JULIET M ITCH ELL
389
was the revolutionary class, the universalistic aspect of such thought of
which I spoke earlier must turn to abstraction-there is no other way in
which it can refer
to
all people .
John Stuart Mill in a sense expresses the best and the last in the
high liberal tradition . His ideals represent the best his society is capable
of but they can no longer be felt
to
represent that society-as a
consequence there is a sort of heroic isolation
to
his philosophy.
Because of his isolation, because of his abstraction, in this field Mill's
thought pinpoints and' 'fixes " the essence of liberalism :
The old theory was, that the least possible should be left to the
individual agent ; that all he had to do should, as far as practicable,
be laid down for him by superior powers. Left to himself he was
sure to go wrong. The modern conviction , the fruit of a thousand
years of experience, is that things in which the individual is the
person directly interested, never go right but as they are left to his
own discretion ; and that any regulation of them by authority
except to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous . This
conclusion , slowly arrived at , and not adopted until almost every
possible application of the contrary theory has been made with
disastrous result, now (in the industrial department) prevails
universally in the most advanced countries , almost universally in
all that have pretensions to any sort of advancement. It is not that
all processes are supposed to be equally good , or all persons to be
equally qualified for everything ; but that freedom of individual
choice is now known to be the only thing which procures the
adoption of the best processes , and throws each operation into the
hands of those who are best qualified for it .
Mill's philosophy is an overriding belief in the individual and in
the right of the individual
to
fulfill his or her maximum potential,
Mill 's concept of equality is therefore an equality of opportunity . As a
politician he fought for equal rights for women under the law.
Since Mill wrote there has been, I think-in an uneven way-a
decline in the tradition of liberal thought. Today , exactly three–
quarters of the way through the twentieth century, "equality" would
seem
to
have become a somewhat unfashionable concept . Equal rights
are still strenuously fought for but equality as the principle of a just and
free society rarely elicits the eloquent support it once received . I am
neither a philosopher nor a political scientist and I am ill-equipped
to
