The Foundations of Modern Social and Political Thought

1. The Foundations of Modern Social and Political Thought Lecture 5: Liberty and Democracy After Mill

2. Mill and Liberty • Liberty, Utility and Democracy: A Stable Trinity? • Liberty, the Harm Principle and Non-Interference • Democracy and Representative Government • The Root Idea: Individuality

3. An Initial Response: Rejecting Freedom ‘If the word 'liberty' has any definite sense attached to it, and if it is consistently used in that sense, it is almost impossible to make any true general assertion whatever about it, and quite impossible to regard it either as a good thing or a bad one. If, on the other hand, the word is used merely in a general popular way without attaching any distinct signification to it, it is easy to make almost any general assertion you please about it; but these assertions will be incapable of either proof or disproof as they will have no definite meaning. Thus the word is either a misleading appeal to passion, or else it embodies or rather hints at an exceedingly complicated assertion, the truth of which can be proved only by elaborate historical investigations.’ L. F. Stephen

4. The Initial Response: The Reaction Against Individualism ‘I think that the attempt to distinguish between self-regarding acts and acts which regard others, is like an attempt to distinguish between acts which happen in time and acts which happen in space. Every act happens at some time and in some place, and in like manner every act that we do either does or may affect both ourselves and others. I think, therefore, that the distinction (which, by the way, is not at all a common one) is altogether fallacious and unfounded.’ L. F. Stephen

5. The Changing Context • The Extension of Democracy • The Extension of Legislation • The Hegelian Revolution • The Darwinian Revolution • Rethinking Ideas of Liberty and Democracy

6. Reconsidering Liberty, Individual and Society: Spencer and Darwin ‘The life of a society is independent of, and far more prolonged than, the lives of any of its component units; who are severally born, grow, work, reproduce, and die, while the body-politic composed of them survives generation after generation, increasing in mass, in completeness of structure, and in functional activity.’ H. Spencer.

7. Reconsidering Liberty, Individual and Society: Spencer and Darwin ‘I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him; and that, whether this machinery is or is not one he shared in making, its actions are not of the kind proper to Liberalism if they increase such restraints beyond those which are needful for preventing him from directly or indirectly aggressing on his fellows—needful, that is, for maintaining the liberties of his fellows against his invasions of them’ H. Spencer

8. Idealism: A New Rejection ‘We do not mean merely freedom from restraint or compulsion. We do not mean merely freedom to do as we like irrespectively of what it is that we like. We do not mean freedom that can be enjoyed by one man or one set of men at the cost of a loss of freedom to others.’ T. H. Green

9. Idealism: A New Conception ‘When we speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others. We mean by it a power which each man exercises through the help or security given him by his fellow-men, and which he in turn helps to secure for them.’ T. H. Green

10. The Components of a New Conception • Perfectionism • Internal Psychological Obstacles • Communal Identity

11. Idealism and the Social Construction of Individuality ‘If we suppose the world of communal relations in which he was born and bred, never to have been, then we suppose the very essence of him not be be; if we take that away, we take him away.’ F. H. Bradley

12. Idealism’s Novelty: Intervention ‘What the legislature has done, on the whole, is to limit the will to do what is wrong or stupid. It is only the pseudo-freedom of individual caprice which has been limited. Nor has the State invaded any rights in such action, for the liberty to do wrong is not a right, but the perversion of a right and its negation; and the elimination of caprice is no loss to any one: it is one of the ends of all moral and social development.’ Henry Jones

13. Idealism’s Novelty: Democracy ‘No Scheme that can be constructed by human ingenuity will make a representative chamber a quite perfect mirror of all the various sets of opinion in the community … But this seeming absurdity results from an abstract and artificial way of looking at the matter. The will of the few persons is only effective because they do represent something very much more than a small fraction of the population.’ D. G. Ritchie

14. Idealism’s Remaining Questions • The Limits of Interference: Assistance not Coercion • The Bonds between Society and State

15. The New Agenda • Reconsidering the State • New Explanations of the State • New Senses of State • Civil Society and the State • Durkheim, Weber and Beyond