 1963-91, CW XIX, 417). No doubt, Mill’s differential treatment is due to different diagnoses. With regard to India, more specifically, his considers that “it has been the destiny of the government of the East India Company, to suggest the true theory of the government of a semi-barbarous dependency by a civilized county” (Mill 1963-91, CW XIX, 577).
At this point, critics may question whether Mill has the knowledge or experience necessary for arriving at his diagnosis.
Or, to put it differently, granted that he has the point with regard to England, could he really be a competent judge when it comes to India? The answer to this certainly bears on the issue of ethnocentrism left by the previous section, as well as the ultimate validity of Mill’s liberal imperialism. Indeed, what has been established so far is that the theory is logically consistent, but,
given that logical reasoning may begin with a false premise, is it something that can be justified? The rest of this article is meant to address this difficult question.
To proceed, note that ethnocentrism is a form of prejudice.
Furthermore, the object of prejudice is “national character”. That is to say, an act of ethnocentrism presupposes a generalization of another nation’s character as well as a way of separating nations into the “good” and the “bad” ones – the “civilized” and the “barbarous”
nations as in the case of Mill; or the “good” and the “evil” states as found in George W. Bush’s 2002 speech mentioned earlier. Thus, an ethnocentrist is one who passes judgment on another state’s national character based on his own nation’s standard. Mill has been accused of being an ethnocentrist or even a racist (Mehta 1999), on the grounds that he uses England as the benchmark whereby other nations are judged to be backward.
To reply on behalf of him, some scholars have pointed to the fact that talk of national character and racial prejudice were commonplace in Mill’s Victorian England (Bell 2007; Brown, Nardin, and Rengger 2002, 465). Nevertheless, appealing to this historical fact does not help Mill much; rather, that seems to confirm that he was in the wrong. Indeed, Jahn (2006, 195) precisely regards this to be evidence for Mill’s ethnocentrism anyway.
A better defence for Mill’s position comes from Georgios Varouxakis’s study. According to him, what is behind the rationale of the very common ethnocentrism of Victorian Britain is “racial
determinism” based on a racial-biological explanation of savage society, often couched in Darwinian language (Varouxakis 2005, 139), and that is precisely what Mill pitted himself against. The idea of “race” was used basically as an explanatory tool, by which a nation’s failure could be accounted for. For instance, Walter Bagehot used it to explain why the French Revolution did not succeed, attributing the failure of that “experiment” to national character in terms of blood (Varouxakis 2005, 139-40). However, according to Varouxakis, Mill meant to discredit this way of understanding national character and failure. Instead of “blood” (hence incurableness), he attributes the backward states’ national character to “culture and institutions” which are malleable.
This shift in focus seems to suggest that Mill’s theory of liberal imperialism is not premised on racism as claimed by Uday Mehta (1999). No doubt, Varouxakis’s finding is consistent with the reading of this article. In fact, what this article continues to say will support his more recent interpretation of Mill as a cosmopolitan patriot thinker who considers the project of civilizing the barbarous to be not just a utilitarian duty, but also a way of protecting his motherland (Varouxakis 2005; 2013).
To continue, it cannot be overemphasized that Mill is a British empiricist, and that means he is essentially an individualist. This overall philosophical stance that bears on his writings should be understood. Yet it is so often neglected by interpreters of Mill’s liberal imperialism, as if his political theory is a sui generis theory
that can only be understood as an a priori system of abstract ideas subject to logical examination. This is a mistake. At least this way of reading is inapplicable to Mill, as our discussion of “experiments in living” has suggested. In addition, to read Mill in this way is unfair, for it runs the risk of attributing ideas alien to his thought. More likely than not, those who accuse him of ethnocentrism also ignore this basic feature of Mill as a thinker.
To illustrate, critics may now appeal to the fact that Mill does compare different nations. In addition, he often compares backward nations to children – indeed, so frequently that it gives the impression that he merely draws an analogy between man and nation to make out his prescription of “vigorous despotism” for savage societies which are, metaphorically speaking, people still in their childhood. If so, Mill’s theory of liberal imperialism is but an application of his treatment of children at the international level – that is to say, the same paternalistic logic is at work at both levels.
And what is implied by this is that, firstly, Mill is still on the verge of ethnocentrism, for he belittles nations like India and, secondly, he has lost what Berlin (1996, 1-39) calls “the sense of reality” to have mistaken the metaphor for the real – a crime for an empiricist, so to speak.
This is not true. For one thing, methodologically speaking, as established in our discussion on Walzer, Mill does not rely on the metaphor of seeing a nation as a person writ large. Furthermore, in any event, Mill’s methodological individualism bars him
from interpreting a nation or its institutional structure as an
“experimented” mode of collective life whose validity is universal or can be mechanically transferred to another state in a different context. Democratic Peace theorists are inclined to do so; and so was Bagehot mentioned just now. That is to say, Mill the empiricist has an acute sense of reality, and never intends his metaphorical use of “blood” (Varouxakis 2005, 141) or “child” to be more than a figure of speech.
For another, practically speaking, Mill’s empiricism implies that for him all propositions must be experimented with in order to be regarded as true, including forms of living – to be “proved practically”, as noted in the passage where he introduces the idea of experiments in living. However, what is even more important is that, for Mill, since no two states are exactly the same in every detail, we cannot conduct experiments at this level (Ryan 1987, 138-42). Indeed, the textual evidence confirms that he dismisses Marx’s socialism on the grounds that it was not capable of experimental trials on a full scale (Rosen 2013, 192-93).
In effect, Mill does not need to rely on cross-level analogical reasoning to argue for making his points with regard to nations anyway. For his liberal imperialism is an “outgrowth” from his own experiments in living. He reflects first in the capacity of an individual who discovers active citizenship to be a higher pleasure;
then of a confirmed utilitarian who offers a package of social reform for England; and finally a cosmopolitan patriot who takes up his
utilitarian duty to better humanity in the belief that this could either earn his nation a reputation in history or protect the interests of the Empire – precisely as he concludes in his essay “A Few Words on Non-Intervention”:
The prize is too glorious not to be snatched sooner or later by some free country; and the time may not be distant when England, if she does not take his heroic part because of its heroism, will be compelled to take it from consideration for her own safety (Mill 1963-91, CW XXI, 125).
In the final analysis, Mill should not be read as arguing for the case that – to recall Holmes’s words – the “representative democracy of the British sort” is the ideal form of government for all because it has collectively been experimented to be a success.
His theory is not an “alibi for the fait accompli of empire” (Mantena 2007b, 114; 2010). Furthermore, his liberal imperialism is not meant to promote England as a “city on a hill” or a beacon to the rest of the world – as found in the American president’s parlance.7 Rather, it is a theory with a utilitarian concern to better each individual man as a
“progressive being.”
The “being” is a person. Each person is a centre where
7 For a discussion on the view of the USA as a “city on the hill”, the so-called
“Jeffersonian” tradition of American foreign policy, see Walter Russell Mead (2002).
progress can be made. Content-wise, what counts as progress may vary from one individual to another. However, the way progress is made is the same for all – to conduct experiments in living and then reflect on them in due course. Mill’s liberal imperialism that this article reconstructs is not only internally coherent but also logically consistent with his other aspects of thought. It is justifiable in his own individualist-empiricist terms – with Mill being an experienced
‘competent judge’. Yet, whether this theory ultimately can stand criticisms from external perspectives is an issue beyond the scope of this article.
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