The Outer Limits of Liberalism

Illustrations by Vartika Sharma

In October of 1858, John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet, were traveling near Avignon, France. She developed a cough, which seemed like just a minor inconvenience, until it got worse. Soon Harriet was racked with pain, not able to sleep or even lie down. Mill frantically wrote to a doctor in Nice, begging him to come see her. Three days later her condition had worsened further, and Mill telegraphed his forebodings to his stepdaughter. Harriet died in their hotel room on November 3.

Mill sat alone with her body in their room for a day. He was despondent over the loss of his marriage: “For seven and a half years that blessing was mine. For seven and a half years only!”

Later that same month, he sent a manuscript to his publisher, which opened with a lavish dedication to Harriet. He subsequently wrote that she had been more than his muse; she had been his co-author. The book was, he said, “more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name, for there was not a sentence of it that was not several times gone through by us together.” The book’s “whole mode of thinking,” he continued, “was emphatically hers.”

The book was called On Liberty. It is one of the founding documents of our liberal world order. Individuals, the Mills argued, have the right to be the architect of their own life, to choose whom to marry, where to live, what to believe, what to say. The state has no right to impinge on a citizen’s individual freedom of choice, provided that the person isn’t harming anyone else.

A society organized along these lines, the Mills hoped, would produce a rich variety of creative and daring individuals. You wouldn’t have to agree with my mode of life, and I wouldn’t have to agree with yours, but we would give each other the space to live our fullest life. Individual autonomy and freedom of choice would be the rocks upon which we built flourishing nations.

The liberalism that the Mills championed is what we enjoy today as we walk down the street and greet a great variety of social types. It’s what we enjoy when we get on the internet and throw ourselves into the messy clash of ideas. It is this liberalism that we defend when we back the Ukrainians in their fight against Russian tyranny, when we stand up to authoritarians on the right and the left, to those who would impose speech codes, ban books, and subvert elections.

After he sent in the manuscript, Mill bought a house overlooking the cemetery where Harriet was buried, filled it with furniture from the room in which she’d died, and visited every year for the rest of his life. It’s a sad scene to imagine—him gazing down at her grave from the window—but the couple left us an intellectual legacy that has guided humanity another step forward in civilization’s advance.

Many good ideas turn bad when taken to their extreme. And that’s true of liberalism. The freedom of choice that liberals celebrate can be turned into a rigid free-market ideology that enables the rich to concentrate economic power while the vulnerable are abandoned. The wild and creative modes of self-expression that liberals adore can turn into a narcissistic culture in which people worship themselves and neglect their neighbors.

These versions of liberalism provoke people to become anti-liberal, to argue that liberalism itself is spiritually empty and too individualistic. They contend that