Thomas Carlyle's views on limits of personal liberty in Past and Present

¶ … personal freedom and also the limits of that freedom have been key in Western civilization for centuries. The problems raised were addressed by various writes and ethical theorists, including the political theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the nineteenth century English essayist Thomas Carlyle, who discussed his particular views on personal freedom and its limits in his work Past and Present written in 1843.

The book Past and Present was an effort to explain the social order of Britain at a time of crisis, the crisis being an economic crisis then prevailing in England. The Industrial Revolution was changing the nature of work and the society organized around work, and the process was now affected by a recession that led to the closure of factories, the loss of jobs, an increase in the slums of the cities, and more people starving in the streets. This crisis caused Carlyle to consider the nature of the leadership the nation then had and to compare them to leaders from other eras and other situations. Carlyle offered the Abbot Samson as a cleric from the past who had devoted himself unselfishly to the monasteries he governed and worked to improve. This contrasted with many of the leaders of Carlyle's own day, men who were more interested in their own concerns and needs than in shaping the economy of the country for the benefit of all. He indeed sees the leaders in government as incapable of providing the guidance needed and instead sees the leaders of industry as the hope for the future, but even then, they would have to change their ways and work to bring about the changes needed.

In this book, Carlyle addressed the situation by calling for a reassessment of the social discourse of the time in terms of Labor, which he sought to express as something sacred. By doing so, "Carlyle underwrites its transcendent status, a status mirrored in a particular code of labor relations, the Chivalry of Work, that Carlyle offers as an ideological justification for a recentering of the workplace around the all-penetrating gaze of the Captains of Industry. In so doing, Carlyle would thus bring the structural relations of commodity production in line with his vision of the centralized structure of symbolic production, the production of meaning" (Ulrich para. 6). He proposes a relation that in each case is hierarchical, centralized, and orderly and that further functions as a final symbolic effort to intervene in what Carlyle pictures as society's "imminent descent into meaninglessness" (Ulrich para. 6).

Carlyle also describes the existing social situation, or what he calls the "Condition of England," as something utterly unfamiliar and historically unprecedented. Carlyle uses the metaphor of "enchantment" to describe this strange new world, and he also describes the contradiction: that England is among the most productive and wealthiest of nations even as it is seemingly dying because of "a lack of food, work, morals and spirit" (Ulrich para. 7). Wealth is also described as a contradiction because it seems to belong to no one, to signify nothing, and yet circulates freely in the free market.

Ulrich further points out that Carlyle's analysis of the social crisis differs markedly from the position Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were developing at approximately the same time and with reference to many of the same conditions. Their approach "concerns the mystification of the masses through an historically-determined nexus of bourgeois ideology and economic oppression. The Marxist position, of course, readily identifies the agents of that oppression and ideology as belonging to a particular class, with interests that are coterminous with a specific political formation, the State. Collective revolutionary action, on the part of an historically conscious proletariat, is thus provided with a clear target for the expenditure of its energy" (Ulrich para. 8).

For Carlyle, one of the concerns to be addressed is freedom, and he writes of this social element,

Freedom, not nomad's or ape's Freedom, but man's Freedom; this is indispensable. We must have it, and will have it! To reconcile Despotism with Freedom: -- well, is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism "just." Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no 'Freedom' at all but in obeying them. The way is already known, part of the way; -- and courage and some qualities are needed for walking on it! (Carlyle Chapter Book II V)

For Carlyle, the monastic community was one unified by human and spiritual values. The culture of England at the time was seen as having deified impersonal economic forces and abstract theories about human rights and natural laws. Carlyle saw the important communal values collapsing into isolated individualism and a ruthless laissez-faire system, suggesting that personal; freedom for Carlyle was not an absolute freedom but carried with it a requirement for the individual to serve the communal interests and not merely his or her own.

Mill approaches the obligations of both the state and the individual in terms of his Harm Principle as introduced in on Liberty, a principle addressing the basic issue of when power can be exercised over any individual member of a civilized community against his or her will. Mill says such power cannot be wielded except to prevent harm to others. Mill thus takes an anti-parentalist view. There are those who see the government acting in loco parentis, or in place of the parent, imposing restrictions for the individual's own good. Mill opposes any such notion.

Mill begins his discussion of moral theory with a definition of utilitarianism, stating that this is the creed that accepts utility as the foundation of morals, meaning the greatest happiness principle. This holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, and wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. Happiness means the intended pleasure and the absence of pain, while unhappiness means pain and the privation of pleasure. While Mill agrees that those actions which produce happiness are good and those that produce pain are bad, it is not the happiness or pain of the person taking action that is necessarily the guide. Rather, it is a more abstract happiness overall that is being considered so that actions which add to happiness overall is good while actions reducing happiness are bad. Happiness for Mill is a unified way of life rather than an abstraction toward which we tend as we make our choices and behave as our analyses dictate. "Living right" is a moral proposition that is more than an abstraction based on concepts of pleasure and pain and the development of a sum total of happiness. For Mill, living right is itself part of the happiness and the pleasure we seek. He also sees the individual as a coherent part of a social whole, and as the individual develops as a social being, morality adds to the sum total of happiness on the individual and the social level as the individual acts in a conscious way to be part of and enjoy the social level.

For Mill, the individual has a moral duty to live according to the laws of the state, but this is not an absolute duty. The element of utility takes precedence so that some laws might be considered unjust because they would produce unhappiness rather than happiness. Some laws may be unjust, giving rise to the question of whether it is right to disobey it:

Some maintain that no law, however, bad, ought to be disobeyed by an individual citizen; that his opposition to it, if shown at all, should only be shown in endeavoring to get it altered by competent authority... Other persons, again, hold the directly contrary opinion that any law, judged to be bad, may blamelessly be disobeyed, even though it be not judged to be unjust but only inexpedient, while others would confine the license of disobedience to the case of unjust laws. (Mill 43)

Mill himself would propose limits for criminal law and also for the moral force of social disapproval. The general test of law is utilitarian, based on the standard of whether the law tends to maximize pleasure and minimize pain (Kelly 340).

Mill argues that right and wrong cannot be equated merely with whether or not something maximizes happiness and sees a number of potential sources for the punishment that accrues to the individual who transgresses certain laws, punishment from the law, from his fellow citizens, or from his conscience. For Mill, the individual also helps see that justice is done through the action of his or her conscience. Mill says that the individual is, after all, the person most interested in his or her own welfare. Mill admits that many people refuse to recognize the distinction between that part of a person's life that concerns only himself and that part which concerns society. They state that the conduct of one member of society clearly affects the conduct of others and that no one is entirely isolated. Mill agrees that the mischief a person does to himself can affect others, and he finds that it is right to bring to bear moral disapprobation,

Whenever there is a definite damage, the case moves out of the province of liberty and into that of morality or law. With reference to that which is merely contingent, however, society can afford to bear the inconvenience (Magid 799-800).

Mill in his work on Liberty proposed a simple principle for determining whether society has a right to limit individual freedom, a principle based on utilitarian concepts and applicable to the individual in his or her dealings with society. that principle can be stated as follows:

The only thing of ultimate value is the happiness of individuals, and individuals can best achieve their happiness in a civilized society when they are left free to pursue their own interest with their own talents as these have come to be understood and developed by them under an adequate system of education. (Magid 797)

Mill thus asserts the principle of non-interference where the individual is concerned, though this applies only to adults and not to children. An examination of the elements of Mills analysis and of the rationale behind it can be used to consider whether government has the right to enforce morality and to examine this in terms of the contentious contemporary issue of abortion.

Mill bases his idea on the self-development of the individual. He does not, however, base this idea on any sense that there is a natural right on the part of the individual to develop himself freely, and instead he bases it on the principle of utility. This principle says that each individual should be free to develop his or her own powers and abilities according to his or her will or judgment as long as they do so in a way that does not interfere with the rights of others. From the standpoint of society, says Mill, this is also desirable because it is preferable that individuals develop themselves freely since this enhances society, while having everyone conform does not. The free development of the individual is one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and therefore it is a utility for the individual to develop himself freely as a way of achieving that happiness.

Mill emphasizes that it would be wrong to think that his statement that it is not acceptable to interfere with the decisions of an individual if those decisions do not affect someone else is nothing more than selfish indifference. He says it is also wrong to assume that he is saying no one should concern themselves about the well-being of another unless their own interest is involved. What he is saying is that such interest should be expressed in persuasion and not in compelling behavior or belief. This is especially important in terms of the right of society to enforce morality, which is a matter of belief and is something of which people should be persuaded rather than forced to accept. Mill makes a distinction between that part of one's life that belongs specifically to the individual and that which belongs to society, and belief clearly belongs to the individual, where behavior may belong to society.

Mill's reasons for taking this view begin with the fact that there is a tacit agreement between society and the individual that because the individual receives the protection of society, he or she owes a return for this benefit. The mere fact that one lives in society means that one is bound to observe certain conduct toward the others in society. The first element of such conduct is not to injure the interests of one another, and such interests should be considered rights; the second is that each person should bear his share of the labors and sacrifices incurred for defending society or its members. The individual whose conduct becomes such as to affect prejudicially the interests of others may be punished because at that point society has jurisdiction over such conduct. The fact that the individual has sovereignty over his own actions until those actions become prejudicial to the interests of another, however, means that society has no right to interfere in those actions until they become prejudicial to the interests of another. This assumes that all the people involved are adults and have the ordinary amount of understanding. Mill's assertion of individual liberty imposed two conditions upon the individual: the individual's conduct must not injure the interests of another, and each individual had to bear his or her share of the labors and sacrifices necessary to defend society or its members from injury or molestation. Society was justified in enforcing these two limits at all costs by the exaction of either legal or social penalties (Himmelfarb 92-93).

The individual is, as Mill notes, the person most interested in his or her own welfare. Mill admits that many people refuse to recognize the distinction between that part of a person's life that concerns only himself and that part which concerns society. They state that the conduct of one member of society clearly affects the conduct of others and that no one is entirely isolated. Even if he does not injure others directly, he does so by serving as an example. They would limit the actions of the individual and allow government to enforce morality because only in that way could government teach morality to others. Mill agrees that the mischief a person does to himself can affect others, and he finds that it is right to bring to bear moral disapprobation. Whenever there is a definite damage, the case moves out of the province of liberty and into that of morality or law. With reference to that which is merely contingent, however, society can afford to bear the inconvenience. Mill says that it is a worse example to bring force to bear and to thus do more damage directly than the individual is doing indirectly.

Carlyle was noted for writing sermons and in Past and Present uses the same approach, with a narrator who seems to be preaching to the reader. His intent is to raise questions about the past and thus to suggest changes in the present that will then shape the future. Carlyle also sees the actions of life in terms of a long timeline and finds foolish those who see only the immediate consequences. Personal freedom is to be prized, but those who substitute personal freedom for the greater good are mistaken. There are powers greater than the individual and even the individual nation, and offending those powers through actions that are counter to the greater good can lead to disaster, though it may take some time before this disaster manifests itself. As he states, those who offend the powers of Nature may not recognize what they have done but will suffer for it: "Properly it is the secret of all unhappy men and unhappy nations.

Had they known Nature's right truth, Nature's right truth would have made them free" (Carlyle Book I Chapter II).

Instead, as Carlyle says, those who fail to see this truth are enchanted and "stagger spell-bound, reeling on the brink of huge peril, because they were not wise enough" (Carlyle Book I Chapter II). He also notes that those who do not see disaster on the immediate horizon may believe that they have chosen rightly and that there are no untoward consequences, but they are mistaken. As he writes,

Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice, but an accidental one, here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death! (Carlyle Book I Chapter II)

With freedom there is responsibility, an idea mirrored in Mill and considered by Carlyle in terms of what may happen to the nation as a whole over time.

Carlyle never uses the term "greater good," but the idea is inherent in much of what he writes about how individuals exercise freedom and how they fail to see the long-term consequences. Given that the damage may not appear for a century or two, such consequences are not likely to affect the fortunes of the individual exercising his freedom. The consequences will fall on others and especially on the nation as a whole. What Carlyle says about the actions of government can apply to the actions of individuals as well. Carlyle says that Parliament and the Courts of Westminster are venerable to him but also have to be seen as made up of human beings who struggle with the good and the bad within them each day, "For a thousand years and more, Wisdom and faithful Valour, struggling amid much Folly and greedy Baseness, not without most sad distortions in the struggle, have built them up; and they are as we see" (Carlyle Book I Chapter II).