Educating Liberty: Democracy and Aristocracy in J. S. Mill’s Political Thought, by Chris Barker, John Stuart Mill on History: Human Nature, Progress, and the Stationary State, by Jay M. Eisenberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Educating Liberty: Democracy and Aristocracy in J. S. Mill's Political Thought by Chris Barker, and: John Stuart Mill on History: Human Nature, Progress, and the Stationary State by Jay M. Eisenberg Bruce Kinzer (bio) Educating Liberty: Democracy and Aristocracy in J. S. Mill's Political Thought, by Chris Barker; pp. viii + 267. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2018, $105.00. John Stuart Mill on History: Human Nature, Progress, and the Stationary State, by Jay M. Eisenberg; pp. xxi + 223. Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington Books, 2018, $95.00. However various the interpretations of John Stuart Mill's thought may be, commentators agree that he aimed to promote what John M. Robson's classic 1968 study of Mill's social and political thought called The Improvement of Mankind. Moreover, a consensus exists that the improvement Mill had in mind was principally intellectual and moral rather than material in character. The chief source of disagreement concerns the means by which Mill sought to bring about the ends he had in view and the organization of the society he considered best fitted to give expression to these ends. Scholars such as Maurice Cowling, Shirley Letwin, Joseph Hamburger, and Linda Raeder detect a massive strain of intellectual elitism and moral authoritarianism in Mill's thought. They assert that Mill wished to supplant Christianity with a non-theological religion rooted in the authority of social science—see, for example, Raeder's John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity (2002). This new orthodoxy would be defined, promulgated, and sustained by an intellectual elite. Mill, on this view, valued liberty not for its own sake but as the [End Page 132] instrument for enabling superior individuals to reach a consensus on the norms and beliefs that should govern the social order. Most scholars reject this assessment, arguing that Mill's abiding commitment to individual self-development embraced the common run of human beings in societies that had attained a certain level of civilization (Victorian England, for example). Acknowledging his concern to preserve the sway of those with superior abilities, knowledge, and expertise, they contend that Mill saw such influence as contributing to individual growth writ large. Chris Barker's Educating Liberty: Democracy and Aristocracy in J. S. Mill's Political Thought makes a significant contribution to the latter (predominant) school of Mill studies. He does this by bringing together strands of Mill's thought that he believes best illustrate Mill's educative mission, whose object was to foster "mental independence" (2). The achievement of this end, in Barker's account, required spousal equality within the household, a large dose of cooperative labor relations between workers and owners/managers, a proper understanding of the important yet circumscribed role to be played by social scientists in the shaping of political judgment, a representative political order capable of reconciling the need for both elite competence and mass participation, and the propagation of a democratic civil religion directed at promoting a social unity compatible with individual agency. Each of these matters receives a distinct chapter, the first two being dedicated to substantiating Barker's claim that Mill considers "women's liberation from legal disabilities and the end of class-based separation of workers and owners/managers" as "the most transformative changes in society" (83). Regarding women's emancipation, Barker concentrates on Mill's ideal of companionate marriage and effectively draws out the connections between this ideal and his conception of the household as "a school of liberty" (40). While deeply impressed by the force of Mill's case, Barker recognizes its limitations. Like others who have examined Mill's writings on sexual equality, Barker concedes that "Mill's distinction between the genders certainly reads as a faulty generalization from too few examples" (42). Barker also furnishes a careful and highly sensitive reading of Mill's hankering for the creation of a cooperative marketplace and the links between this aspiration and his focus on mental independence and moral improvement. Here too (and this can be said of all the issues he tackles), Barker perceptively identifies problems in Mill's argument, especially as they pertain to the demonstrated preferences of workers themselves. The problems notwithstanding, Barker finds...