John Stuart Mill's biographer Richard Reeves reminds us why Mill remains an important political thinker. Mill, the proto-liberal and philosophe engagé, had a famously rough start in life: joyless toil in the classics practically from birth until he broke down at age 20. No doubt this experience made him look askance at happiness, the study of which is currently a fad in psychology. Mill always preferred freedom to happiness.
Mill was passionate liberal who was also highly quotable, something in short supply these days. Among his better quotes are "Better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied" and the great "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative."
He was even a bit woolly headed in his instance that freedom must be conditioned by a moral life. But thus far Mill hasn't been pinned to the wall by our current polemics. He's too Victorian, his life in politics too genially unsuccessful, to be associated too closely with narrow definitions of liberalism. Thus, politicians (British ones, anyway) can call themselves "liberal socialists" or the more waggish "liberal conservative." When anybody asks what those terms mean, they can just hand them a copy of On Liberty and make a quick getaway.
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