Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government, and: Mill on Nationality (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government, and: Mill on Nationality C. L. Ten (bio) Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government, by Nadia Urbinati; pp. xii + 293. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002, $37.50, £26.50. Mill on Nationality, by Georgios Vorouxakis; pp. ix + 169. London and New York: Routledge, 2002, £55.00, $80.00. John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty (1859) has rightly been acknowledged and discussed as a great classic of liberalism. But apart from Utilitarianism (1863), there has been little discussion of how his other works relate to the central themes of his moral and political philosophy. The books under review correct this omission by connecting Mill's liberalism with some of the broader themes both of his times and of our own. In the process, Mill's views—and the way in which they are developed and related to contemporary debates— are clarified, and misconceptions corrected. Nadia Urbinati believes that "the ancients are the key to understanding Mill's contribution to modern democratic theory" (2). Mill admired the Athenian republic and tried to model modern representative government on the deliberative and agonistic character of its democratic political life. For Mill, a desirable form of democracy is not one held together by sameness or agreement. Rather, democratic government is legitimated and unified by public participation in the process of opinion formation and exchange. There is equality among citizens, all of whom have the capacity to deliberate on public matters. At the same time, there is a process for selecting those who have the technical competence required for administration. But these competent professionals should not have the ultimate control of government. Mill would not have accepted Isaiah Berlin's purely negative concept of liberty. Instead, his is a notion of liberty from subjection, as opposed to the mere absence of interference. Persons are seen as related to others, and can cause harm to them either by direct injury, or by passive conduct reflected in forms of social relations which undermine their ability to make independent decisions and plans. For example, failure to perform certain political acts, such as voting or serving on a jury, can be said to harm others. Here, positive interference, rather than noninterference is required in order to promote liberty. But the kind of interference that promotes liberty must not be arbitrary or discretionary, and those who are interfered with must be included in the processes of deliberation and decision-making. In showing the relevance of Mill's writings on ancient Greece to his views on democratic theory and liberty, Urbinati has made a valuable and original contribution. She deliberately steers away from what she regards as the overemphasis by scholars on his moral philosophy and the details of his "harm principle." But these aspects of Mill scholarship are still crucial to a full understanding of his views, and Urbinati's broad depiction of some of his moral and political ideas fails to connect with central debates about the basis and limits of his defense of liberty. For example, she maintains that liberty as freedom from subjection is a normative principle which cannot be traded off even if the suppression of liberty will maximize the general welfare, as required by the utilitarian principle. This may well be correct, but it is hardly uncontroversial, and it is surprising that Urbinati should so thoroughly ignore attempts to reconcile Mill's defense of liberty with utilitarianism. Again, her passing comments on the notion of self-regarding conduct and on "interference with self-regarding actions" seem to presuppose the mistaken view [End Page 345] that to be truly self-regarding an act must have no effect on others. Thus she claims, "Mill did not believe that there was any such thing as a perfect self-regarding action, or a sphere of individual life that did not affect, or was unaffected by, others" (169). But the alleged evidence for this merely illustrates a different point, which Mill readily conceded—that self-regarding acts affected others, or could do so. The crucial issue is the effects self- regarding acts have, and here Urbinati is quite unhelpful. This...