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P O L I T ICA L STU D IES: 2003 VO L 51, 404–428

Millian Radical Democracy: Education for Freedom and Dilemmas of Liberal Equality Bruce Baum University of British Columbia This paper returns to J. S. Mill to draw out democratic conceptions of education and equality that challenge still-current conceptions of intractable human inequalities. Mill acknowledges that individuals differ in abilities. Nonetheless, he develops a broad conception of ‘education for freedom’ and insists that only ‘wretched social arrangements’ prevent virtually all people from exercising capacities for self-government in citizenship, marriage, and industry. In the same breath, he qualifies his democratic egalitarianism with reference to a sub-class of working people whose ‘low moral qualities’ leave them unfit for such self-government. Modern liberal states largely dismiss Mill’s more radical democratic impulse. Meanwhile, they reiterate and refine his exclusionary one through new practices for constructing and managing inequalities – for example, IQ tests, educational ‘tracking’, and social science categories like the ‘underclass’. I reconsider this divided legacy of Mill’s egalitarianism as a basis for rethinking the limits of today’s ‘meritocratic’ egalitarianism.

[A]ny education which aims at making human beings other than machines, in the long run makes them claim to have the control of their own actions (J. S. Mill, 1977b, p. 403). This essay returns to the work of John Stuart Mill to draw out radical democratic conceptions of education and equality that challenge still current conceptions of intractable human inequalities. Mill acknowledges that individuals differ in abilities in some ways. Nonetheless, he develops a broad conception of ‘education for freedom’ and insists that only stultifying social arrangements prevent virtually all people from acquiring the mental cultivation necessary for self-government in domains of citizenship, marriage, and industry. In this way his theory of education for freedom goes hand-in-hand with a democratic conception of equality. Ultimately, his understanding of the educative character of all social relationships and practices leads him beyond a revisionist liberal and social democratic concern to provide universal quality schooling for citizens and to ameliorate degrading social conditions that undermine human development to a radical democratic vision. Mill seeks to democratize political, economic, and gender and family relations to achieve maximal autonomy, democratic equality, and freedom among citizens. In the same breath, he qualifies his democratic egalitarianism with reference to a sub-class of working people whose ‘low moral qualities’ leave them unfit for such self-government. My argument is indebted in part to Martha Nussbaum’s recuperation of Aristotle’s political thought for social democratic politics. Nussbaum’s contrast between liberal and social democratic views of equality, however, does not fit Mill’s liberalism. Lib© Political Studies Association, 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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eralism, she says, ‘focuses above all on giving resources. ... In social democracy the concern for equality is a concern for the equal capability to live well over a complete life. Government activity provides comprehensive and not just supplemental support, operating with a partially comprehensive conception of the good’ (Nussbaum, 1990, p. 242). Mill, I explain, has aims similar to those of the ‘Aristotelian social democrat,’ with a partially comprehensive conception of the good life that turns largely on his emphasis on freedom and individuality as essential conditions for human flourishing. He differs from social democrats mainly in how he conceives and seeks to achieve shared goals, but also in presenting a distinct ideal of a maximally free and just society. Principally, social democrats like Nussbaum generally accept the basic political economic structure of democratic capitalist societies but propose comprehensive educational, regulatory, and social welfare programs to temper the inequalities produced by capitalism, ensure economic security for all, and establish substantial equality of opportunity. Mill, by contrast, advances a radical democratic call to democratize economic and gender and family relations as well as the state. This radical democratic dimension of Mill’s thought, I contend, is a central though generally overlooked part of his legacy. Mill was radical in the best sense of the term: he understood that at the root of modern social and political life are human beings equipped with common capacities for reasoning, judgment, initiative, deliberation, and self-dependence; and he worked as a theorist and activist for a realistic radical democratic ideal – a free, equal, non-sexist, and (basically) classless democratic society that did not yet exist but that could and should be brought into being. Building on what he regarded as the most important contributions of socialist thinkers of his time, Mill sought a democratically organized economy and society that would transcend existing class and gendered divisions of freedom and power. He summed up this future-oriented dimension of his thinking in a letter to Pasquale Villari near the end of his life: ‘[My work] lies rather among anticipations of the future than explorations of the past’ (28 February 1872, in Mill, 1972, p. 1873).1 My argument is that the radical democratic aspect of Mill’s thought continues to provide a promising emancipatory vision for contemporary egalitarian democrats and a powerful challenge to anti-egalitarians of all stripes. At a time when an increasingly hegemonic neo-liberalism returns to a ‘classical’ liberal reliance on limited state regulation of competitive markets and instructs us to accept the deepening economic inequalities generated by globalizing capitalism as the unavoidable cost of ‘freedom’ and progress, Mill’s deepest insights continue to offer a persuasive, alternative democratic liberalism. His notions of education for freedom and democratic equality provide conceptual tools with which to revitalize egalitarian claims and to envision more inclusive and democratic practices of freedom. Yet at its margins, Mill’s thinking also has some loose affinities to contemporary neo-liberal thinking which holds that the enormous material inequalities we see today are largely a matter of rewards due to differences of merit and innate abilities and thus compatible with liberal equality (Coole, 1996, p. 17; Bourdieu, 1998; Hutton and Giddens, 2000). In the broadly neo-liberal view, today’s economic ‘winners’ (all other things being equal) are generally just smarter, more creative, more diligent, more willing to take risks, and exercise more initiative than the ‘losers’ (or mere survivors) in a basically meritocratic global capitalism – that is, at least as it radi-

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ates out from its base in the liberal democratic capitalist countries of Europe and North America, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. In this spirit, modern liberal states now largely ignore or dismiss Mill’s more radical democratic goals, offering instead more attenuated commitments to equality that emphasize formal equality of opportunity and rewards proportionate to merit. They offer more limited practices of economic freedom that rely on consumer choice within hierarchical capitalist structures at the expense of political economic democratization. In accordance with these more constrained notions of equality and freedom, these liberal states have typically reiterated and refined versions of Mill’s exclusionary move – his (perhaps conditional) writing out of his radical democratic vision a sub-class of working people plagued with ‘low moral qualities’. They have done so by creating new techniques and practices of government, in Michel Foucault’s sense, for constructing, reifying, and managing inequalities among their populations based on new forms of social scientific knowledge about them – for example, ‘scientific’ management, ‘scientific racism’, IQ testing, educational tracking, and social science categories like the ‘underclass’ (Foucault, 1991, pp. 100–4; Gordon, 1991, pp. 1–8, 14–36; Burchell, 1991). These new governmental practices enable liberal democratic capitalist states to insist on their commitments to equality while they justify and sustain enormous inequalities by insisting that each person is being treated according to her or his unique talents and abilities. To explain how Mill’s liberalism both challenges and opens the door to these antiegalitarian contemporary liberal practices of government, I first discuss Mill’s notions of education for freedom and democratic equality to indicate how these notions challenge the class-structured and class-related inequalities of capitalist democracies.2 I focus on those aspects of his educational theory that are directly concerned with cultivating people’s capacities for self-government and forgo any extended discussion of Mill’s more time-bound policy prescriptions for formal schooling. Then I draw on Michel Foucault’s account of the political construction of the category of ‘delinquents’ to show how Mill introduces a similar theoretical and political move that arbitrarily limits his democratic egalitarianism (Foucault, 1979). Overall, I reconsider this tension in Mill’s egalitarianism as a basis for rethinking egalitarian democratic possibilities against the limits of today’s ‘meritocratic’ egalitarianism. In short, the radical democratic aspect of Mill’s thought offers support for a radical democratic politics that aims to empower all members of society for freedom and equality. Meanwhile, scrutinizing the problematic character of Mill’s classist exclusionary move in light of his radical egalitarianism offers a critical perspective on the limitations of contemporary neo-liberalism’s constricted meritocratic view of equality.

Education for Freedom Mill addresses the practical issues of education for individual liberty and democratic self-government in relation to his engagement with four movements for social and political democratization in nineteenth century England and elsewhere: the struggles to extend suffrage (exemplified by the English Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867); the women’s rights movement; the co-operative movement to democratize industrial relations; and the movement to establish state support for, in Mill’s

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phrase, ‘the education of the whole people’ (Mill, 1967a, p. 729). The latter movement brought about the establishment of tax supported compulsory systems of public education in France, Germany, England, the USA, the British dominions, Japan, and elsewhere – though at different rates and in various forms in different countries.3 In England during Mill’s lifetime the newly enfranchised middle classes and the disenfranchised working class had little practical political education from political participation and little formal schooling (Parry, 1994, p. 54). Not surprisingly, then, the debates over democratic suffrage and popular political democracy in particular were closely connected to debates about the limits and possibilities of popular education.4 Mill pinned his own hopes for a comprehensive program of democratic social, political, and economic reform largely on the degree to which the masses could and would ultimately be educated for the freedom of self-government. Mill uses the phrase ‘educate for freedom’ in passing in the last chapter of On Liberty; yet the notion plays a central role in his political theory. In the course of discussing state regulation of the sale of ‘stimulants’, he supports a policy of licensing sellers, but opposes any further restrictions. Limiting the number of beer and spirit houses to limit access and occasions for temptation, he says, ‘is suited only to a state of society in which the labouring classes are avowedly treated as children or savages, and placed under an education of restraint, to fit them for future admission to the privileges of freedom’ (Mill, 1977c, pp. 298–9). He adds: ‘This is not the principle on which the labouring classes are professedly governed in any free country; and no person who sets due value on freedom will give his adhesion to their being so governed, unless after all efforts have been exhausted to educate them for freedom and govern them as free men, and it has been definitely proved that they can only be governed as children’ (1977c, p. 299). These remarks might seem to indicate a thoroughgoing class bias in Mill’s thinking, but he maintains that virtually every human being has the potential to be a free-thinking, autonomous, self-governing, developed individual. Mill conceives of freedom most basically as the capacity to ‘pursu[e] our own good in our own way’ (1977c, p. 226). In addition, he maintains that people exercise freedom not just as disconnected individuals who act independently of others, but also as agents who share with others in shaping the power relationships and systems of rules and constraints that govern their lives. ‘Freedom of action’ consists of ‘the liberty of each [person] to govern his own conduct by his own feelings of duty, and by such laws and social constraints as his conscience can subscribe to’, and it entails that people have ‘influence in the regulation of their affairs’ (Mill, 1984c, pp. 336, 337). Thus, practices of freedom, in Mill’s view, encompass each of two questions that Isaiah Berlin later associates with ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ senses of freedom, respectively: ‘What am I free to do or be?’ and ‘Who governs me?’ (Berlin, 1969, p. 130; Baum, 2000, 22, 172–266). Mill’s view of freedom underwrites his radical democratic vision and it is crucial to grasp that for Mill the freedom ‘of pursuing our own good in our own way’ is something quite distinct from merely being able to do as we please. Pursuing our own good in our own way requires what he calls ‘mental freedom’, and what philosophers now call autonomy: the capacity of persons to think for themselves

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and to reflectively formulate and pursue their own aims and purposes (1974, p. 841). In Mill’s terms, individuals are fully free with respect to their aims, desires, and purposes only to the extent that they achieve individuality of character – that is, when their expressed preferences and life plans ‘are the expression of [their] own nature[s] as [they have] been developed and modified by [their] own culture’ (1977c, p. 264; Baum, 2000, pp. 25–34). For Mill, this means that people do not naturally or inevitably attain individuality and autonomy (or free agency). Rather, the capacity for free action is a potentiality of virtually all human beings that is called forth or stifled according to the educative character of the social relationships and institutions situating them – that is, the extent to which people’s social relationships develop or stifle their faculties of reasoning, deliberation, imagination, judgment, and self-control. He says in Utilitarianism that the capacity for such ‘nobler feelings’ as the love of freedom and independence ‘is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but mere want of sustenance’ (Mill, 1969b, p. 213). Yet he contends that the only thing standing in the way of ‘almost all’ people attaining the ‘mental cultivation’ needed to be fully free and self-governing is ‘the present wretched education, and wretched social arrangements’ (1969b, p. 215). These developmental aspects of Mill’s conception of free agency, both psychological and sociological, are basic to his theory of education for freedom. Following his father, James Mill, John Stuart Mill builds his theory of the educative conditions for freedom and social reform on the foundation of associationist psychology. In his Autobiography he says that his father’s associationist doctrine of the formation of human character by circumstances demonstrates the ‘unlimited possibility of improving the moral and intellectual condition of mankind by education’ (1963a, pp. 109, 111). He sees the malleability of human character and capacities posited by associationism as integrally linked to possibilities for progressive, freedomsupporting social and political reform.5 To address the interface between the psychological and sociological processes involved in the formation of people’s characters and capacities, especially those basic to autonomous agency, Mill sketches a new science of ‘ethology’ – the ‘Science of the Formation of Character’. The aim of ethology is to provide systematic knowledge about how desired kinds of characters and capacities are produced by particular forms of education in light of the ‘laws of the mind’ (1974, p. 869). The science of ethology thereby corresponds to the ‘art’ (or practice) of education. Mill speculates that ‘when Ethology shall be thus prepared, practical education will be the mere transformation of those principles into a parallel system of precepts’ (1974, p. 874).6 He insists that even though it is unavoidably an ‘imperfect’ science it promises significant practical guidance concerning how various circumstances produce different kinds of character (1974, pp. 869–70). Although Mill never produced his intended volume on ethology, he carries out informal ethological analysis in many of his works, including Principles of Political Economy, Considerations on Representative Government, England and Ireland, The Subjection of Women and his Autobiography. While he gives no explicit examples of ethological laws, he does offer some suggestive remarks that can be reformulated as ethological ‘laws’ with a direct bearing on his ideal of ‘education for freedom’. Two

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of these are especially noteworthy. First, in a letter to Rev. Henry William Carr on the question of ‘how to teach social science to the uneducated’, he says, ‘What the poor as well as the rich require is not to be indoctrinated ... , but to be induced and enabled to think for themselves’ (Letter, 7 January 1852, in Mill, 1972, p. 80). Second, he says in Considerations on Representative Government, ‘Whatever invigorates the faculties in however small a measure, creates an increased desire for their more unimpeded exercise: and a popular education is a failure, if it educates the people for any state but that which it will certainly induce them to desire, and most probably demand’ (1977b, p. 403). While Mill never explicitly presents these propositions as ethological laws, he gives them a comparable status in his theory of education. They serve as two guiding precepts for organizing educative practices to foster people’s capacities as free agents: (1) for people to develop mental freedom they must be encouraged to arrive at conclusions through their own reasoning, rather than being inculcated with received truths; and (2) to the degree that the social relationships situating people exercise their cognitive faculties, they will tend to foster in them a continuing desire to exercise and develop their faculties. Building upon these precepts, he conceives of the educational conditions of freedom with regard to both formal education, or schooling, and what he refers to in his 1867 inaugural address at St. Andrews as education ‘in its largest acceptation’. The latter includes ‘even the indirect effects produced on the character and on the human faculties, by things of which the direct purposes are quite different; by laws, by the forms of government, by the industrial arts, by modes of social life’; it consists of ‘whatever helps to shape the human being – to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not’ (1984b, 217).7

Formal Education Concerning formal education, Mill outlines the crucial role of ‘elementary education’ in Principles of Political Economy (1848–73). ‘There are certain primary elements and means of knowledge’, he says, ‘which it is in the highest degree desirable that all human beings born into the community should be able to acquire during childhood’ (1965, p. 948). He adds: ‘Instruction, when it really is such, does not enervate, but strengthens as well as enlarges the active faculties: in whatever manner acquired, its effect on the mind is favourable to the spirit of independence’ (1965, p. 949). In ‘The Claims of Labour’ (1845), Mill links a basic education directly to people’s capacities for self-government and for knowing their own interests. He says that due to their lack of education English working people are so deficient ‘in the power of reasoning and calculation’ that they are ‘insensible to their own direct personal interests’ (1973c, p. 202). He contrasts the English worker with the Scottish peasant who, due to strong parish schools, ‘has been a reflecting, an observing, and therefore naturally a self-governing, a moral, and a successful human being – because he has been a reading and a discussing one’ (1973c, p. 203). Schooling, he concludes, is crucial for ‘converting’ English workers ‘into rational beings – beings capable of foresight, accessible to reasons and motives addressed to their understanding; and therefore not governed by utterly senseless modes of feeling and action’ (1973c, p. 204).

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Mill explains his view of empowering formal education in two early articles in which he distinguishes educational practices that merely fill students up with facts from instruction that teaches them to think for themselves. He explains in an 1835 article he says, ‘One of these is the system of cram; the other is the system of cultivating mental power. One proposes to stuff a child’s memory with the results which have been got at by other people; the other aims at qualifying its mind to get at results by its own observation, experience, and reflection’ (1986b, p. 786, Mill’s emphasis). Mill elaborates his perspective in his 1832 essay, ‘On Genius’. The chief limitation to most people achieving their potential for ‘genius’, he contends, is their narrow educations. Modern schooling typically fails because it discourages young people from thinking of anything other than what they are told, or what is ‘professed by other people’; it is ‘all cram’ as if the world already knows everything (1963b, p. 337). As an alternative, he recommends the educational approach of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This consisted not in giving what is called knowledge, that is grinding down other men’s ideas to a convenient size ... it was a series of exercises to form the thinking faculty itself, that the mind, being active and vigorous, might go forth and know ... With powers [of reasoning] thus formed, and no possibility of parroting where there was scarcely anything to parrot, what a man knew was his own, got at by his own senses or his own reason; and every new acquisition strengthened the powers, by the exercise of which it had been gained (1963b, 335–6). Formal primary schooling, then, is an important means to cultivate people’s capacities for individuality and free agency (or autonomy) – at least insofar as it engages them as active participants in the learning process, and exercises their capacities for reasoning and understanding. Mill also addresses the role of higher education with respect to cultivating freedom and civic responsibility. He favors a classic model of ‘liberal education’, including an emphasis on logic, mathematics, classics, languages, history, analytical psychology, and political economy (1984b, p. 220). In his view, the purpose of a university education is not to teach people vocational skills, but rather to make them ‘capable and cultivated human beings’ (1984b, p. 218). Higher education should cultivate people’s faculties of reasoning, judgment, observation, and imagination, rather than training them to adopt particular conclusions (1973b, p. 196; 1973d, p. 452; 1984a). These capacities are essential for people ‘to judge between conflicting opinions which are offered to us as vital truths’ and ‘to form a rational conviction on great questions’ of legislation and policy (1984a, p. 234). For present purposes, the most pertinent feature of Mill’s view of higher education is his abiding interest in cultivating people’s capacities for reasoning, judgment, and imagination. His view of higher education also has some élitist aspects that stem largely from his use of the élite English universities of the mid-nineteenth century as his models. He favors opening higher education to all men and women who demonstrate an aptitude for it; but he looks to higher education to form the ‘great minds’ that would authoritatively instruct the broader democratic public on matters of public policy, and he upholds a sharp dichotomy between liberal and vocational modes of education (1967b, p. 628; 1973b, 195, 201). As a result, his

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educational thinking offers some support for a segmented education policy that would largely restrict traditional liberal education – education for freedom in the fullest sense – to some students (usually those from more economically advantaged backgrounds) while relegating most students to narrower vocational training. Yet this tendency in his thinking stands in some tension to the more persistent inclusive tenor of his theory of education for freedom, especially his democratic egalitarian insistence that the mental cultivation necessary for people to become free, responsible, self-governing agents can be made ‘the inheritance of every person in the nation’ (1967a, p. 746).

Education in the ‘Larger Sense’ The radical democratic dimension of Mill’s educational thinking is most evident in his understanding of education ‘in its largest acceptation’. His account of education in the largest sense extends his theory of the kind of formal education that strengthens people’s cognitive faculties. ‘Whatever can be learnt in schools is important’, he says, ‘but not all important. The main branch of the education of human beings is their habitual employment, which must be either their individual vocation, or some matter of general concern’ (1977e, p. 169). He explains, when education, in ... its narrow sense, has done its best, and even to enable it to do its best, an education of another sort is required, such as schools cannot give. What is taught to a child at school will be of little effect, if the circumstances which surround the grown man or woman contradict the lesson. We may cultivate his understanding, but what if he cannot employ it without becoming discontented with his position, and disaffected to the whole order of things in which he is cast? Society educates the poor, for good or for ill, by its conduct to them, even more than by direct teaching (1973c, p. 204). He reiterates this point in an 1846 newspaper article on Ireland in which he considers proposals to ‘correct’ the habits and characters of the Irish peasants: You will never change people unless you make themselves the instruments, by opening to them an opportunity to work out for themselves all the other changes. You will never change people but by changing the external motives which act on them, and shape their way of life from the cradle to the grave. Much has been said of popular education: but education does not mean schools and school books; these are the most valuable, but only as preparations and as auxiliaries. The real effective education of a people is given them by the circumstances by which they are surrounded ... the unintentional teaching of institutions and relations (1986a, p. 955). In other words, formal schooling does little to develop of people’s capacities for free action unless it is complemented by freedom-supporting education in the larger sense of the term. For Mill, this point has radically democratic implications. It leads him to envision and work for democratic reform of major social institutions – families, economic enterprises, and representative government – so that an

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education for freedom in schools can be joined with an education for freedom in ‘the [broader] circumstances which surround the grown man or woman’. The educational shortcoming of most existing social relationships and institutions, in Mill’s view, is that they resemble the ‘system of cram’ that characterizes constricted formal schooling. He asks in ‘On Genius’: ‘When he leaves school, does not everything which a young person sees or hears conspire to tell him, that it is not expected he shall think, but only that he shall profess no opinion on any subject different from that professed by other people?’ (1963b, p. 337). This pressure to merely ‘go along’ is found in relationships of command and obedience that subject women to male dominance, laborers to employers, and all persons who live under despotic governments. In each case paternalism is rationalized by the claim that the governed, like young children, are unable to govern themselves. A similar dynamic is present whenever individuals let others choose their life plans for them, since such persons have need of no ‘other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation’ (1977c, p. 262). Mill further develops this line of analysis in The Subjection of Women. He views the subjection of women by men as a product of male domination, custom, and tradition. He acknowledges that many women ‘voluntarily’ accept traditional roles and expectations, but he contends that the character of their educations calls into question the degree to which their submission is really free and voluntary: ‘The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others’ (1984c, p. 271). That is, nearly everything that constitutes the education of women works to stifle their capacities for self-control and self-direction. Mill employs a similar argument in Principles of Political Economy to refute the prevailing theory that the work lives of labourers ‘should be regulated for them, not by them’ (1965, p. 759, Mill’s emphasis). According to this theory, working people ‘should not be required or encouraged to think for themselves, or give to their own reflection or forecast an influential voice in the determination of their destiny ... [It is taken to be] the duty of the higher classes to think for them, and to take responsibility for their lot’ (1965, p. 759). ‘The rich’, this theory holds, ‘should be in loco parentis to the poor, guiding and restraining them like children. Of spontaneous action on their part there should be no need. They should be called on for nothing but their day’s work, and to be moral and religious’ (1965, p. 759). This kind of routinized paternalism comprises the largest part of the practical education of most labouring men and women. Employers exercise their faculties by managing enterprises; yet the general run of laborers find little in their jobs that invigorates their faculties or broadens their understandings. Thus, the hierarchical structure of capitalist firms stifles working people’s capacities for self-government. Critical reflection upon the repressive character of existing social relationships enables Mill to envision freedom-supporting alternatives. He declares in Representative Government, ‘Between subjection to the will of others, and the virtues of selfhelp and self-government, there is a natural incompatibility’ (1977b, p. 410).8 The

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positive conclusion that he draws from this observation is that social and political institutions tend to educate people for freedom to the degree that they are organized to treat the people situated within them as potentially autonomous agents and to cultivate their capacities for autonomy. He says in his Principles: It is ... of supreme importance that all classes of the community, down to the lowest, should have much to do for themselves; that great a demand should be made upon their intelligence and virtue as it is in any respect equal to; that the government should not only leave as far as possible to their own faculties the conduct of whatever concerns them alone, but should suffer them, or rather encourage them, to manage as many as possible of their joint concerns by voluntary co-operation; since this discussion and management of collective interests is the great school of that public spirit, and the great source of intelligence of public affairs, which are always regarded as the distinctive character of the public of free countries (1965, p. 944). For instance, trade union and political organizing by laboring men and women around matters of collective interest tends ‘to awaken [their] public spirit ... and to excite [their] thought and reflection’ (1965, pp. 763–4; see also 1977a, p. 469). Likewise, while prevailing gender and family relations are ‘a school of despotism’, the family can become a ‘real school of the virtues of freedom’ if it is ‘justly constituted’ on the basis of equality between the sexes (1984c, pp. 294–5). He sees analogous benefits to be gained from a policy that leaves adult members of society completely free to do as they please in ‘self-regarding’ matters: The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. ... He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather material for decision, discrimination to decide, and ... firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feeling is a large one (1977c, pp. 262–3). In Mill’s view, then, people’s capacities for autonomy are cultivated to the extent that they are empowered to direct the course of their own lives. This educative effect is not limited to choices made by individuals acting alone; it also depends upon democratized social and political relationships that involve people in mutual self-government.

Democratic Equality Mill’s view of education for freedom supports his commitment to democratic equality. He links directly the prospect of educating all persons for freedom with his radical democratic aim to democratize political, economic, and gender and family relations.9 Rather than seeing a necessary trade-off between freedom and equality, like many other liberal thinkers (for example, Berlin, 1969, pp. liii–liv, 170; Rawls, 1971, p. 204), Mill sees the relationship between freedom and equality as a com-

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plementary but conditional one. Accordingly, he challenges systematic social and political inequalities that impose unequal restraints on the freedom of different social groups, particularly women, generally, and members of the working class; he strongly supports equality of educational opportunity as a condition of equal freedom; and his conception of freedom includes the mutual freedom of democratic self-government.10 Mill argues against some people having unaccountable ‘power over others’ and maintains that the only ‘solid security’ for the freedom of each person is ‘the equal freedom of the rest’ (1977a, p. 610).11 Overall, he develops a conception of democratic equality that includes but goes beyond what Fred Berger calls his ‘baseline’ conception of equality. Mill accepts certain inequalities as just – notably, some inequality of incomes and political power – but only conditionally and only insofar as these inequalities are justified by differences of merit and compatible with respect for the equal moral status of all persons as free agents (Berger, 1984, p. 199).12 Thus, one of the grounds on which he condemns as unjust the existing capitalist economic system, existing restrictions of voting rights in England, and the subordinate status of women concerns how these social arrangements systematically undermine the free and equal status of many members of society. This baseline view of equality also leads him to justify conditionally some inequalities with respect to political rights, economic power, and the sexual division of labor without abandoning his basic commitment to equal freedom. For instance, he rejects the claim that all adults are entitled absolutely to a strictly ‘equal voice’ in their government, but he favors political equality as an ultimate goal (Mill, 1977d, p. 323).13 What Berger’s ‘baseline’ interpretation misses is the distinctly democratic dimension of Mill’s conception of equality.14 Mill’s commitment to the equal moral standing of all persons as free agents leads beyond a distributive emphasis on a just distribution of income, wealth, resources, and opportunities for desirable employment careers. He also calls for progressively extending egalitarian relations of democratic self-government in those institutional arrangements that govern peoples lives and generate particular distributions of resources and opportunities in tandem with progress in popular education.15 ‘The perfection both of social arrangements and of practical morality’, he says, ‘would be, to secure to all persons complete independence and freedom of action, subject to no restriction but that of not doing injury to others: and the education which taught or the social institutions which required them to exchange the control of their own actions for any amount of comfort or affluence, or to renounce liberty for the sake of equality, would deprive them of one of the most elevated characteristics of human nature’ (1965, 208–9).

Freedom, Democratic Equality, and Economic Co-operation To grasp how his conceptions of education for freedom and democratic equality challenge the existing processes of class stratification and exclusion in capitalist democracies, his argument to extend democratic self-government into ‘the industrial department’ is pivotal. As we have seen, he argues in his Principles that the relationship within capitalist firms between the employing (or capitalist) class and the laboring classes expresses the theory of ‘dependence and protection’. Under

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this scheme, ‘the many who do the work [are] mere servants under the command of the one who supplies the funds’ (1965, pp. 759, 769). Mill maintains that with the continued ‘improvement’ in the education available to the working classes and the spread of ideas of equality, this kind of dependence increasingly becomes intolerable to workers: The poor have come out of leading strings, and cannot any longer be governed or treated like children. ... Modern nations will have to learn the lesson, that the well-being of a people must exist by means of the justice and self-government ... of individual citizens ... ... If the improvement [of human affairs] ... shall continue its course, there can be little doubt that the status of hired labourers will gradually tend to confine itself to the description of workpeople whose low moral qualities render them unfit for anything more independent: and the relation of masters and workpeople will be gradually superseded by partnership ... : in some cases, association of the labourers with the capitalist; in others, and perhaps finally in all, association of labourers among themselves (1965, pp. 767, 763, 769, Mill’s emphasis). In short, improvements in education mean that almost all working people can be governed and will increasingly demand to be governed in accordance with what he calls the theory of self-dependence. This theory regards adult members of society as self-governing beings. Mill’s faith in the ability of working people to govern themselves, once they receive the requisite education, leads him to promote a political economic ideal that resembles worker self-managed, co-operative market socialism as the system most compatible with the equal freedom of all (Riley, 1994; Baum, 2000, chapter 7). The usual relationship of dependence in capitalist enterprises between capitalists and wage earners would be replaced by ‘the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves’ (1965, p. 775). The co-operative principle would combine the freedom and independence of the individual, with the moral, intellectual, and economical advantages of aggregate production; and ... would realize, at least in the industrial department, the best aspirations of the democratic spirit, by putting an end to the division of society into the industrious and the idle, and effacing all social distinctions but those fairly earned by personal services and exertions ... the existing accumulations of capital might honestly ... become in the end the joint property of all who participate in their productive employment (1965, p. 793). Mill adds that this change ‘would be the nearest approach to social justice, and the most beneficial ordering of industrial affairs ... which it is possible at present to foresee ... (assuming of course that both sexes participate equally in the government of the association)’ (1965, p. 794). Since large enterprises will tend to dominate modern societies, freeing people within their income-earning activities will not be achieved by making them ‘able to do without one another’, but by enabling

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them ‘to work with or for one another in relations not involving dependence’ (1965, p. 768). The co-operative principle, Mill says, would extend the ‘democratic spirit’ into large enterprises to ‘all who participate in their productive employment’, so that each worker would gain a voice in managing the economic institutions that govern her or his work life (1965, pp. 793, 768, 783–4).16 Similarly, he says in an 1864 speech on cooperation, ‘We want ... the co-operation of all workers – such ought to be our object. We ought to proceed towards this cautiously ... and never attempt to do an act which we feel will not be recommended by principle’ (Mill, 1988, p. 8). His vision of the progress of cooperativism here is firm but carefully measured: ‘How to succeed will be learned by degrees. Co-operators will learn by practice. ... I do not mean that the industrial or commercial operations of particular co-operative societies can or ought to be carried out upon some gigantic scale. All such societies as this can do, is in its nature limited’. Still, his ultimate political economic ideal ‘when this great improvement in the mind of the people has taken place, – when all have become capable of cooperation’, is of a democratic co-operativist future: ‘This is the millennium towards which we should strive’ (1988, pp. 8–9).

Standing for Equality, Constructing Inequalities For Mill, then, the liberal commitments to freedom and democratic equality lead to a radical democratic (and basically democratic socialist) account of the ‘the nearest [attainable] approach to social justice’.17 Freedom and democratic equality would be most fully and widely achieved in modern societies when the class division between capitalists who rule enterprises and workers who have no voice in these enterprises is overcome by a system of co-operative production. For many reasons this radical democratic vision has rarely been even vaguely approached in democratic capitalist societies.18 My present concern is limited to one specific reason for the eclipse of the radical democratic horizon of Mill’s thought within contemporary liberalism: the qualification that Mill includes in his co-operative political economic ideal introduces an exclusionary social scientific and political logic that has been refined and extended in an array of subsequent liberal practices of governance. These practices have worked – ideologically and practically – to undermine the kind of substantive radical democratic liberal conceptions of education for freedom and democratic equality that Mill himself (generally) favors. Recall how Mill’s qualifies his call for an economy of worker self-managed democratic cooperatives. He says that as working people are increasingly educated for freedom, the industrial order that makes workers dependent on the rule of others ‘will gradually tend to confine itself to the description of workpeople whose low moral qualities render them unfit for anything more independent’ – that is, ‘those who have too little understanding, too little virtue’, to be fully self-governing (1965, pp. 769, 793, emphasis added). Mill makes the same point in his 1864 speech on cooperation. ‘There is no fear’, he says, ‘that co-operation will spread faster than the co-operators improve’ (1988, p. 8). He explains that ‘it is necessary to state that this is a gradual process; for as long as there are any working people who are dishonest – as long as there are any who are idle, who are intemperate, who are

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spendthrifts – so long there will be working people who are only fit to be receivers of wages’ (1988, p. 7).19 He adds: so long as there are persons unworthy to take a part in great operations, there must be persons [who are] receivers of wages. It is only when the entire working class shall be as much improved as the best portion of them now are that our [co-operativist] hopes will be realized, and the whole mass of the people will practically adopt co-operation. ... It is only in proportion as the lower grades rise to the level of the higher classes – it is only in proportion as that great change takes place, that the advantages of co-operation will be individually felt; and persons will be ashamed of not taking their due share in the work (1988, p. 8). Thus, freedom and the ‘independence of the individual’ would be better served for most working people through democratic co-operative production (1965, p. 793). Meanwhile, the remainder – that is, those with intractable ‘low moral qualities’ – must remain subject to the undemocratic and dependent relations of production that characterizes unreformed capitalism. Ideally, economic democracy would become the rule within economic enterprises and capitalistic dependence would become the exception. In effect, Mill introduces a proto-underclass at the margins of his theory that prefigures later notions of ‘underclasses’ in modern capitalist societies: a sub-class of workers whose characters and incapacities will disqualify them from the ‘normal’ achievements of a maximally free, ‘improving’ society (1965, p. 769).20 As I will explain shortly, given his theory of education for freedom, Mill leaves this subset of workers with an ambiguous status with respect to his radical democratic vision of social and political reform. Even so, the way that Mill conceives this protounderclass suggests the pattern of politically shaped ‘scientific’ social analysis that Foucault finds exemplified in the specification of ‘delinquency’ in nineteenth century France. Foucault explains that although ‘delinquency’ is related to criminality (that is, lawbreaking) more generally, the discourse surrounding delinquency shows that it is primarily specified in terms of the principle of the norm rather than that of the law. While ordinary offenders are distinguished by their illegal acts, the delinquent ‘is to be found in quasi-natural classes, each endowed with its own characteristics and requiring a specific treatment’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 253). Delinquents are defined more by what they supposedly are than by what they do; they are people with ‘dangerous proclivities’ who are resistant to ‘correction’ (Foucault, 1979, pp. 277, 252, 264–72). Foucault contends that the use of new ‘scientific’ knowledge about criminals to specify ‘delinquency’ in relation to the broader, more inchoate group of criminals represents the great ‘success’ of the modern prison system. This is a political success for those who seek to forestall radical criticism of the class structured inequalities that produce criminality because the ‘process that constitutes delinquency as an object of knowledge is one with the political operation that dissociates illegalities and isolates delinquents from them’ (1979, p. 277). Insofar as the problems of ‘delinquents’ are seen as rooted in what they are, the concept of delinquency deflects

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attention from a deeper sociological and political analysis of the social conditions that marginalize the ‘delinquents’ along with the broader class of poor people, including poor working people (1979, pp. 63, 278, 287). In fact, when the phenomena of ‘delinquency’ was delineated in the mid-nineteenth century, just such a socio-political analysis of criminality was articulated by French working class newspapers, Fourierists, and anarchists. They explained ‘delinquency’ in terms of oppressive social conditions rather than in terms of the intrinsic traits of the individual criminal.21 Foucault’s analysis brings to light how politics is involved not just with respect to how a society decides to control its ‘delinquents’, but also in the very practice of specifying ‘delinquency’.22 It thereby illuminates the political implications of Mill’s seemingly ‘objective’ social scientific specification of a sub-class of recalcitrant workers.23 Working as a political economist and social philosopher, Mill employs his intellectual authority to subdivide the working class into a larger sub-class of working people who readily can be equipped for self-government and a smaller sub-set of people who are prone to remain ill-suited for this freedom and responsibility. He and other élite nineteenth century writers sometimes called these people the ‘dangerous classes’.24 Mill never explicitly theorizes his sub-class of ‘intemperate’ working people in a manner comparable to how other nineteenth century thinkers specified delinquency or to how twentieth century social scientists have theorized the ‘underclass’ concept. Indeed, he is never completely clear about whether he sees this sub-class as plagued by ‘innate’ deficiencies or as just deeply hindered by especially ‘wretched social arrangements’. His educative convictions would seem to favor the environmentalist view. Moreover, Mill was no disengaged ‘ivory tower’ economist and political theorist. He was also a public moralist and political actor who sought to influence public debate in England and encourage working class people’s efforts at self-improvement.25 Accordingly, there is some reason to understand his remarks about recalcitrant workers as, at least in part, a clarion call for working people to ‘improve’ themselves – that is, to overcome any residual idleness and intemperance that might hold some of them back from becoming self-governing agents. For Mill, the prospects of the emancipation of the working classes hinged on ‘the degree to which they can be made into rational beings’ (1965, p. 763; Hollander, 1985, pp. 888–907; Baum, 2000, chapters 4, 7). These considerations suggest that Mill would maintain that even his sub-class of ‘problem’ working people would be amenable to the influence of a sustained reform program of education for freedom and democratic political economic reform.26 Nonetheless, given his claims about the virtually ‘unlimited possibility of improving the moral and intellectual condition of mankind by education’ (1963a, pp. 109, 111), his remarks about those working people with ‘low moral qualities’ – particularly in the Principles – are striking: they tend to mark these people as a special problem, blame them for their plight, and indicate some ambivalence about the prospects for inclusive, egalitarian radical democratic reform.27 Furthermore, regardless of Mill’s precise intentions, his exclusionary language prefigures a much more explicit and pervasive exclusionary logic through which liberal democratic

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states have subsequently produced and managed class-structured economic inequalities while asserting their commitments to the ‘equality of opportunity’. This exclusionary logic has been manifest in subsequent liberal modes of governance in two interrelated ways. First, a number of subsequent social scientific and liberal governmental practices have attempted to theoretically specify precisely which members of society can be expected to develop ‘too little understanding, too little virtue’, to share fully in individual liberty and democratic self-government: scientific racism and eugenic theories; English Victorian theories of ‘the residuum’ – a class of unregenerate poor – and late twentieth century ‘underclass’ theories.28 Second, an array of closely related theories and social practices have been developed that have further refined and generalized this exclusionary logic. They have done so – and in some cases continue to do so – by specifying criteria that yield a seemingly more rigorous sorting of people in terms of supposed degrees of (innate or achieved) ‘fitness’ for positions, power, authority, and self-government. These practices include various forms of ‘intelligence’ and ‘scholastic aptitude’ testing, such as IQ testing and standardized ‘achievement’ tests, and closely related practices of educational ‘tracking’ or ‘streaming’ that funnel some students towards more lucrative university (professional-managerial) educations and others toward more vocational and technically oriented educations.29 Educational mechanisms like IQ testing, achievement tests, tracking, and streaming have been used variously with differing impacts among democratic capitalist countries, which have developed their national education systems in distinct ways.30 Moreover, proponents of IQ testing have often regarded it as offering a fair, meritocratic, and, thus, ‘democratic’ mode of educational selection that would replace forms of educational selection and tracking based on inherited (and thus unearned) class positions with selection based on ability (or ‘intelligence’) and educational achievement (Sutherland, 1984, pp. 97–127; Wooldridge, 1995, pp. 164–200, 363–420). In their overall impact, however, these practices have worked to propagate widely the view that people differ significantly in innate cognitive abilities and that existing inequalities in advanced capitalist democracies are due largely to differences in merit – an effect that has gained renewed impetus from recent defenses of the efficacy of IQ testing, particularly in the USA (Jacoby and Glauberman, 1995; Wooldridge, 1995, pp. 363–83). According to this view, equality of opportunity has been largely achieved in these countries and the distribution of educational achievement, incomes, wealth, careers, power and authority, and success and failure roughly corresponds to differences in innate ability and exertions (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 42). The new class-segmenting educational practices have worked in tandem with similar ‘scientific’ refinements to processes of class-stratification in industrial relations and in the management of economic enterprises more generally: Taylorism (Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theory of efficient labor relations) and related ‘scientific management’ and ‘human relations’ management theories. Consequently, in stark contrast to Mill’s vision of a gradual transition to economic democracy, contemporary capitalist democracies have generally adopted as fact the ideological notion that managing economic enterprises requires a specialized kind of knowledge that few people are able to attain (see Baum, n.d.).

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Together, these various contemporary liberal governmental practices provide a theoretical rationale for a sharp retreat from the more radical democratic and egalitarian aspect of Millian liberalism in two respects. First, they confirm and refine the idea, which is already present at the margin of Mill’s theory, that some people are simply not equipped, perhaps by nature, for the kind of expansive education for freedom that Mill himself recommends. Second, they replace Mill’s claim that most members of society, including most members of the working class, can and should be educated for self-government in democratically organized firms with the view that only a relatively small and élite class of people have capacity to effectively and efficiently manage economic enterprises. This amounts to a reversal of Mill’s political economic ideal wherein most workers would eventually achieve the status of self-governing worker-managers in democratic co-operatives (as well as full citizens of democratic states) and only a few are left with the status of hired laborers. In most contemporary capitalist economies only a relatively small number of people are self-governing or relatively autonomous in significant aspects of their work lives (for example, partners in law firms and medical practices; self-employed persons; university professors; capitalists and senior executives) and the work lives of the vast majority of working people (including most people who work for wages and salaries) are characterized by dependence on the rule of others and limited autonomy.31

Conclusion For Mill, the liberal democratic commitment to the freedom of individuals ‘to govern [their] own conduct by [their] own feelings of duty, and by such laws and social constraints as [their] conscience can subscribe to’, once they have been educated for freedom, has radical democratic implications. With respect to the organization of economic institutions in particular, Mill, as we have seen, looked forward to a post-capitalist economy of democratic co-operatives as ‘the millennium towards which we should strive’. This system would largely overcome the standing class division between labor and capital. My aim in this essay has not been to assess whether Mill’s particular model of a democratic economy is workable under current circumstances. Instead, it has been to reconsider the divided legacy of his egalitarianism as a way to highlight certain limitations and mystifications in the egalitarian pretensions of today’s ‘meritocratic’ neo-liberalism. His notions of education for freedom, democratic equality, and a maximally freedom-supporting post-capitalist co-operative economics extend liberal principles in a radical democratic direction; yet his demarcation of a protounderclass anticipates later exclusionary liberal governmental practices that have served to prematurely jettison the very idea of a more democratic and egalitarian ordering of economic and educational institutions and practices. These governmental practices (for example, ‘scientific management’, educational tracking, ‘scientific’ racism, IQ testing, and ‘underclass’ theories) have achieved this end in two interrelated ways. First, they have validated the dubious idea that existing democratic capitalism comes close to realizing ‘equality of opportunity’ and a distribution of rewards according to merit. This enables governing élites to declare that prevailing social institutions and policies effectively promote equal opportu-

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nity and democratic equality while they maintain governmental practices that actually hide systemic class structured economic inequalities under a meritocratic veneer. Second, the governmental practices in question also work to insulate the meritocratic ideal itself from democratic critique.32 In short, these liberal governmental practices reinforce the questionable view that once ‘democratic’ capitalism is joined with a system of universal compulsory elementary and secondary schooling, the resulting inequalities of income and wealth, economic positions, and economic power are the ‘natural’ expression of prior ‘inequalities’ among people in talent, intelligence, initiative, and effort.33 According to this theory, the rich are rich because, generally speaking, they possess greater talent, intellect, and inventiveness and exert greater effort than most other people; middle-class and working class people have earned their economic status, nothing more, nothing less; and the ‘underclasses’ (variously conceived) have only their own moral, ‘racial’, cultural, and/or intellectual ‘deficiencies’ to blame for their plight. Despite Mill’s expectation that there remain (at least for the foreseeable future) a sub-class with ‘too little understanding, or too little virtue’, to be capable of being fully included in political and economic relationships of democratic equality and democratic self-government, his own theory of education for freedom offers a more optimistic take on this conclusion. It suggests that when certain people fail to develop the ‘mental cultivation’ necessary for responsible democratic self-government, this is typically due to bad (or at least ineffective) formal schooling and other stultifying social conditions.34 Indeed, the undemocratic and inegalitarian character of modern capitalist economies calls to mind the converse of Mill’s claim in Representative Government with which I started this essay: any education – including any educative social circumstances beyond schooling – that treats people as machines rather than as free agents capable of self-determination tends to diminish their sense of efficacy for and expectations concerning practices of democratic self-government. As the late Pierre Bourdieu has said, ‘A large part of social suffering stems from the poverty of people’s relationship to the education system, which not only shapes social destinies but also the image they have of their destiny (which undoubtedly helps to explain what is called the passivity of the dominated ...)’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 42). If this argument is correct, then egalitarian democrats still have some grounds for optimism concerning the possibility of building a more fully democratic society. To approach this goal, however, a society would have to strive, following Mill’s more persistent line of argument, to create broad systems of education that seek to develop in all persons the capacities for autonomy and self-government.35 This would require a decisive shift away from current tendencies to educate different individuals according to their ‘scholastic aptitude’ as measured by standardized tests, and away from what Doris Lessing calls the tendency to regard people’s talents ‘as commodities with a value in the success-stakes’ (Lessing, [1962] 1981, p. xv). For more immediate purposes and in a more modest social democratic vein, Mill’s analysis also indicates the deficiency of proposals to reform popular schooling (that is, education in the narrower sense) that are isolated from any effort to ameliorate broader inegalitarian social conditions that produce unequal educational outcomes between differently situated social groups and classes.36 In addition, his theory of education for freedom suggests compellingly that the task of

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effectively educating all members of society for freedom and democratic equality will inevitably be limited by the failure to achieve a more egalitarian, participatory, and democratic economic system. These considerations pose serious practical obstacles to a radical democratic vision such as Mill’s given the persistence of pervasive social inequalities in democratic capitalist societies. Nonetheless, Mill’s notions of education for freedom and democratic equality offer important theoretical resources for those of us who continue to aspire to and work for a more substantial and inclusion practice of democratic egalitarianism. (Accepted: 8 January 2003) About the Author Bruce Baum, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, 1866 Main Mall, Buchanan C472, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1, Canada; email: [email protected]

Notes Thank you to Wendy Donner and three anonymous reviewers for Political Studies for comments on earlier versions of this article. 1 Mill’s radicalism can be usefully contrasted to that of his contemporary Karl Marx. Where Marx tends to presume that almost all people are always already prepared to be equally self-governing with respect to otherwise alienating forms of political and economic power in modern capitalist societies, Mill is a more measured radical. He insists that people must be educated for self-government, and he sees possibilities for majority tyranny and social conformism and a place for authority and authorities even in the most fully realized democratic society (Baum, 2000, chapters 2, 5–8). Summing up how the influences of such disparate thinkers as Coleridge and the Saint-Simonians led him to distinguish his own thinking from that of the utilitarian Philosophic Radicals, Mill once called for ‘not radicalism but neoradicalism’ (1963c, p. 312). This has led Bernard Semmel to speak of his ‘Coleridgean Neoradicalism’ (Semmel, 1998). Without denying Mill’s Coleridgean side, my characterization of Mill’s radicalism is more in line with the late Richard Ashcraft’s emphasis on his radical sociology of power and commitment to a form of democratic socialism (Ashcraft, 1998; see also Sarvacy, 1984; Claeys, 1987; Morales, 1996). 2 A full account of exclusionary aspects of Mill’s political thought would have to address, in addition, the Eurocentric and unduly rationalistic features of his notion of ‘rational conduct’ that went along with his defense of British colonialism in India. It would also have to contend with Mill’s relation to racist and neo-racist modes of thought and political practice. On the former, see Parekh, 1994; Robson, 1998; Mehta, 1999, pp. 97–114; Baum, 2000, pp. 36–43. On the latter, see Varouxakis, 1998; Goldberg, 2000. 3 Hofstadter, 1966, chapter 13; Jones and Williamson, 1979, ‘History of Education’, pp. 42–54; Green, 1990. 4 During the Reform debates of 1867, conservative commentators like Robert Lowe warned that further extensions of the franchise would degrade the franchise ‘to the level of those persons who have no sense of decency or morality’ (Lowe, Speeches and Letters on Reform [1867], pp. 61–2, quoted in Briggs, 1965, p. 499). On the general state of British formal education in this period, see Sutherland, 1990. 5 Concerning association psychology, Mill explains that our more complex ideas and states of consciousness are built up out of associations among more elementary impressions in relation to our awareness of similarities, differences, conjunctions, and successions among our sensations (Mill, 1974, pp. 852–3; Baum, 2000, pp. 105–11). 6 Much like the liberal pragmatist John Dewey after him, Mill was quite optimistic overall about the potential of social science to identify the social conditions necessary to educate citizens for freedom. See Ryan, 2001, 19–20. 7 Taken together, formal schooling and the educative effects of the various social and political relationships situating people comprise what Mill calls ‘all the powers of education’ (1977c, p. 282; Baum, 2000, chapter 4). For a comprehensive treatment of Mill’s view of education in a democratic society, see Garforth, 1980. 8 Mill elaborates upon this point in a variety of contexts. In The Subjection of Women, for instance, he says that for women to simply reject the idea that ‘all the wider subjects of thought and action ... are

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men’s business, ... the mere consciousness a woman would then have of being a human being like any other, entitled to pursue her own pursuits, ... would effect an immense expansion of the faculties of women’ (1984c, p. 327). Mill is somewhat ambivalent, however, about the effects of despotic government. In Representative Government he says that for ‘civilized’ societies even a ‘good despotism’ enervates the active faculties of its subjects (1977b, pp. 399–403). Yet he contends that ‘despotism is a legitimate mode of government for barbarians, provided the end be their improvement’ (1977c, p. 224; 1977b, pp. 567–77). 9 This is where Mill’s radical democratic concerns depart from the social democratic approach Nussbaum favors. I do not mean to overdraw the contrast between radical democratic and social democratic visions. For instance, if we trace social democracy back to Edward Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism, which aims ultimately at a democratic socialist transformation of modern capitalist economies, we find a radical democratic edge to social democratic aspirations. Still, social democracy, including Nussbaum’s version of it, has increasingly become a program of comprehensive welfare state regulation of capitalist economies rather than a program for radical democratic transformation of capitalist societies. The question of whether this tendency has been due more to political expedience than to matters of principle is beyond the scope of this paper. On the distinction between social democratic and radical democratic perspectives, compare Nussbaum, 1990; Lummis, 1996. 10 Concerning his view of equal educational opportunity, see Mill, 1965, pp. 948–50; 1967b, pp. 622, 628; 1977c, pp. 301–2; and Baum, 2000, p. 211. Mill says relatively little about the state’s responsibility to ensure that everyone has sufficient access to formal schooling beyond elementary education. This is largely for the reason he gives in his posthumous Chapters on Socialism. He says, ‘we are still only at the first stage of that movement for the education of the whole people’ (1967a, p. 729). Even after the Education Act of 1870 elementary schools in England were still not free. The beginning of a coherent national system of free, compulsory elementary and secondary education system in England was established only with the 1902 Balfour Education Act. See Green, 1990, pp. 302–6; Grendler, 2001, pp. 343–4. 11 In his second review of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, he remarks, ‘Equality may be either equal freedom, or equal servitude’ (1977e, p. 159). In a letter to Arthur Helps he explains his commitment to equality as follows: ‘As I look upon inequality as in itself always an evil, I do not agree with anyone who would use the machinery of society for the purpose of promoting it. As much inequality as necessarily arises from protecting all persons in the free use of their faculties of mind and body and in enjoyment of what these can obtain for them, must be submitted to for the sake of the greater good’ (Letter to Arthur Helps [1847?], in Mill, 1972, p. 2002, Mill’s emphasis). 12 Berger summarizes Mill’s baseline conception of equality in terms of the following four points: ‘1. Substantive inequalities of wealth, education, and power are prima facie wrong, and require justification. 2. Substantive inequalities must not permit any to “go to the wall”; redistribution to provide subsistence must be guaranteed. 3. Inequalities must not undermine the status of persons as equals ... 4. Only certain kinds of grounds serve to justify inequality – the inequality will make no one worse off, or that is the result of rewarding according to desert’ (Berger, 1984, pp. 159–60, emphasis in the original). 13 ‘The claims of different people to such power’, he says at one point, ‘differ as much as their qualifications for exercising it beneficially’ (1977d, p. 323). 14 Here I am slightly revising my own earlier account of Mill’s conception of equality (Baum, 2000, pp. 63–5). There I follow Berger too closely, even though my interpretation does highlight Mill’s construal of equality in terms of practices of democratic self-government. For a related analysis of Mill’s egalitarianism, see Morales, 1996. 15 In this respect, Mill’s view of equality has affinities to Elizabeth Anderson’s notion of democratic equality. Democratic equality, she says, entails that ‘Equals are not dominated by others; they do not live at the mercy of others’ wills. This means that they govern their lives by their own wills, which is freedom.’ She also says that ‘the primary subject of justice is the institutional arrangements that generate people’s opportunities over time’ (Anderson, 1999, pp. 315, 309). Mill’s democratic socialist commitments, however, distinguish his view of democratic equality from Anderson’s. He seeks to democratize the economic structures that produce economic inequalities whereas Anderson remains focused largely on the distribution of resources and opportunities. See Ashcraft, 1998; Baum, 2000, chapter 7. 16 After making his case for co-operative associations, he says: ‘I agree, then, with the Socialist writers in their conception of the form which industrial operations tend to assume in the advance of improvement; and I entirely share their opinion that the time is ripe for commencing this transformation, and that it should by all just and effectual means be aided and encouraged’ (1965, p. 794). Mill relies largely on the self-organization of working people and ‘a kind of spontaneous process’ to bring about a post-capitalist co-operative economy. See Riley, 1996, pp. 39–71; Baum, 2000, chapter 7.

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17 In this regard, it is a mistake to see the historically conditional élitist elements of Mill’s democratic theory in Representative Government as evidence that his democratic commitments are tenuous. Mill shares with more recent participatory and radical democrats the view that the democratic character of modern representative government is crucially dependent upon the extent to which the broader society in which it is embedded is democratically organized. See Sarvacy, 1984; Ashcraft, 1998; Baum, 2000, chapter 8. 18 Something roughly in the spirit of Mill’s ideal, I think, can be found in the lineaments of Swedish and Norwegian Social Democracy. Nussbaum notes that the Scandinavian approach to social welfare, as formulated by theoreticians like Robert Erickson, includes attention to such things as the capacity of citizens ‘to control and consciously direct (their) living conditions; that is, the individual’s level of living will be an expression of his [or her] “scope of action” ’ (Erickson, quoted in Nussbaum, 1990, p. 240). 19 In a slightly different transcription of this speech (published in The Reasoner, 1 May 1864), Mill wrote, more ominously, ‘for as long as there are working people, there will also be the idle, the imprudent, and the spendthrift, who will remain the receivers of wages’ (1988, p. 7, editor’s note). The transcription of this passage that is privileged in Mill’s Collected Works, which I quoted above, was published in The Co-operator, June 1864. 20 I am not suggesting that Mill actually conceived of his sub-class of working people as an underclass in the contemporary sense. See Baum, n.d. 21 Society is at fault, they argued, ‘either because [it] is incapable of providing its fundamental needs, or because it destroys or effaces in [the criminal] possibilities, aspirations or needs that later emerge in crime’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 287). Mill himself was much influenced by French socialist theories of this era. 22 Mill himself uses the concept of ‘delinquents’ in this way in the footnote to the 1867 and 1872 editions of his book, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. Responding to a critic of his argument in On Liberty that people should not be punished for their own good, he says that it is a perversion of his doctrines to claim that he means ‘that children not be punished for their own good ... that parents, and even the magistrates, when dealing with that class of delinquents, are not entitled to constitute themselves judges of the delinquents’ good ... . Did I not expressly leave open, as similar to the case of children, that of adult communities which are still in the infantine stage of development?’ (1979, p. 459n, emphasis added). 23 It is significant that Mill makes this point in Principles of Political Economy, since he regards economics as the most ‘scientific’ of the social sciences. See Mill’s 1844 essay, ‘On the Definition of Political Economy’ (Mill, 1967d). 24 Mill also refers in other writings to a part of the working class that has ‘low moral qualities’. For instance, in his 1834 ‘Notes on the Newspapers’, he says that he as much as anyone detests, ‘the selfishness with which the demoralized and brutal part of the working population squander their earning ... leaving their families in want’ (1982, p. 234). Later, testifying to a Royal Commission on the Contagious Disease Acts, in 1870, he refers to ‘the criminal and vicious classes, the dangerous classes’, in response to a question about whether the Acts have had the effect of ‘raising the lowest and most demoralised portion’ of the class ‘of common prostitutes’ (1984a, p. 366). And in The Subjection of Women he discusses domestic violence against women by men of ‘the most naturally brutal and morally uneducated part of the lower classes’ (1984c, p. 296). In these remarks he tends to consider the ‘immoralities’ of these people in relation to circumstances that ‘render them immoral’ (1982, p. 213, Mill’s emphasis). 25 I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer for Political Studies. On Mill’s career as a public moralist, see Collini, 1991, chapter 4. Mill celebrates working class activities for self-improvement in his chapter in the Principles, ‘On the Probable Futurity of the Labouring Classes’. 26 This interpretation finds support in Mill’s statement, quoted above, that ‘It is only when the entire working class shall be as much improved as the best portion of them now are that our [co-operativist] hopes will be realised, and the whole mass of the people will practically adopt co-operation’ (1988, p. 8). In the report of Mill’s speech on co-operation published in The Reasoner, he is quoted as follows: ‘We are looking forward to the time when the whole mass of the people shall adopt the true principles of co-operation’ (quoted in Mill, 1988, p. 8, editor’s note). Further support for this interpretation can be found in Samuel Hollander’s recounting of Mill’s analysis of the effects of population pressures on the condition of workers and his hope for ‘universal improvement’ among the working classes (Hollander, 1985, pp. 888–907, quoting Mill at p. 903). For a more critical view of Mill on these matters, see Carlisle, 1991, chapter 3. 27 The past century and a half suggests that such ambivalence may have been (and may continue to be) well warranted. The salient question, however, is whether it was warranted because such a reform agenda is highly ambitious and politically contentious, or because it would have made

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demands on people that exceed the capabilities of many of us (in terms of capacities for democratic self-government). 28 To be clear concerning scientific racism, my point is that the exclusionary logic Mill deploys in his specification of a proto-underclass as well as in his cultural defense of English colonialism prefigures the kind of exclusionary logic operative in later forms of scientific racism and contemporary ‘neoracism’. This is so despite the ways in which Mill himself explicitly challenges racist thinking in his time. See Varouxakis, 1998; Goldberg, 2000. 29 See Sutherland, 1984; Oakes, 1985; Hanson, 1993; Lemann, 1995; Wooldridge, 1995. 30 Sutherland, 1984, pp. 3, 283–90; Green, 1990; Grendler, 1995; Wooldridge, 1995, pp. 1–17, 402–20. Among the North Atlantic democratic capitalist societies, for instance, the English national education system remained perhaps the most deeply class structured through the twentieth century. This legacy is exemplified in English secondary education by the persistence of what Green describes as its ‘antiquated system of gentry education in the public schools [which are actually exclusive private schools] and the absence of normatively middle-class schooling such as has been achieved with the continental lycée and Realschule, and the American high school’ (Green, 1990, p. 313). At the same time, due to the extreme class segmentation in English education, English élites between 1900 and 1940 effectively resisted the new, supposedly ‘meritocratic’ forms of educational selection represented by IQ testing and competitive examinations (Sutherland, 1984, pp. 283–90). 31 What Mill said about the ‘restraints to freedom’ imposed by nineteenth century capitalism is still largely true about contemporary capitalism: most workers have ‘little choice of occupation or freedom of locomotion, [and] are practically dependent on fixed rules and on the will of others’ (1965, p. 209). The situation of dependent caretakers, whose work involves child care, housework, and elder care but who do not work for wages, poses a related challenge and one that Mill himself does not address directly. 32 This is not to deny that the meritocratic ideal has occasionally been subjected to powerful critiques. See Wooldridge, 1995, pp. 306–18. 33 Mill knew better. He maintains that under unreformed capitalism the distribution of the produce between the rich and poor is ‘obviously unjust ... so slightly connected as it is with merit and demerit, or even with exertion’ (Mill, 1967c, p. 444; see also 1967a, p. 714). On Mill’s view of distributive justice, see Hollander, 1985, p. 782; Baum, 2000, pp. 213–19. 34 Another possibility is that some people are resistant to certain approaches to ‘liberal’ education, but not to an education for freedom in its fundamentals. Perhaps what they require is an education that more effectively hooks up to their life experiences. Mill himself considers this possibility in an article on Ireland. After saying that intended lessons about industry, prudence, and respect for law will be of little use in teaching the peasants ‘if everything which the peasant, throughout life, sees and hears, tells him ... that he has nothing to gain by industry or prudence, and everything to lose by submitting to the law’, he adds: ‘Nothing that you can say will alter the state of his mind, only something that you can do. Make it his interest to be industrious and prudent, and engage his interest on the side of the law’ (1986b, p. 955). 35 I am inclined to agree with Anderson, however, that within such a framework ‘[s]ome exceptions would have to be made for those so severely mentally disabled or insane that they cannot function as agents’ (Anderson, 1998, p. 331 n. 97). 36 Due to Mill’s ambivalence about the use of the state power to foster quality schooling for all (1965, p. 950; 1977c, pp. 301–2), his specific policy prescriptions offer only limited guidance in this domain. See Garforth, 1980, chapter 6; Hollander, 1985, pp. 724–9; Baum, 2000, 211–12.

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