Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History and the Human

4. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Criticism

4 John Stuart Mill, On Libertyand Criticism 1:間耐叫叫叫 Cα 凹叫 u 叫叫 11 the defense of c 口 ri 沮 ticαism? The ques 討甜 tion i 臼 s too broad and our t 位 1m 虹 me too short to answer fully, but there is no doubt that 扎 M 位 ill's great essay 多 r， Oη Li 仿 bert 句 y， published in 1859 - the same year as Darwin's Origin ofSpecies and Marx's A Contribution to the Cr而que ofPolitical Economy - gives us passionate and compelli時 reasons to think so. Moreover, in On Liberty, liberalism and historicism show themselves in some ways to be more than allies. Mill's liberalism is an important branch, an offshoot of the greater and more inclusive root of historical humanism. His devotion to individual freedom from obtrusive politi日1 and social authority emerges from the fact that in Western modernity humanity has become foundationally historical rather than fixed in its being. Historical humanity, to put it simply, has the capacities to develop itself as long as it remains historical. On Liberty is a defense of those abilities and a passionate warning against several threats to their existence, including, 的 Mill sees it, all forms of corporatist or collective authority that inevitably stifle freedom within conformity and error.1 On Liberty identifies not only those who would arrest the possibilities and necessity of historical transformation within repressive political regimes but others, especially intellectuals and their institutions that would deny the very fact of that historicality and so arrest the human within a natural concept that invariably accommodates itself to power and provides power with legitimating stories of human limitation. Mill's endorsement of the British Empire was inseparable from his thinking about liberty, believing as he did those British abilities to lead the world more likely assured the expansion of liberty he embraced. That Mill solidified the Empire's ideological self-justification is a brutal fact that shows how intertwined were the conditions of imperialism and the possibility of theorizing freedom. For all, although in different ways, these entanglements hopelessly but interestingly mar allliberal practices, institutions, 58 Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human and aspirations. Interest lies in how deep1y Mill deve10ped his thinking about liberty within the nexus of imperia1 culture that a1so reduced English life to mere commercia1ism, crude capitalism, and cu1tural closure. The horrors of that context, even if comp1ete1y misjudged by Mill's embrace of the "A1bion's Mission," make this essay a passionate and revealing reading of aspirations key to Western criticism. In Mill - and this is the 1esson we must 1earn from him in this set of lectures - criticism is the essentia1 form that freedom takes to think and speak. Criticism is the sine qua non of historical humanity's struggle for itself and for the conditions of its own development.2 On Liberty is an important imbuement of the historica1 human strugg1e against those tendencies of nature and power that would eradicate it, and Mill's pathos and urgency in defense of freedom - more important than any philosophica1 or ana1ytic inconsistencies of theory - is a witness to achievement and an anxious anticipation of 10ss. It is this 1ast that makes Mill our contemporary who can he1p us learn why and how to do literary criticism.3 Opponents on the politica1 right and 1eft have made us so suspicious of Mill's associations and philosophicallapses that to invoke him is to provoke a variety of passionate objections to his authority and examp1e. Despite these circumstances, 1 want to do more than provoke; 1 want to reread On Liberty to remind us of the risks inherent in anti-liberalisms that either forget the achievements of liberalism or passionate1y oppose them. Mill is not, of course, the 1ast or best word on matters of freedom and authority or of criticism and history, but his work highlights what we risk losing in any rush to deny the resources of liberalism - a rush that historically brings right and 1eft into uncomfortable alliance. Liberalism is not the fina1 word in that somehow "being in the middle" between extremes of right and left is not its position. On the contrary: liberalism's right-wing opponents,ofwhom1will say more 1ater, would destroy those very institutions and va1ues that its 1eftist antagonists frequently admire but find serious1y limited. As far as many of those conservatives hosti1e to Mill are anti-democrats in contrast to those progressives who want，的 it were, more democracy, we see how Mill's liberalism is not a midd1e path, a...