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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007, Unit 6, Th e Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 1.1 (2007) 003–014] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368 
doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.3 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Th e Tension of the Perennial, Traditional and Historical in 
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty

TIMOTHY FULLER

Colorado College

Refl ection on teaching courses in the Western tradition over many years leads 
the author to identify some unavoidable fundamental questions, among 
them: What does one mean by “tradition”?  Are there perennial insights 
which persist through time?  If there are, how are they aff ected by changing 
historical conditions?  Are ideas necessarily relative to time and place? Is 
there progressive understanding or wisdom or is there simply change? What 
sorts of lessons is one to gain from studying the past?  John Stuart Mill’s “On 
Liberty” is examined with respect to such questions to discern the response 
of one of the acknowledged masters of modern progressive thought. In turn, 
some concluding questions are posed to Mill’s response, seeking to extend 
dialogue on these matters.

Th roughout my career at Colorado College, I have taught courses in 
Western Civilization. Th e college does not have a single core course 
with common readings that all students take, but it does require that 
all new students take a course surveying the history of the West from 
some important angle. Th e Political Science Department satisfi es this 
requirement with the entry course into our major, “Introduction to 
the Western Political Tradition.” Over the years, I have taken an active 
role in promoting the importance of the Western tradition. I was a 
co-founder of such courses as “Renaissance Culture” and the current 
course on the “Western Political Tradition,” and I have also taught the 
venerable, trans-disciplinary course in our curriculum, “Freedom and 
Authority,” which has been taught at Colorado College since the early 
l950s. Th us for the past thirty years, I have committed myself to intro-
ducing my students to the monuments of the Western tradition such 

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as great books, historic documents, masterpieces of painting, sculpture 
and architecture, great musical compositions, and classic scientifi c ex-
periments.  

Over the course of that time, I have been moved to inquire not only 
how to teach courses like these, but why. We need to become more 
thoughtful about the task of teaching western culture and its role with-
in the humanities. In this essay, I will illustrate my thinking by consid-
ering John Stuart Mill’s classic text On Liberty, a book frequently as-
signed in the “Western Political Tradition” course. On Liberty could be, 
and often is, assigned in courses on topics such as ethics and politics, 
social and political philosophy, liberty and authority, modern democ-
racy, and so on. But here it allows me to demonstrate how I challenge 
my students to refl ect on “tradition,” “the perennial,” and the “histori-
cal”—terms that we might otherwise use without even knowing what 
they mean.

1. Tradition

We enjoy an inheritance of dialogue and refl ection on politics handed 
down to us in a considerable number of books, both ancient and mod-
ern, that have come to be seen as especially full of insights of permanent 
value to us. Th ey are books which, even if occasioned by the particular 
crises of their authors’ times and places, seek to understand politics 
philosophically, to see in the present discontents what is revealed about 
the human condition as such. Th ese authors understand themselves 
to be writing for their contemporaries in part but perhaps even more 
for the ages. It is thus both useful and necessary to acquaint ourselves 
with a representative sample of those works, from the time of Socrates, 
Plato and Aristotle to the American Founding and beyond, as a means 
to make ourselves conversant with the complex range of thinking of 
the Western tradition.

A tradition is neither static nor defi ned by a single thought or idea; 
a tradition is a complex exploration in search of self-understanding; it 
comprises interminable actions both of preservation and innovation. 
A tradition is an unsystematic whole in which there is both argument 
and agreement. One enters into it actively by becoming conversant 

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with its range and complexity, with its internal tensions addressed and 
addressed again through time. One might think of a tradition as a 
dialogue extended through time. It began long before us and will very 
likely continue long after us. It is always unfi nished, and there is always 
more to be said than has been said, while what has been said before 
remains pertinent as a guide to what is important to discuss.

We do not, in short, begin from scratch but from wherever in this 
extended dialogue we fi nd ourselves. We may like where we are or we 
may long for a diff erent time and place. Th ere will be both affi  rmation 
and criticism, agreement and disagreement, and, perhaps, agreement 
to disagree. Th at we are embedded in traditions is unavoidable. How 
we choose to think about and make use of them is our responsibility, 
and that too is unavoidable. We are, one could say, unavoidably con-
strained, unavoidably free, and unavoidably responsible.

 In this context, reading does not mean simply going through mate-
rial effi  ciently.  Rather, it means trying to understand how the world 
looks in the views of those whose thoughts and arguments we encoun-
ter, how they may challenge and disagree with our assumptions, how 
they may reaffi  rm or strengthen them. Important books are important 
because they are the means by which we gain access to the full range of 
thinking that composes our tradition. Careful reading rescues us from, 
and forces us out of, the temporal parochialism that would confi ne our 
thinking to the here and now. In refl ection and dialogue, the thoughts 
of our predecessors become present to us, and recognizable puzzles 
and predicaments of the human situation cast our immediate concerns 
into a larger, historical perspective. We can thereby make clearer to 
ourselves what is novel in our time and place, and what is not, assess-
ing our hopes and aspirations in light of the vast array of hopes and 
aspirations history records.

Th us we seek to think carefully about the enduring questions of 
politics through careful reading and discussion. We seek to clarify the 
vocabulary of political discourse. We seek to understand how, for ex-
ample, the American political tradition emerges out of, and adapts, the 
larger Western political tradition of which it is a part. We recognize 
that, in discussing these matters, we will have both agreements and 

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disagreements of opinion, that some issues necessarily are heartfelt and 
personal. But we share the common endeavor to understand better 
than we understood before, to become liberally educated by accepting 
the longer road of inquiry whereon the inquiry may be as important 
as the conclusions we hope to reach. So far as we are individuals char-
acterized by freedom and reason, then, we must each make out of our 
inquiries something for ourselves with the help and support of our 
common association in inquiry and dialogue. Th is is a joint inquiry 
into fundamental questions about our lives together.

2. Th e perennial and the historical

Considering the perennial and the historical, I off er my students these 
questions: In teaching the Western tradition, is one bringing to sight 
truths valid in all times and places? Is one considering a progressive 
development in which greater approximations to truth are made over 
time so that we know more of what is true now than we could have 
known before?  Have we departed from past insights such that we have 
declined rather than advanced? Does each era (remembering always 
the diffi  culty of demarcating eras without arbitrariness) present us with 
what is true in its context, true for it, but not true beyond it, and thus 
indicative neither of advance nor of decline, but only of transforma-
tion? Is there only an interminable succession of understandings that 
human beings have generated in responding to the contingent circum-
stances in which they have found themselves? If we grant that we must 
be implicated in, and constrained by, what has gone before us, and that 
our self-understanding may be greater so far as we are aware of what 
we have been and where we have come from, does it follow that such 
comprehensiveness will endow us with meaning or protect us?  Will it 
be, as Hegel asserted, that the only lesson we learn from history is that 
we never learn from history?  What is the relation of historical under-
standing to the quest for wisdom?

On Liberty

Let us consider Mill’s famous essay (Mill 1975) for the light it may 
shed on questions like these.1 Few will need reminding of the basic 

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arguments of On Liberty; Mill published the book in 1859, and it 
quickly emerged as a classic expression of modern liberal thought and 
individualism. Mill explores what it means for us to be associated as 
free individuals capable both of self-development and of self-govern-
ance, who require little governmental control, who are orderly without 
the need of much coercion, and who are associated in the exchange of 
ideas through absolute freedom of thought and expression, in the hope 
of establishing a permanently improving, spontaneously progressing 
society wherein the disposition to stability and preservation serves not 
as a brake on progress but as the staging area for continual eff orts at 
improvement without disruption. Mill was a liberal not only because 
he defended the principle that human beings are free beings, but also 
because in the necessary balancing of the forces of order with the forces 
of progress, Mill thought the balance should be struck for the sake of 
progress, understanding that order is instrumental to progress.  “Order” 
was for him the preservation of those past accomplishments which are 
genuine contributions to the advancement of the human condition, 
keeping the way open for further contributions to “Progress.” Th is way 
of balancing Order and Progress he thought to be the primary safe-
guard against decadence and decline. He elaborates this more fully in 
Considerations on Representative Government (Mill [1867] 1993) which 
complements and extends the arguments of On Liberty.

We have in On Liberty the vision of a society of collaborative, mature 
individuals, governed directly or indirectly by a scientifi c attitude in a 
procedure of continual dialogue and constructive criticism. In it, Mill 
emphasizes civil or social liberty, and the tension between Liberty and 
Authority. Mill is seeking to establish the “nature and limits of the 
power which can be legitimately exercised over the individual” (1975, 
3). According to him, the question is 

so far from being new, that, in a certain sense, it has divided mankind, 
almost from the remotest ages; but in the stage of progress into which 
the more civilized portions of the species have now entered, it presents 
itself under new conditions, and requires a diff erent and more funda-
mental treatment. (3) 

Refl ections on the questions of the nature and limits of governmental 

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interference arise classically, Mill says, in Greece, Rome and England. 
England is the inheritor of an ancient inquiry and aspiration; as such 
it is, according to Mill, perhaps the most competent purveyor of its 
current meaning to the world.

Mill has put before us a perennial question concerning human lib-
erty. Yet he thinks that nineteenth century England has progressed to a 
new stage of civilization in which there is a need to think more deeply 
about the relation of Liberty and Authority, possibly to arrive at a deci-
sive insight into that relationship which will at last complete previous 
speculations. Mill, like virtually all of his contemporaries, recognized 
that circumstances had dramatically altered in the wake of the Refor-
mation, the Scientifi c Revolution and the American and French Revo-
lutions. Like Tocqueville, he saw that we had entered into a democra-
tizing age, irrevocably separating the spirit of our age from the spirit 
of every preceding age. Like Tocqueville again, he saw that there was 
both possibility and peril in this historic transformation. Th erefore, 
while the question of Liberty and Authority persisted, its implication 
requires fresh reexamination.

Th e old issue of the tyranny of rulers was more or less resolved by the 
establishment of political liberties or immunities and then by the es-
tablishment of constitutional arrangements to constrain the exercise of 
political power. In the wake of this resolution, a new project appeared 
inspired by the desire to establish a common interest between rulers 
and ruled such that the tension between Liberty and Authority might 
be transcended. But in America where something like that project had 
come to be, observation showed that the will of the people is practi-
cally speaking the will of the majority. Th us, limiting the power of 
government over individuals “loses none of its importance when the 
holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that is, 
to the strongest part therein” (5).

Th e problem of tyranny is thus perennial, but the character of tyran-
ny has altered as the danger of the tyranny of the majority has emerged.  
Now we must defend against “the tyranny of prevailing opinion and 
feeling” by fi nding the limit to the “legitimate interference of collective 
opinion” (6). Does this make the question of what we mean by the per-

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ennial more diffi  cult to answer?  We cannot return to the past for more 
than inspiration to gain our bearings in the distinctive conditions of 
our present. Mill studied the history of western culture and, like Hegel, 
believed that philosophical issues must be resolved through historical 
understanding of how they have altered through time, and thus have 
come to be what they are for us. Wisdom is cumulative but yet there 
may be decisive moments in history which reveal opportunities for 
dramatic achievement. Mill was not alone in thinking that he stood at 
such a point. Man’s permanent interest, he insisted, is as a progressive 
being (12); it is only in this new age, with its new spirit, that Mill be-
lieved we could see this fully. What had emerged was the possibility of 
a society of free individuals who understand themselves to be free and 
expect to be treated as free. 

However, emergent with this new age was the threat of majority tyr-
anny or collective opinion. Th e prospects of any age’s accomplishments 
are accompanied by characteristic threats to their fulfi llment. Th e fun-
damental principles of the new age must be articulated if we are to arm 
ourselves against misunderstanding those principles. Th e philosophical 
examination of Liberty and Authority requires both that we understand 
what these concepts have meant in diff erent times and places, and also 
what they are for us now. We are dealing with continually transform-
ing, if persistent, questions. Th e insights of the past are permanently 
germane to the predicaments for which they are the proper responses. 
As such, they do not cease to be valid and true, and just so far they are 
valid and true for us. But to the degree that we must respond to altered 
conditions, the validity and truth of the latter insights cannot compre-
hend all that is valid and true.

Th us it becomes necessary for Mill to formulate the basic principle 
for the new age, that is, the age in which “mankind have become ca-
pable of being improved by free and equal discussion” (11). Th e basic 
principle is that

the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collec-
tively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, 
is self-protection. Th at the only purpose for which power can be right-
fully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his 

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will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or 
moral, is not a suffi  cient warrant. (10–11)

Th e rest of On Liberty presents the well known and powerful argu-
ments for free thought and discussion as antidotes to the “tendency of 
all the changes taking place in the world…to strengthen society, and 
diminish the power of the individual” (15).

At the same time, the utility of strengthening the individual and con-
straining the power of social opinion lies in the fostering of collabora-
tive inquiry into the ways of continual improvement so that stagnation 
might henceforth be kept at bay. We must defeat collectivization but 
at the same time enhance collaboration. Th e evil of oppressive society 
will not spontaneously disappear. Th e temptation to relax and stagnate 
cannot be eradicated (15). Th e age of democracy, as is true of all ages, 
carries both possibilities and perils. Th e task is to cultivate attitudes 
and understandings which will keep open the way of improvement 
against the powerful tendencies to slip back once more into an ossify-
ing age.  

On the one hand, free thought and discussion will contribute to a 
growing convergence of understandings on what is true and best for 
us. On the other hand, the consensus must emerge through voluntary 
assent to convincing arguments, not through coercion. For the right to 
such coercion is no less prohibited to the best governments than to the 
worst (18). Indeed, only by preserving the possibility of open skepti-
cism about what is thought to be true can we have confi dence at all in 
what we believe and in the method by which we arrive at it. Truth must 
be understood as a temporary conclusion always subject to revision, a 
way station on the path to fi nal insight.

Moreover, the vibrancy of the truth depends on the felt need to 
ponder it and defend it, if not to reformulate it, in light of ongoing 
criticism. Mill says that “Truth gains more even by the errors of one 
who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the 
true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suff er 
themselves to think” (33).  

Progress promises an ever-expanding knowledge of what is best 
for human beings in the spontaneously improving society. It is only 

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now, according to Mill, that we can fully visualize this possibility as 
something more than utopian aspiration. Yet Mill does not think this 
vision originated in the present. On the contrary, he thinks that it 
was expressed in the past through extraordinary individuals, the “best 
men and the noblest doctrines” (24). Mill especially invokes Socrates 
and Jesus who became martyrs in the cause to realize the vision. What 
separates our age from all preceding ones is the prospect of universal 
recognition of the open and progressive society such that the need for 
martyrs to it will be superseded.

As Mill reminds us, Socrates, the “acknowledged master of all the 
eminent thinkers who have since lived—whose fame... all but out-
weighs the whole remainder of the names which make his native city 
illustrious,” was executed by Athens for his impiety (25). Jesus, “[t]he 
man who left on the memory of those who witnessed his life and con-
versation such an impression of his moral grandeur that eighteen sub-
sequent centuries have done homage to him as the Almighty in person” 
was killed as a blasphemer (25). However, in defeat they were victori-
ous insofar as they kept alive for future generations the thought of the 
good society which they themselves could possess only in their visions 
of it.

Mill also believed that, if Marcus Aurelius, whom he described as “a 
better Christian in all but the dogmatic sense of the word than almost 
any of the ostensibly Christian sovereigns who have since reigned” 
(26), had pre-empted Constantine by adopting instead of persecuting 
Christianity, the day of the good society would have dawned sooner. 
Th at this did not happen, Mill calls “one of the most tragical facts in 
all history” (27).

Mill’s refl ections inspire him to the thought of that society in which 
the price of truth will never again be tragedy and martyrdom, in which 
the martyrdom of the seekers of wisdom will be rendered unnecessary.  
Mill’s liberal vision is of the vindication, fi nally, of Socrates and Jesus, 
not by directing us to an encounter with the divine, unchanging things 
above and beyond our temporal existence, but by gaining for their 
example public recognition in a spontaneously-improving, progressive 
society. Th eir vision can now be accessible and known as practicable, 

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no longer being reserved to the grasp of the philosophic few or the 
spiritual virtuosos.

Considering the Platonic Socrates, one might ask if Plato’s point is 
rather that there is a tragic confl ict between the philosopher and the 
city, exemplifi ed in the fact that Athens was open to philosophy but 
also executed the true philosopher because they could not understand 
Socrates or experience him unambiguously. Could Plato agree with 
Mill as to the insight to be derived from the example of Socrates?  One 
might also wonder whether Saint Augustine, who saw Christ to be the 
pivot of world history, could hope for the earthly fulfi llment that Mill 
articulates. We are struck by the thought that the presence to us of 
great philosophical and spiritual inspirations of the past.

Mill did not think that truth always triumphs over persecution; such 
optimism, he says, is a “pleasant falsehood” (28). “Th e real advantage 
which truth has,” Mill argues,

consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished 
once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will gener-
ally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappear-
ances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes 
persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent 
attempts to suppress it . (29)

In short, fulfi llment may be expected immanently in history.  In Mill’s 
time, the practice of executing those of unacceptable opinion had de-
clined dramatically, but other forms of more subtle persecution per-
sist:

Socrates was put to death, but the Socratic philosophy rose like the sun 
in heaven, and spread its illumination over the whole intellectual fi rma-
ment. Christians were cast to the lions, but the Christian church grew 
up a stately and spreading tree, overtopping the older and less vigorous 
growths, and stifl ing them by its shade. Our merely social intolerance 
kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, 
or to abstain from any active eff ort for their diff usion. It maintains all 
prevailing opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely 
interdict the exercise of reason by dissentients affl  icted with the malady 
of thought...the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacifi cation is the 
sacrifi ce of the entire moral courage of the human mind. (32–3)

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Mill’s contemporaries, which include us, are stuck between routi-
nized opinion and the obscure investigations of the isolated experts. 
To cultivate the fruit that fl ourishes in the atmosphere of a universal 
commitment to open discussion and inquiry is the prerequisite to the 
society Mill believes possible for us. It is important to stress that, for 
Mill, this is really possible. While we could fail to realize the possibil-
ity, we have a special opportunity to achieve it. In one way, Mill is far 
from being a sentimentalist about the course of history, but in another 
way he transposes ancient experiences of transcendence into an historic 
project to moralize political and social life. 

At the dawn of the twenty-fi rst century, we are compelled thought-
fully to ask what we hope for in teaching the classics of the Western 
tradition. With Mill we have a triumphal story of what is possible 
for us. Mill stops just short of guaranteeing progress, but there is the 
assurance of perceiving the broad outlines of what progress must be, 
what the goal is towards which we are progressing (“convergence on 
truth”), and what we must do to realize it, together with the confi dence 
that certain societies, admittedly imperfectly, increasingly instantiate 
the good and progressive society. But the intervening destructiveness 
of the twentieth century cannot be contemplated without wondering 
whether we are entitled to maintain the perspective Mill off ers. If we 
go back to the old question (famously “raised again” by Kant) whether 
the human race is progressing or declining, we might wonder whether 
Kant and later Mill posed the right question. Mill defends the free 
society, on the one hand, as intrinsically right for us, but, on the other, 
as instrumental to a convergence on truth. He did not consider, as 
Nietzsche was to do, that the truth about ourselves might be unbear-
able. He also did not consider, as Plato and Augustine would have, the 
fl imsiness and evanescence of all human structures.

Might it have been possible for Mill to have seen further?  Mill 
wished to end the tension of the perennial and the historical by subor-
dinating tradition to contemporary appraisal, such that “order” (past 
accomplishment) is judged and appropriated by the progressive un-
derstanding of the “best minds,” the progressive minds, of the present. 
Yet even for Mill, absolute freedom of thought and discussion requires 

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guidance and direction from those best qualifi ed to off er such guid-
ance and direction. Some have, after all, seen further along the path 
of improvement. But this seeing further does not precisely fi t with So-
cratic ignorance or Christian humility, both of which looked beyond 
the sequence of temporal events for their grounding. It is not clear that 
Mill’s absolute freedom of thought and discussion is in real dialogue 
with the ancient responses to the perennial questions as Plato and Au-
gustine meant them. Furthermore, as we in the twenty-fi rst century 
refl ect on the past century of total war and holocaust and the prospect 
of renewed terror and destruction, we must ask what is the status of 
the “spontaneously improving, continually progressing” society?  Has 
the need or unavoidability of martyrdom become less urgent? What 
we must confront, it would seem, is the need for deeper thoughtful-
ness about the experience of the twentieth century in clarifying what 
we intend—what we hope for—in our endeavor to do what is best for 
ourselves and our students. To do so is to restore consciousness of the 
tension between the perennial and historical, the pertinence of past 
voices in the tradition, to reconsider anew what the ancients have to 
say to us.

Endnotes

1. All quotations will be from the Norton Critical Edition of On Liberty.

References

Mill, John Stuart
1975 On Liberty [1859].  Scranton:  W. W. Norton and Co.  
1993 Considerations on Representative Government [1867].  In Utilitarianism, 

On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government, ed. Geraint Wil-
liams.  London: Everyman.  

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