In today’s Guardian, Roy Hattersley takes John Stuart Mill and the Liberal Democrats to task (‘Liberty is not what it was’) and claims that their philosophy is outmoded in the modern age.

He’s arguing with something of a caricature of Mill, though – in saying that “He would have rejected outright a more positive view of liberty since it required the freedoms of the few to be constrained in order to protect the freedoms of the many,” he ignores Mill’s willingness to support the requirement for children to be education, for example.  Mill actually extended the idea of harm to others to neglecting to develop a child’s mental faculties!  The very idea of the ‘harm principle’ implies that the only reason freedoms (of the few or the many) can be constrained is precisely to protect the freedoms of others.

Hattersley is correct that specific judgments (disputes over tobacco smoke are probably a reasonable example) made on particular issues may be different in 2007 from the nineteenth century, but this does not necessarily invalidate the broader framework of Mill’s thinking.

An attachment to liberty remains profoundly relevant today – when the Times has David Davis calling for the banning of Hizb-ut-Tahrir primarily on the basis of their opinions (‘The wrong voice for Muslim Britain’), for instance, people who can advocate freedom of expression from a principled position are sorely needed – and they’re likely to know their John Stuart Mill.  Liberalism has drawn on other strands of thought, as Hattersley acknowledges to some extent – but broader notions of freedom enhance and build upon the original insight rather than contradict it.