ABSTRACT
In evaluating Mill’s harm principle, it is necessary to consider two significant features. The first is contextual: Mill was writing to an audience who were involved in novel and intense stresses on the fabric of social life. The widespread urban deprivation set huge social policy problems for the governing elite, who were also concerned with the political tensions expressed in the seething working-class radicalism of the union movement and periodic outbreaks of Chartism. It is to this governing elite that Mill’s sermon on liberty and the limits of state interference is primarily addressed. For, while Mill was a radical and reforming liberal, he was worried that the interventionist streak of the radical reformers and the ardour of the social movement for what we would now call a welfare state would overwhelm the social order of civil liberties which he saw as necessary for individual and social progress. The argument in On Liberty is designed in part to forewarn of the dangers of well-intentioned bludgeoning of civil society into a stunted overgoverned conservatism, in which citizens, though well fed, educated and protected, are browbeaten into a dull and unimaginative conformity. The harm principle is a mechanism designed to delineate the precise boundaries of state intervention and of social reformism, in the light of the necessary retention of individual freedom.
