THUS, THE FREQUENT NECESSITY OF A FASCIST INTERLUDE:

John Stuart Mill, Dead Thinker of the Year: The 19th century thinker still has much to teach us on liberty. (ROBERT D. KAPLAN | DECEMBER 2011, Foreign Policy)

Mill asserts, in On Liberty, and especially in Considerations on Representative Government, that while democratic government is surely to be preferred in theory, it is incredibly problematic in its particulars. This, of course, is part of Mill's larger exploration of liberty, and why ultimately the only justification a government has to curtail that liberty is when a person's behavior impinges on the rights of others. Despotism may work better in some instances, if only as a temporary measure, he writes; democracy is not suited for each and every society during significant periods of its development. I am crudely simplifying Mill, who is so clear while being so incredibly nuanced, and thus immensely readable.

"Progress includes Order," Mill writes in Considerations, "but Order does not include Progress." Tyranny may be the political building block of all human societies, but if they don't get beyond tyranny, the result is moral chaos and stagnation. Middle Eastern despots of our day too often supplied only Order; Asian ones have brought Progress, too. Thus China's rulers, who must retire at a certain point, who bring technical expertise to their rule, and who govern in a collegial style, are much to be preferred over the North African variety, to say nothing of those in Syria or Yemen. Yet even in those cases, the prospect of a collapse of central authority indicates that, pace Mill, there may be no alternative to some sort of dictatorship, at least in the very short term.

Mill's philosophy actually builds on that of his 17th-century compatriot, Thomas Hobbes, another thinker all too relevant for our times. Hobbes is often regarded as a preacher of doom and gloom. In fact, he wasn't. He stared into the abyss of anarchy and realized there was, indeed, a solution that could lead to order and progress. That solution was the state. Hobbes extols the moral benefits of fear and sees violent anarchy as the chief threat to society. For Hobbes -- best known for observing that the lives of men are "nasty, brutish, and short" -- fear of violent death is the cornerstone of enlightened self-interest. By establishing a state, men replace the fear of violent death with the fear that only those who break the law need face. So while Hobbes made the case for central authority, Mill built on him to help us understand how humanity must get beyond mere authority in order to erect a liberal regime.

Such concepts are sometimes difficult to grasp for today's urban middle class, which has long since lost any contact with man's natural condition. But the horrific violence of a disintegrating Iraq, or this year's fears of state collapse in places such as Yemen and Syria, have allowed many of us to imagine man's original state. In fact, as more and more nondemocratic systems find it harder and harder to survive in this age of instant electronic communications, Mill and Hobbes will top the dead thinkers list for years to come.

Posted by oj at December 3, 2011 7:25 AM
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