John Stuart Mills Theories - Essay Example

The essay concludes that Mill's proposed limitations on legitimate interference with the individual has limited sustainability, and can only be applied in a system which has already liberated its citizens through education and cultural revolution. John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth century philosopher, is an icon for liberal ideals. Noted as "An extraordinarily nice, warm-hearted and intellectually generous man, as well as an extraordinarily gifted one" (Marquand, 2007), whom it is impossible to dislike, Mill set the standard for ideas on the nature of individual Liberty in a functioning society.

Unlike many philosophers of his age, Mill put the need for Individual freedom above the need of the state for social order and control. Mill was not alone in theorizing about liberty, and the constraints on government. A century before his writing, two nations had risen up and overthrown what had been legitimate government. The American Revolution argued that there can be no taxation without representation, and the French Revolution succeeded in toppling a monarchy; within Mill's lifetime, the latter revolution had still been battling to come to terms with these events, the monarchy having been recreated and overthrown for a second time.

During the first French Revolution, intellectuals had rushed to view the action, and intellectual society was still shaken by what it had seen. Questions and worries about what these events meant for society were therefore not far from the minds of philosophers and creative thinkers in JS Mill's social circle. This paper attempts to examine Mill's proposal on limitations on state interference in light of his intellectual influences and events of the time. By examining some of the ideas which Mill discussed in On Liberty, both about government interference with individual will, and how his own constraints on Liberty serve to protect individuals from harm by others, this paper will attempt to analyze the limitations which Mill proposed be placed upon legitimate government.

Interpretations and discussion of Mill's most famous work center on the connection between Mill's theories of freedom, and the school of Utilitarianism in which he was brought up. According to Isaiah Berlin, his intellectual achievement, after a "Terrifying education at the hands of a rigid and dogmatic father" (Marquand, 2007), remains that he managed to develop his own need for freedom and happiness into a set of principles which remain at the centre of debates into the freedom of the individual (Berlin, 1991).

Berlin also suggests that Mill hung on to his Utilitarian upbringing, which has been criticized more recently by, amongst others, John Gray. In the introduction to On Liberty in Focus, Gray and his co-editor G Smith consider the idea that Mill had given up Utilitarianism, and instead "It is rather the celebrated 'one very simple principle' of the first chapter of On Liberty" (Gray and Smith, 1991) which was Mill's motivation, and suggest other alternatives to Berlin's interpretation.