GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

528
POLITICS
The Principle ofKon- Interference. But it is not only
to freedom of thought that Mill's defence of liberty applies.
His avowed object is to define the extent to which, and the
spheres in which, the individual is entitled to claim free*
dom from interference by the State or the community.
"The subject of this Essay," he writes, "is . . . Civil,
or Social Liberty; the nature and limits of the power
which can be legitimately exercised by society over the
individual." Mill begins by narrating how lovers of liberty
have for centuries dedicated their efforts and often their
lives to resisting the Oppression of tyrants. When success
crowned their efforts, when by means of democratic
institutions the people became, through their chosen
representatives, their own rulers, the foundations of liberty
might well have seemed to be securely laid. For how, it
might well have been asked, could the people wish to
oppress themselves? And so, once the people had in theory
become their own rulers, once the fact that sovereignty
resided in them and in nobody and nothing else had been
recognized, and had received recognition in a democratic
constitution, political theorists of radical sympathies
Mill has clearly in mind here his father, James Mill, and
Bentham assuming liberty to be effectively safeguarded,
had been chiefly concerned to prevent the imposition of
any check upon the people's power.
But the problem, Mill saw, was not so simple. The view
that the people were autonomous, controlled, that is to say,
only by their own will, was, he held, fallacious. For,
(i) it was difficult, if not impossible, to devise effective
checks upon a government during its period of office, and
it might use the power with which the people had*entrusted
it for purposes which were contrary to their wishes. It
might even use it to deprive electors of their liberties, including
the liberty to dismiss it, and to substitute another
government in its stead, (a) The government in any event
only represented the majority of the people. (3) Men in
the mass are highly suggestible; they are influenced by
custom, convention and public opinion; they are swept