Liberty and Prosperity
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Liberty and Prosperity’
Those in Power may imagine that a docile and compliant public makes Government run more smoothly, but a society of that kind just won’t move forward.
John Stuart Mill was a firm believer in individual freedom, a conviction which led him to dissent from then-fashionable economic and social policy on women’s rights and American slavery. In On Liberty (1858), he warned politicians that a docile, on-message public might let the engine of State run more smoothly, but it will also rob it of any power to move forward.
Even where freedom of speech and conscience are not curtailed by law, there is another kind of censorship that is just as destructive to progress.
In the 1850s, those who held opinions felt by Authority to be untrue, antisocial or extreme were still being frozen out of academic, political and commercial roles, not by law so much as by denying them preferments or a public platform. John Stuart Mill warned that such censorship would not silence dissent, but would nurture a generation so feeble-minded that progress itself would be slowed to a crawl.
Abusive language, straw-man arguments and downright ‘fake news’ should have no place in civilised debate, but censoring them is far worse.
Addressing the issue of freedom of speech, John Stuart Mill turned his attention in On Liberty to the use of uncivil discourse and what we now call ‘fake news’. He admitted both were disagreeable and even dangerous, but felt that no action should be taken to police them. Such action makes the Establishment into judge, jury and executioner, and honest dissent is declared a sign of bad or even criminal character.
John Stuart Mill set out three kinds of liberty essential to a truly free society: freedom of conscience, of tastes, and of association.
In his essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill has been talking about the proper role of Government, arguing that the State authorities should not meddle in the lives of individual citizens. He now lays out three freedoms essential to any truly liberal society: those of thought, choice and association. Every man should have the freedom to go his own way in life, so long as he extends the same courtesy to his neighbours.
A rowdy but good-humoured crowd gathered in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to protest against electoral malpractice and Government cronyism.
As the Nineteenth Century opened, workers in England’s rapidly growing industrial centres were driving national prosperity. But they had few MPs to represent them, electoral malpractice was rife and most of them were not allowed to vote anyway. The feeling that Government was a hostile enemy from whom neither justice nor sympathy could be expected was only confirmed in August 1819.
Macaulay recalled an Italian fable about a fairy doomed every now and then to take the form of a snake, and drew from her a lesson about Liberty.
In an essay on John Milton contributed to the Edinburgh Review in 1825, Thomas Babington Macaulay recalled a fable by Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) concerning the lovely fairy Manto, who every seventh day underwent transformation into a loathsome serpent. Macaulay drew from this a lesson about those statesmen who snatch Liberty away when she does not produce the results they want.