Mill's Appropriation of Nationalism and the End of Free Speech

• In Event: The Politics of Truth and Persuasion

Abstract

J.S. Mill is celebrated and/or criticized for his extreme position on free speech. As successive, new media markets prove susceptible to scary influences - propaganda, mass-marketing, misinformation - his sanguine expectations are repeatedly called into question. It is also well-known that his utilitarian foundations are susceptible to this sort of challenge, demanding a constant renewal of proof that free speech yields social benefits. But it is not as often noticed that his arguments in On Liberty are self-consciously time-contingent, i.e., historically based in the need to challenge what he considers to be a dysfunctionally Christian social culture. When read in conjunction with his biographic essays of Bentham and Coleridge, as well as his classic pleas for a common nationality to support representative institutions, the historical contingency of the argument takes on added importance. Combining an appreciation for Coleridge's conservative romantic views with a continuing adherence to Benthamite progress and rationalism, Mill openly advocates for the future emergence of a "national" clerisy of experts to replace the Church establishment of his day. Pulling together this more complex view of Mill's argument and strategy creates a more ambiguous picture of what Mill would say to our current debates over the contrasting dangers of "unscientific," or false, information and expertise-driven censorship.

Author

• Daniel Hutter Fram, Middlebury College