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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2009
John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty is motivated by a fervent concern for the rightful limits of social pressure on individuals, and it articulates what these limits should be. Yet Mill's conception of liberty undermines privacy and, in so doing, makes people more rather than less vulnerable to the social control Mill feared. Mill was led to this ironic position through two related misconceptions: an underestimation of the (rightful) effect of the opinions of others on our judgment and behavior and an overestimation of the efficacy of reason, when present, as the governing norm in belief assessment and behavior.
MILL'S CONCERN ABOUT SOCIAL TYRANNY
Mill is expressly concerned with informal or social pressures on individuals to make their lives conform to socially approved models. He notes that social pressures can be more pervasive, unrelenting, and crushing than legal threats and, as a result, do more damage to human personality.
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. […]
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