ABSTRACT
Mill’s new utilitarianism which established a primary concern for self-development, his understanding of the relation between authority and free inquiry and his persistent eclectic desire to promote agreement, had all led by the early 1840s to an unambiguous conception of the conditions necessary for free individual agency. It is also worth remembering that Mill himself took his opinions to be fixed by this time. He had ‘no further mental changes to tell of, but only, as I hope, a continued mental progress’. 1 He had, indeed, reached some kind of conclusion—a more or less settled understanding of the nature of moral and political philosophy. The fixed points seem obvious enough. Just as increases in happiness were hopeless which were due solely to a change of outward circumstances and not to a change in the state of the desires, so were rules of conduct authoritatively imposed as truths of science. No one could be compelled to be good, any more than he should accept truths he had not seen for himself; and if true or ideal happiness presumed changes of feeling, so the free acceptance of rules of conduct presumed a well-developed state of moral and intellectual culture. The vast majority would neither experience happiness, nor freely accept obligations, without self-education; this, in turn, could not proceed effctively without substantial social and political reforms. The radical party held to this view almost as an article of faith. Mill’s ‘philosophy of movement’ certainly retained some aristocratic emphases, remnants, perhaps, of a tory disdain for the common man, but his notion of education still presumed fairly radical changes in social structure and political institutions. Mill made this clear in a long and patient letter to d’Eichthal. Mankind would not be perfected by instruction or by teaching. Without an alteration in ‘those parts of our social institutions and policy which at present oppose 85improvement, degrade and brutalise the intellects and morality of the people, giving all the ascendancy to mere wealth’, there would not be ‘the growth of a pouvoir spirituel capable of commanding the faith of the majority who must and do believe on authority’. 2 As a radical, Mill assumed the interdependence of reform by individual exertion and reform by public agency. To him, self-culture and social reform were inseparable; an intelligent and active character presumed a responsible society.
