P O L I T ICA L STU D IES: 2003 VO L 51, 404–428

Millian Radical Democracy: Education

for Freedom and Dilemmas of
Liberal Equality
Bruce Baum
University of British Columbia

This paper returns to J. S. Mill to draw out democratic conceptions of education and equality that
challenge still-current conceptions of intractable human inequalities. Mill acknowledges that indi-
viduals differ in abilities. Nonetheless, he develops a broad conception of ‘education for freedom’
and insists that only ‘wretched social arrangements’ prevent virtually all people from exercising
capacities for self-government in citizenship, marriage, and industry. In the same breath, he quali-
fies his democratic egalitarianism with reference to a sub-class of working people whose ‘low moral
qualities’ leave them unfit for such self-government. Modern liberal states largely dismiss Mill’s
more radical democratic impulse. Meanwhile, they reiterate and refine his exclusionary one
through new practices for constructing and managing inequalities – for example, IQ tests, educa-
tional ‘tracking’, and social science categories like the ‘underclass’. I reconsider this divided legacy
of Mill’s egalitarianism as a basis for rethinking the limits of today’s ‘meritocratic’ egalitarianism.

[A]ny education which aims at making human beings other than

machines, in the long run makes them claim to have the control of their
own actions (J. S. Mill, 1977b, p. 403).
This essay returns to the work of John Stuart Mill to draw out radical democratic
conceptions of education and equality that challenge still current conceptions of
intractable human inequalities. Mill acknowledges that individuals differ in abili-
ties in some ways. Nonetheless, he develops a broad conception of ‘education for
freedom’ and insists that only stultifying social arrangements prevent virtually all
people from acquiring the mental cultivation necessary for self-government in
domains of citizenship, marriage, and industry. In this way his theory of education
for freedom goes hand-in-hand with a democratic conception of equality. Ulti-
mately, his understanding of the educative character of all social relationships and
practices leads him beyond a revisionist liberal and social democratic concern to
provide universal quality schooling for citizens and to ameliorate degrading social
conditions that undermine human development to a radical democratic vision. Mill
seeks to democratize political, economic, and gender and family relations to achieve
maximal autonomy, democratic equality, and freedom among citizens. In the
same breath, he qualifies his democratic egalitarianism with reference to a
sub-class of working people whose ‘low moral qualities’ leave them unfit for such
self-government.
My argument is indebted in part to Martha Nussbaum’s recuperation of Aristotle’s
political thought for social democratic politics. Nussbaum’s contrast between liberal
and social democratic views of equality, however, does not fit Mill’s liberalism. Lib-

© Political Studies Association, 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
MILLIAN RADICAL DEMOCRACY 405

eralism, she says, ‘focuses above all on giving resources. ... In social democracy the
concern for equality is a concern for the equal capability to live well over a
complete life. Government activity provides comprehensive and not just supple-
mental support, operating with a partially comprehensive conception of the good’
(Nussbaum, 1990, p. 242). Mill, I explain, has aims similar to those of the
‘Aristotelian social democrat,’ with a partially comprehensive conception of the
good life that turns largely on his emphasis on freedom and individuality as essen-
tial conditions for human flourishing. He differs from social democrats mainly in
how he conceives and seeks to achieve shared goals, but also in presenting a dis-
tinct ideal of a maximally free and just society. Principally, social democrats like
Nussbaum generally accept the basic political economic structure of democratic
capitalist societies but propose comprehensive educational, regulatory, and social
welfare programs to temper the inequalities produced by capitalism, ensure
economic security for all, and establish substantial equality of opportunity. Mill, by
contrast, advances a radical democratic call to democratize economic and gender
and family relations as well as the state.
This radical democratic dimension of Mill’s thought, I contend, is a central though
generally overlooked part of his legacy. Mill was radical in the best sense of the
term: he understood that at the root of modern social and political life are human
beings equipped with common capacities for reasoning, judgment, initiative, delib-
eration, and self-dependence; and he worked as a theorist and activist for a real-
istic radical democratic ideal – a free, equal, non-sexist, and (basically) classless
democratic society that did not yet exist but that could and should be brought into
being. Building on what he regarded as the most important contributions of social-
ist thinkers of his time, Mill sought a democratically organized economy and society
that would transcend existing class and gendered divisions of freedom and power.
He summed up this future-oriented dimension of his thinking in a letter to Pasquale
Villari near the end of his life: ‘[My work] lies rather among anticipations of the
future than explorations of the past’ (28 February 1872, in Mill, 1972, p. 1873).1
My argument is that the radical democratic aspect of Mill’s thought continues to
provide a promising emancipatory vision for contemporary egalitarian democrats
and a powerful challenge to anti-egalitarians of all stripes. At a time when an
increasingly hegemonic neo-liberalism returns to a ‘classical’ liberal reliance on
limited state regulation of competitive markets and instructs us to accept the deep-
ening economic inequalities generated by globalizing capitalism as the unavoidable
cost of ‘freedom’ and progress, Mill’s deepest insights continue to offer a persua-
sive, alternative democratic liberalism. His notions of education for freedom and
democratic equality provide conceptual tools with which to revitalize egalitarian
claims and to envision more inclusive and democratic practices of freedom. Yet at
its margins, Mill’s thinking also has some loose affinities to contemporary neo-liberal
thinking which holds that the enormous material inequalities we see today are
largely a matter of rewards due to differences of merit and innate abilities and thus
compatible with liberal equality (Coole, 1996, p. 17; Bourdieu, 1998; Hutton and
Giddens, 2000). In the broadly neo-liberal view, today’s economic ‘winners’ (all
other things being equal) are generally just smarter, more creative, more diligent,
more willing to take risks, and exercise more initiative than the ‘losers’ (or mere
survivors) in a basically meritocratic global capitalism – that is, at least as it radi-
406 BRUCE BAUM

ates out from its base in the liberal democratic capitalist countries of Europe and
North America, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. In this spirit, modern liberal
states now largely ignore or dismiss Mill’s more radical democratic goals, offering
instead more attenuated commitments to equality that emphasize formal equality
of opportunity and rewards proportionate to merit. They offer more limited prac-
tices of economic freedom that rely on consumer choice within hierarchical capi-
talist structures at the expense of political economic democratization. In accordance
with these more constrained notions of equality and freedom, these liberal states
have typically reiterated and refined versions of Mill’s exclusionary move – his
(perhaps conditional) writing out of his radical democratic vision a sub-class of
working people plagued with ‘low moral qualities’. They have done so by creating
new techniques and practices of government, in Michel Foucault’s sense, for
constructing, reifying, and managing inequalities among their populations based
on new forms of social scientific knowledge about them – for example, ‘scientific’
management, ‘scientific racism’, IQ testing, educational tracking, and social science
categories like the ‘underclass’ (Foucault, 1991, pp. 100–4; Gordon, 1991, pp. 1–8,
14–36; Burchell, 1991). These new governmental practices enable liberal democ-
ratic capitalist states to insist on their commitments to equality while they justify
and sustain enormous inequalities by insisting that each person is being treated
according to her or his unique talents and abilities.
To explain how Mill’s liberalism both challenges and opens the door to these anti-
egalitarian contemporary liberal practices of government, I first discuss Mill’s
notions of education for freedom and democratic equality to indicate how these
notions challenge the class-structured and class-related inequalities of capitalist
democracies.2 I focus on those aspects of his educational theory that are directly
concerned with cultivating people’s capacities for self-government and forgo any
extended discussion of Mill’s more time-bound policy prescriptions for formal
schooling. Then I draw on Michel Foucault’s account of the political construction
of the category of ‘delinquents’ to show how Mill introduces a similar theoretical
and political move that arbitrarily limits his democratic egalitarianism (Foucault,
1979). Overall, I reconsider this tension in Mill’s egalitarianism as a basis for
rethinking egalitarian democratic possibilities against the limits of today’s ‘merito-
cratic’ egalitarianism. In short, the radical democratic aspect of Mill’s thought offers
support for a radical democratic politics that aims to empower all members of
society for freedom and equality. Meanwhile, scrutinizing the problematic charac-
ter of Mill’s classist exclusionary move in light of his radical egalitarianism offers a
critical perspective on the limitations of contemporary neo-liberalism’s constricted
meritocratic view of equality.

Education for Freedom

Mill addresses the practical issues of education for individual liberty and democra-
tic self-government in relation to his engagement with four movements for social
and political democratization in nineteenth century England and elsewhere: the
struggles to extend suffrage (exemplified by the English Reform Bills of 1832 and
1867); the women’s rights movement; the co-operative movement to democratize
industrial relations; and the movement to establish state support for, in Mill’s
MILLIAN RADICAL DEMOCRACY 407

phrase, ‘the education of the whole people’ (Mill, 1967a, p. 729). The latter move-
ment brought about the establishment of tax supported compulsory systems of
public education in France, Germany, England, the USA, the British dominions,
Japan, and elsewhere – though at different rates and in various forms in different
countries.3 In England during Mill’s lifetime the newly enfranchised middle classes
and the disenfranchised working class had little practical political education from
political participation and little formal schooling (Parry, 1994, p. 54). Not
surprisingly, then, the debates over democratic suffrage and popular political
democracy in particular were closely connected to debates about the limits and
possibilities of popular education.4 Mill pinned his own hopes for a comprehensive
program of democratic social, political, and economic reform largely on the degree
to which the masses could and would ultimately be educated for the freedom of
self-government.

Mill uses the phrase ‘educate for freedom’ in passing in the last chapter of On
Liberty; yet the notion plays a central role in his political theory. In the course of
discussing state regulation of the sale of ‘stimulants’, he supports a policy of licens-
ing sellers, but opposes any further restrictions. Limiting the number of beer and
spirit houses to limit access and occasions for temptation, he says, ‘is suited only
to a state of society in which the labouring classes are avowedly treated as chil-
dren or savages, and placed under an education of restraint, to fit them for future
admission to the privileges of freedom’ (Mill, 1977c, pp. 298–9). He adds: ‘This is
not the principle on which the labouring classes are professedly governed in any
free country; and no person who sets due value on freedom will give his adhesion
to their being so governed, unless after all efforts have been exhausted to educate
them for freedom and govern them as free men, and it has been definitely proved
that they can only be governed as children’ (1977c, p. 299). These remarks might
seem to indicate a thoroughgoing class bias in Mill’s thinking, but he maintains
that virtually every human being has the potential to be a free-thinking, auto-
nomous, self-governing, developed individual.

Mill conceives of freedom most basically as the capacity to ‘pursu[e] our own good
in our own way’ (1977c, p. 226). In addition, he maintains that people exercise
freedom not just as disconnected individuals who act independently of others, but
also as agents who share with others in shaping the power relationships and
systems of rules and constraints that govern their lives. ‘Freedom of action’ con-
sists of ‘the liberty of each [person] to govern his own conduct by his own feel-
ings of duty, and by such laws and social constraints as his conscience can subscribe
to’, and it entails that people have ‘influence in the regulation of their affairs’ (Mill,
1984c, pp. 336, 337). Thus, practices of freedom, in Mill’s view, encompass each
of two questions that Isaiah Berlin later associates with ‘negative’ and ‘positive’
senses of freedom, respectively: ‘What am I free to do or be?’ and ‘Who governs
me?’ (Berlin, 1969, p. 130; Baum, 2000, 22, 172–266).

Mill’s view of freedom underwrites his radical democratic vision and it is crucial to
grasp that for Mill the freedom ‘of pursuing our own good in our own way’ is
something quite distinct from merely being able to do as we please. Pursuing our
own good in our own way requires what he calls ‘mental freedom’, and what
philosophers now call autonomy: the capacity of persons to think for themselves
408 BRUCE BAUM

and to reflectively formulate and pursue their own aims and purposes (1974,
p. 841). In Mill’s terms, individuals are fully free with respect to their aims, desires,
and purposes only to the extent that they achieve individuality of character – that
is, when their expressed preferences and life plans ‘are the expression of [their]
own nature[s] as [they have] been developed and modified by [their] own culture’
(1977c, p. 264; Baum, 2000, pp. 25–34).
For Mill, this means that people do not naturally or inevitably attain individuality
and autonomy (or free agency). Rather, the capacity for free action is a potentiality
of virtually all human beings that is called forth or stifled according to the educa-
tive character of the social relationships and institutions situating them – that is,
the extent to which people’s social relationships develop or stifle their faculties of
reasoning, deliberation, imagination, judgment, and self-control. He says in Utili-
tarianism that the capacity for such ‘nobler feelings’ as the love of freedom and
independence ‘is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by
hostile influences, but mere want of sustenance’ (Mill, 1969b, p. 213). Yet he con-
tends that the only thing standing in the way of ‘almost all’ people attaining the
‘mental cultivation’ needed to be fully free and self-governing is ‘the present
wretched education, and wretched social arrangements’ (1969b, p. 215).
These developmental aspects of Mill’s conception of free agency, both psychologi-
cal and sociological, are basic to his theory of education for freedom. Following his
father, James Mill, John Stuart Mill builds his theory of the educative conditions
for freedom and social reform on the foundation of associationist psychology. In
his Autobiography he says that his father’s associationist doctrine of the formation
of human character by circumstances demonstrates the ‘unlimited possibility of
improving the moral and intellectual condition of mankind by education’ (1963a,
pp. 109, 111). He sees the malleability of human character and capacities posited
by associationism as integrally linked to possibilities for progressive, freedom-
supporting social and political reform.5
To address the interface between the psychological and sociological processes
involved in the formation of people’s characters and capacities, especially those
basic to autonomous agency, Mill sketches a new science of ‘ethology’ – the
‘Science of the Formation of Character’. The aim of ethology is to provide
systematic knowledge about how desired kinds of characters and capacities are
produced by particular forms of education in light of the ‘laws of the mind’ (1974,
p. 869). The science of ethology thereby corresponds to the ‘art’ (or practice) of
education. Mill speculates that ‘when Ethology shall be thus prepared, practical
education will be the mere transformation of those principles into a parallel sys-
tem of precepts’ (1974, p. 874).6 He insists that even though it is unavoidably an
‘imperfect’ science it promises significant practical guidance concerning how
various circumstances produce different kinds of character (1974, pp. 869–70).
Although Mill never produced his intended volume on ethology, he carries out
informal ethological analysis in many of his works, including Principles of Political
Economy, Considerations on Representative Government, England and Ireland, The Subjec-
tion of Women and his Autobiography. While he gives no explicit examples of etho-
logical laws, he does offer some suggestive remarks that can be reformulated as
ethological ‘laws’ with a direct bearing on his ideal of ‘education for freedom’. Two
MILLIAN RADICAL DEMOCRACY 409

of these are especially noteworthy. First, in a letter to Rev. Henry William Carr on
the question of ‘how to teach social science to the uneducated’, he says, ‘What the
poor as well as the rich require is not to be indoctrinated ... , but to be induced
and enabled to think for themselves’ (Letter, 7 January 1852, in Mill, 1972, p. 80).
Second, he says in Considerations on Representative Government, ‘Whatever invigorates
the faculties in however small a measure, creates an increased desire for their more
unimpeded exercise: and a popular education is a failure, if it educates the people
for any state but that which it will certainly induce them to desire, and most prob-
ably demand’ (1977b, p. 403).
While Mill never explicitly presents these propositions as ethological laws, he gives
them a comparable status in his theory of education. They serve as two guiding
precepts for organizing educative practices to foster people’s capacities as free
agents: (1) for people to develop mental freedom they must be encouraged to arrive
at conclusions through their own reasoning, rather than being inculcated with
received truths; and (2) to the degree that the social relationships situating people
exercise their cognitive faculties, they will tend to foster in them a continuing desire
to exercise and develop their faculties. Building upon these precepts, he conceives
of the educational conditions of freedom with regard to both formal education, or
schooling, and what he refers to in his 1867 inaugural address at St. Andrews as
education ‘in its largest acceptation’. The latter includes ‘even the indirect effects
produced on the character and on the human faculties, by things of which the
direct purposes are quite different; by laws, by the forms of government, by the
industrial arts, by modes of social life’; it consists of ‘whatever helps to shape
the human being – to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being
what he is not’ (1984b, 217).7

Formal Education
Concerning formal education, Mill outlines the crucial role of ‘elementary educa-
tion’ in Principles of Political Economy (1848–73). ‘There are certain primary elements
and means of knowledge’, he says, ‘which it is in the highest degree desirable that
all human beings born into the community should be able to acquire during child-
hood’ (1965, p. 948). He adds: ‘Instruction, when it really is such, does not ener-
vate, but strengthens as well as enlarges the active faculties: in whatever manner
acquired, its effect on the mind is favourable to the spirit of independence’ (1965,
p. 949). In ‘The Claims of Labour’ (1845), Mill links a basic education directly to
people’s capacities for self-government and for knowing their own interests. He
says that due to their lack of education English working people are so deficient
‘in the power of reasoning and calculation’ that they are ‘insensible to their own
direct personal interests’ (1973c, p. 202). He contrasts the English worker with
the Scottish peasant who, due to strong parish schools, ‘has been a reflecting, an
observing, and therefore naturally a self-governing, a moral, and a successful
human being – because he has been a reading and a discussing one’ (1973c,
p. 203). Schooling, he concludes, is crucial for ‘converting’ English workers ‘into
rational beings – beings capable of foresight, accessible to reasons and motives
addressed to their understanding; and therefore not governed by utterly senseless
modes of feeling and action’ (1973c, p. 204).
410 BRUCE BAUM

Mill explains his view of empowering formal education in two early articles in
which he distinguishes educational practices that merely fill students up with facts
from instruction that teaches them to think for themselves. He explains in an 1835
article he says, ‘One of these is the system of cram; the other is the system of cul-
tivating mental power. One proposes to stuff a child’s memory with the results
which have been got at by other people; the other aims at qualifying its mind to
get at results by its own observation, experience, and reflection’ (1986b, p. 786,
Mill’s emphasis). Mill elaborates his perspective in his 1832 essay, ‘On Genius’. The
chief limitation to most people achieving their potential for ‘genius’, he contends,
is their narrow educations. Modern schooling typically fails because it discourages
young people from thinking of anything other than what they are told, or what is
‘professed by other people’; it is ‘all cram’ as if the world already knows everything
(1963b, p. 337). As an alternative, he recommends the educational approach of
the ancient Greeks and Romans. This
consisted not in giving what is called knowledge, that is grinding down
other men’s ideas to a convenient size ... it was a series of exercises to
form the thinking faculty itself, that the mind, being active and vigor-
ous, might go forth and know ... With powers [of reasoning] thus formed,
and no possibility of parroting where there was scarcely anything to
parrot, what a man knew was his own, got at by his own senses or his
own reason; and every new acquisition strengthened the powers, by the
exercise of which it had been gained (1963b, 335–6).
Formal primary schooling, then, is an important means to cultivate people’s capac-
ities for individuality and free agency (or autonomy) – at least insofar as it engages
them as active participants in the learning process, and exercises their capacities
for reasoning and understanding.
Mill also addresses the role of higher education with respect to cultivating freedom
and civic responsibility. He favors a classic model of ‘liberal education’, including
an emphasis on logic, mathematics, classics, languages, history, analytical psychol-
ogy, and political economy (1984b, p. 220). In his view, the purpose of a univer-
sity education is not to teach people vocational skills, but rather to make them
‘capable and cultivated human beings’ (1984b, p. 218). Higher education should
cultivate people’s faculties of reasoning, judgment, observation, and imagination,
rather than training them to adopt particular conclusions (1973b, p. 196; 1973d,
p. 452; 1984a). These capacities are essential for people ‘to judge between con-
flicting opinions which are offered to us as vital truths’ and ‘to form a rational con-
viction on great questions’ of legislation and policy (1984a, p. 234).
For present purposes, the most pertinent feature of Mill’s view of higher educa-
tion is his abiding interest in cultivating people’s capacities for reasoning, judgment,
and imagination. His view of higher education also has some élitist aspects that
stem largely from his use of the élite English universities of the mid-nineteenth
century as his models. He favors opening higher education to all men and women
who demonstrate an aptitude for it; but he looks to higher education to form the
‘great minds’ that would authoritatively instruct the broader democratic public on
matters of public policy, and he upholds a sharp dichotomy between liberal and
vocational modes of education (1967b, p. 628; 1973b, 195, 201). As a result, his
MILLIAN RADICAL DEMOCRACY 411

educational thinking offers some support for a segmented education policy that
would largely restrict traditional liberal education – education for freedom in the
fullest sense – to some students (usually those from more economically advantaged
backgrounds) while relegating most students to narrower vocational training. Yet
this tendency in his thinking stands in some tension to the more persistent inclu-
sive tenor of his theory of education for freedom, especially his democratic egali-
tarian insistence that the mental cultivation necessary for people to become free,
responsible, self-governing agents can be made ‘the inheritance of every person in
the nation’ (1967a, p. 746).

Education in the ‘Larger Sense’

The radical democratic dimension of Mill’s educational thinking is most evident
in his understanding of education ‘in its largest acceptation’. His account of
education in the largest sense extends his theory of the kind of formal education
that strengthens people’s cognitive faculties. ‘Whatever can be learnt in schools
is important’, he says, ‘but not all important. The main branch of the education
of human beings is their habitual employment, which must be either their
individual vocation, or some matter of general concern’ (1977e, p. 169). He
explains,
when education, in ... its narrow sense, has done its best, and even to
enable it to do its best, an education of another sort is required, such as
schools cannot give. What is taught to a child at school will be of little
effect, if the circumstances which surround the grown man or woman
contradict the lesson. We may cultivate his understanding, but what if
he cannot employ it without becoming discontented with his position,
and disaffected to the whole order of things in which he is cast? Society
educates the poor, for good or for ill, by its conduct to them, even more
than by direct teaching (1973c, p. 204).
He reiterates this point in an 1846 newspaper article on Ireland in which he con-
siders proposals to ‘correct’ the habits and characters of the Irish peasants:
You will never change people unless you make themselves the instru-
ments, by opening to them an opportunity to work out for themselves
all the other changes. You will never change people but by changing the
external motives which act on them, and shape their way of life from
the cradle to the grave. Much has been said of popular education: but
education does not mean schools and school books; these are the most
valuable, but only as preparations and as auxiliaries. The real effective
education of a people is given them by the circumstances by which they
are surrounded ... the unintentional teaching of institutions and relations
(1986a, p. 955).
In other words, formal schooling does little to develop of people’s capacities for
free action unless it is complemented by freedom-supporting education in the
larger sense of the term. For Mill, this point has radically democratic implications.
It leads him to envision and work for democratic reform of major social institu-
tions – families, economic enterprises, and representative government – so that an
412 BRUCE BAUM

education for freedom in schools can be joined with an education for freedom in
‘the [broader] circumstances which surround the grown man or woman’.
The educational shortcoming of most existing social relationships and institutions,
in Mill’s view, is that they resemble the ‘system of cram’ that characterizes con-
stricted formal schooling. He asks in ‘On Genius’: ‘When he leaves school, does
not everything which a young person sees or hears conspire to tell him, that it is
not expected he shall think, but only that he shall profess no opinion on any subject
different from that professed by other people?’ (1963b, p. 337). This pressure to
merely ‘go along’ is found in relationships of command and obedience that subject
women to male dominance, laborers to employers, and all persons who live under
despotic governments. In each case paternalism is rationalized by the claim that
the governed, like young children, are unable to govern themselves. A similar
dynamic is present whenever individuals let others choose their life plans for them,
since such persons have need of no ‘other faculty than the ape-like one of
imitation’ (1977c, p. 262).
Mill further develops this line of analysis in The Subjection of Women. He views the
subjection of women by men as a product of male domination, custom, and tra-
dition. He acknowledges that many women ‘voluntarily’ accept traditional roles
and expectations, but he contends that the character of their educations calls into
question the degree to which their submission is really free and voluntary: ‘The
masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole
force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very
earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that
of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yield-
ing to the control of others’ (1984c, p. 271). That is, nearly everything that con-
stitutes the education of women works to stifle their capacities for self-control and
self-direction.
Mill employs a similar argument in Principles of Political Economy to refute the pre-
vailing theory that the work lives of labourers ‘should be regulated for them, not
by them’ (1965, p. 759, Mill’s emphasis). According to this theory, working people
‘should not be required or encouraged to think for themselves, or give to their own
reflection or forecast an influential voice in the determination of their destiny ...
[It is taken to be] the duty of the higher classes to think for them, and to take
responsibility for their lot’ (1965, p. 759). ‘The rich’, this theory holds, ‘should be
in loco parentis to the poor, guiding and restraining them like children. Of sponta-
neous action on their part there should be no need. They should be called on for
nothing but their day’s work, and to be moral and religious’ (1965, p. 759). This
kind of routinized paternalism comprises the largest part of the practical education
of most labouring men and women. Employers exercise their faculties by manag-
ing enterprises; yet the general run of laborers find little in their jobs that invigo-
rates their faculties or broadens their understandings. Thus, the hierarchical
structure of capitalist firms stifles working people’s capacities for self-government.
Critical reflection upon the repressive character of existing social relationships
enables Mill to envision freedom-supporting alternatives. He declares in Represen-
tative Government, ‘Between subjection to the will of others, and the virtues of self-
help and self-government, there is a natural incompatibility’ (1977b, p. 410).8 The
MILLIAN RADICAL DEMOCRACY 413

positive conclusion that he draws from this observation is that social and political
institutions tend to educate people for freedom to the degree that they are orga-
nized to treat the people situated within them as potentially autonomous agents
and to cultivate their capacities for autonomy. He says in his Principles:
It is ... of supreme importance that all classes of the community, down
to the lowest, should have much to do for themselves; that great a
demand should be made upon their intelligence and virtue as it is in any
respect equal to; that the government should not only leave as far as pos-
sible to their own faculties the conduct of whatever concerns them alone,
but should suffer them, or rather encourage them, to manage as many
as possible of their joint concerns by voluntary co-operation; since this
discussion and management of collective interests is the great school of
that public spirit, and the great source of intelligence of public affairs,
which are always regarded as the distinctive character of the public of
free countries (1965, p. 944).
For instance, trade union and political organizing by laboring men and women
around matters of collective interest tends ‘to awaken [their] public spirit ... and
to excite [their] thought and reflection’ (1965, pp. 763–4; see also 1977a, p. 469).
Likewise, while prevailing gender and family relations are ‘a school of despotism’,
the family can become a ‘real school of the virtues of freedom’ if it is ‘justly con-
stituted’ on the basis of equality between the sexes (1984c, pp. 294–5). He sees
analogous benefits to be gained from a policy that leaves adult members of society
completely free to do as they please in ‘self-regarding’ matters:
The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling,
mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making
a choice. ... He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his facul-
ties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee,
activity to gather material for decision, discrimination to decide, and ...
firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these
qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of
his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and
feeling is a large one (1977c, pp. 262–3).
In Mill’s view, then, people’s capacities for autonomy are cultivated to the extent
that they are empowered to direct the course of their own lives. This educative
effect is not limited to choices made by individuals acting alone; it also depends
upon democratized social and political relationships that involve people in mutual
self-government.

Democratic Equality
Mill’s view of education for freedom supports his commitment to democratic equal-
ity. He links directly the prospect of educating all persons for freedom with his
radical democratic aim to democratize political, economic, and gender and family
relations.9 Rather than seeing a necessary trade-off between freedom and equality,
like many other liberal thinkers (for example, Berlin, 1969, pp. liii–liv, 170; Rawls,
1971, p. 204), Mill sees the relationship between freedom and equality as a com-
414 BRUCE BAUM

plementary but conditional one. Accordingly, he challenges systematic social and

political inequalities that impose unequal restraints on the freedom of different
social groups, particularly women, generally, and members of the working class;
he strongly supports equality of educational opportunity as a condition of equal
freedom; and his conception of freedom includes the mutual freedom of democ-
ratic self-government.10 Mill argues against some people having unaccountable
‘power over others’ and maintains that the only ‘solid security’ for the freedom of
each person is ‘the equal freedom of the rest’ (1977a, p. 610).11
Overall, he develops a conception of democratic equality that includes but goes
beyond what Fred Berger calls his ‘baseline’ conception of equality. Mill accepts
certain inequalities as just – notably, some inequality of incomes and political
power – but only conditionally and only insofar as these inequalities are justified
by differences of merit and compatible with respect for the equal moral status of
all persons as free agents (Berger, 1984, p. 199).12 Thus, one of the grounds on
which he condemns as unjust the existing capitalist economic system, existing
restrictions of voting rights in England, and the subordinate status of women con-
cerns how these social arrangements systematically undermine the free and equal
status of many members of society. This baseline view of equality also leads him
to justify conditionally some inequalities with respect to political rights, economic
power, and the sexual division of labor without abandoning his basic commitment
to equal freedom. For instance, he rejects the claim that all adults are entitled
absolutely to a strictly ‘equal voice’ in their government, but he favors political
equality as an ultimate goal (Mill, 1977d, p. 323).13
What Berger’s ‘baseline’ interpretation misses is the distinctly democratic dimension
of Mill’s conception of equality.14 Mill’s commitment to the equal moral standing
of all persons as free agents leads beyond a distributive emphasis on a just distri-
bution of income, wealth, resources, and opportunities for desirable employment
careers. He also calls for progressively extending egalitarian relations of democra-
tic self-government in those institutional arrangements that govern peoples lives
and generate particular distributions of resources and opportunities in tandem with
progress in popular education.15 ‘The perfection both of social arrangements and
of practical morality’, he says, ‘would be, to secure to all persons complete inde-
pendence and freedom of action, subject to no restriction but that of not doing
injury to others: and the education which taught or the social institutions which
required them to exchange the control of their own actions for any amount of
comfort or affluence, or to renounce liberty for the sake of equality, would deprive
them of one of the most elevated characteristics of human nature’ (1965, 208–9).

Freedom, Democratic Equality, and

Economic Co-operation
To grasp how his conceptions of education for freedom and democratic equality
challenge the existing processes of class stratification and exclusion in capitalist
democracies, his argument to extend democratic self-government into ‘the indus-
trial department’ is pivotal. As we have seen, he argues in his Principles that the
relationship within capitalist firms between the employing (or capitalist) class and
the laboring classes expresses the theory of ‘dependence and protection’. Under
MILLIAN RADICAL DEMOCRACY 415

this scheme, ‘the many who do the work [are] mere servants under the command
of the one who supplies the funds’ (1965, pp. 759, 769). Mill maintains that with
the continued ‘improvement’ in the education available to the working classes and
the spread of ideas of equality, this kind of dependence increasingly becomes intol-
erable to workers:
The poor have come out of leading strings, and cannot any longer be
governed or treated like children. ... Modern nations will have to learn
the lesson, that the well-being of a people must exist by means of the
justice and self-government ... of individual citizens ...
... If the improvement [of human affairs] ... shall continue its course,
there can be little doubt that the status of hired labourers will gradually
tend to confine itself to the description of workpeople whose low moral
qualities render them unfit for anything more independent: and the rela-
tion of masters and workpeople will be gradually superseded by part-
nership ... : in some cases, association of the labourers with the capitalist;
in others, and perhaps finally in all, association of labourers among them-
selves (1965, pp. 767, 763, 769, Mill’s emphasis).
In short, improvements in education mean that almost all working people can be
governed and will increasingly demand to be governed in accordance with what
he calls the theory of self-dependence. This theory regards adult members of society
as self-governing beings.
Mill’s faith in the ability of working people to govern themselves, once they receive
the requisite education, leads him to promote a political economic ideal that resem-
bles worker self-managed, co-operative market socialism as the system most com-
patible with the equal freedom of all (Riley, 1994; Baum, 2000, chapter 7). The
usual relationship of dependence in capitalist enterprises between capitalists and
wage earners would be replaced by ‘the association of the labourers themselves on
terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their
operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves’
(1965, p. 775). The co-operative principle
would combine the freedom and independence of the individual, with
the moral, intellectual, and economical advantages of aggregate produc-
tion; and ... would realize, at least in the industrial department, the best
aspirations of the democratic spirit, by putting an end to the division of
society into the industrious and the idle, and effacing all social distinc-
tions but those fairly earned by personal services and exertions ... the
existing accumulations of capital might honestly ... become in the end
the joint property of all who participate in their productive employment
(1965, p. 793).
Mill adds that this change ‘would be the nearest approach to social justice, and the
most beneficial ordering of industrial affairs ... which it is possible at present to
foresee ... (assuming of course that both sexes participate equally in the govern-
ment of the association)’ (1965, p. 794). Since large enterprises will tend to dom-
inate modern societies, freeing people within their income-earning activities will
not be achieved by making them ‘able to do without one another’, but by enabling
416 BRUCE BAUM

them ‘to work with or for one another in relations not involving dependence’
(1965, p. 768). The co-operative principle, Mill says, would extend the ‘democra-
tic spirit’ into large enterprises to ‘all who participate in their productive employ-
ment’, so that each worker would gain a voice in managing the economic
institutions that govern her or his work life (1965, pp. 793, 768, 783–4).16
Similarly, he says in an 1864 speech on cooperation, ‘We want ... the co-operation
of all workers – such ought to be our object. We ought to proceed towards this
cautiously ... and never attempt to do an act which we feel will not be recom-
mended by principle’ (Mill, 1988, p. 8). His vision of the progress of cooperativism
here is firm but carefully measured: ‘How to succeed will be learned by degrees.
Co-operators will learn by practice. ... I do not mean that the industrial or com-
mercial operations of particular co-operative societies can or ought to be carried
out upon some gigantic scale. All such societies as this can do, is in its nature
limited’. Still, his ultimate political economic ideal ‘when this great improvement
in the mind of the people has taken place, – when all have become capable of co-
operation’, is of a democratic co-operativist future: ‘This is the millennium towards
which we should strive’ (1988, pp. 8–9).

Standing for Equality, Constructing Inequalities

For Mill, then, the liberal commitments to freedom and democratic equality lead
to a radical democratic (and basically democratic socialist) account of the ‘the
nearest [attainable] approach to social justice’.17 Freedom and democratic equality
would be most fully and widely achieved in modern societies when the class divi-
sion between capitalists who rule enterprises and workers who have no voice in
these enterprises is overcome by a system of co-operative production. For many
reasons this radical democratic vision has rarely been even vaguely approached in
democratic capitalist societies.18 My present concern is limited to one specific reason
for the eclipse of the radical democratic horizon of Mill’s thought within contem-
porary liberalism: the qualification that Mill includes in his co-operative political
economic ideal introduces an exclusionary social scientific and political logic that
has been refined and extended in an array of subsequent liberal practices of gov-
ernance. These practices have worked – ideologically and practically – to under-
mine the kind of substantive radical democratic liberal conceptions of education
for freedom and democratic equality that Mill himself (generally) favors.
Recall how Mill’s qualifies his call for an economy of worker self-managed demo-
cratic cooperatives. He says that as working people are increasingly educated for
freedom, the industrial order that makes workers dependent on the rule of others
‘will gradually tend to confine itself to the description of workpeople whose low
moral qualities render them unfit for anything more independent’ – that is, ‘those who
have too little understanding, too little virtue’, to be fully self-governing (1965,
pp. 769, 793, emphasis added). Mill makes the same point in his 1864 speech on
cooperation. ‘There is no fear’, he says, ‘that co-operation will spread faster than
the co-operators improve’ (1988, p. 8). He explains that ‘it is necessary to state
that this is a gradual process; for as long as there are any working people who are
dishonest – as long as there are any who are idle, who are intemperate, who are
MILLIAN RADICAL DEMOCRACY 417

spendthrifts – so long there will be working people who are only fit to be receivers
of wages’ (1988, p. 7).19 He adds:

so long as there are persons unworthy to take a part in great operations,

there must be persons [who are] receivers of wages. It is only when the
entire working class shall be as much improved as the best portion of
them now are that our [co-operativist] hopes will be realized, and the
whole mass of the people will practically adopt co-operation. ... It is only
in proportion as the lower grades rise to the level of the higher classes –
it is only in proportion as that great change takes place, that the advan-
tages of co-operation will be individually felt; and persons will be
ashamed of not taking their due share in the work (1988, p. 8).

Thus, freedom and the ‘independence of the individual’ would be better served for
most working people through democratic co-operative production (1965, p. 793).
Meanwhile, the remainder – that is, those with intractable ‘low moral qualities’ –
must remain subject to the undemocratic and dependent relations of production
that characterizes unreformed capitalism. Ideally, economic democracy would
become the rule within economic enterprises and capitalistic dependence would
become the exception.

In effect, Mill introduces a proto-underclass at the margins of his theory that prefig-
ures later notions of ‘underclasses’ in modern capitalist societies: a sub-class of
workers whose characters and incapacities will disqualify them from the ‘normal’
achievements of a maximally free, ‘improving’ society (1965, p. 769).20 As I will
explain shortly, given his theory of education for freedom, Mill leaves this subset
of workers with an ambiguous status with respect to his radical democratic vision
of social and political reform. Even so, the way that Mill conceives this proto-
underclass suggests the pattern of politically shaped ‘scientific’ social analysis that
Foucault finds exemplified in the specification of ‘delinquency’ in nineteenth
century France.

Foucault explains that although ‘delinquency’ is related to criminality (that is, law-
breaking) more generally, the discourse surrounding delinquency shows that it is
primarily specified in terms of the principle of the norm rather than that of the law.
While ordinary offenders are distinguished by their illegal acts, the delinquent ‘is
to be found in quasi-natural classes, each endowed with its own characteristics and
requiring a specific treatment’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 253). Delinquents are defined
more by what they supposedly are than by what they do; they are people with
‘dangerous proclivities’ who are resistant to ‘correction’ (Foucault, 1979, pp. 277,
252, 264–72).

Foucault contends that the use of new ‘scientific’ knowledge about criminals to
specify ‘delinquency’ in relation to the broader, more inchoate group of criminals
represents the great ‘success’ of the modern prison system. This is a political success
for those who seek to forestall radical criticism of the class structured inequalities
that produce criminality because the ‘process that constitutes delinquency as an
object of knowledge is one with the political operation that dissociates illegalities
and isolates delinquents from them’ (1979, p. 277). Insofar as the problems of
‘delinquents’ are seen as rooted in what they are, the concept of delinquency deflects
418 BRUCE BAUM

attention from a deeper sociological and political analysis of the social conditions
that marginalize the ‘delinquents’ along with the broader class of poor people,
including poor working people (1979, pp. 63, 278, 287). In fact, when the phe-
nomena of ‘delinquency’ was delineated in the mid-nineteenth century, just such
a socio-political analysis of criminality was articulated by French working class
newspapers, Fourierists, and anarchists. They explained ‘delinquency’ in terms of
oppressive social conditions rather than in terms of the intrinsic traits of the indi-
vidual criminal.21

Foucault’s analysis brings to light how politics is involved not just with respect to
how a society decides to control its ‘delinquents’, but also in the very practice of spec-
ifying ‘delinquency’.22 It thereby illuminates the political implications of Mill’s seem-
ingly ‘objective’ social scientific specification of a sub-class of recalcitrant workers.23
Working as a political economist and social philosopher, Mill employs his intellec-
tual authority to subdivide the working class into a larger sub-class of working
people who readily can be equipped for self-government and a smaller sub-set of
people who are prone to remain ill-suited for this freedom and responsibility.
He and other élite nineteenth century writers sometimes called these people the
‘dangerous classes’.24

Mill never explicitly theorizes his sub-class of ‘intemperate’ working people in a

manner comparable to how other nineteenth century thinkers specified delin-
quency or to how twentieth century social scientists have theorized the ‘under-
class’ concept. Indeed, he is never completely clear about whether he sees this
sub-class as plagued by ‘innate’ deficiencies or as just deeply hindered by especially
‘wretched social arrangements’. His educative convictions would seem to favor the
environmentalist view. Moreover, Mill was no disengaged ‘ivory tower’ economist
and political theorist. He was also a public moralist and political actor who sought
to influence public debate in England and encourage working class people’s efforts
at self-improvement.25 Accordingly, there is some reason to understand his remarks
about recalcitrant workers as, at least in part, a clarion call for working people to
‘improve’ themselves – that is, to overcome any residual idleness and intemper-
ance that might hold some of them back from becoming self-governing agents. For
Mill, the prospects of the emancipation of the working classes hinged on ‘the degree
to which they can be made into rational beings’ (1965, p. 763; Hollander, 1985,
pp. 888–907; Baum, 2000, chapters 4, 7).

These considerations suggest that Mill would maintain that even his sub-class of
‘problem’ working people would be amenable to the influence of a sustained
reform program of education for freedom and democratic political economic
reform.26 Nonetheless, given his claims about the virtually ‘unlimited possibility of
improving the moral and intellectual condition of mankind by education’ (1963a,
pp. 109, 111), his remarks about those working people with ‘low moral qualities’
– particularly in the Principles – are striking: they tend to mark these people as a
special problem, blame them for their plight, and indicate some ambivalence about
the prospects for inclusive, egalitarian radical democratic reform.27 Furthermore,
regardless of Mill’s precise intentions, his exclusionary language prefigures a much
more explicit and pervasive exclusionary logic through which liberal democratic
MILLIAN RADICAL DEMOCRACY 419

states have subsequently produced and managed class-structured economic inequalities

while asserting their commitments to the ‘equality of opportunity’.
This exclusionary logic has been manifest in subsequent liberal modes of gover-
nance in two interrelated ways. First, a number of subsequent social scientific
and liberal governmental practices have attempted to theoretically specify precisely
which members of society can be expected to develop ‘too little understanding, too
little virtue’, to share fully in individual liberty and democratic self-government:
scientific racism and eugenic theories; English Victorian theories of ‘the residuum’
– a class of unregenerate poor – and late twentieth century ‘underclass’ theories.28
Second, an array of closely related theories and social practices have been devel-
oped that have further refined and generalized this exclusionary logic. They have
done so – and in some cases continue to do so – by specifying criteria that yield
a seemingly more rigorous sorting of people in terms of supposed degrees of (innate
or achieved) ‘fitness’ for positions, power, authority, and self-government. These
practices include various forms of ‘intelligence’ and ‘scholastic aptitude’ testing,
such as IQ testing and standardized ‘achievement’ tests, and closely related prac-
tices of educational ‘tracking’ or ‘streaming’ that funnel some students towards
more lucrative university (professional-managerial) educations and others toward
more vocational and technically oriented educations.29 Educational mechanisms
like IQ testing, achievement tests, tracking, and streaming have been used vari-
ously with differing impacts among democratic capitalist countries, which have
developed their national education systems in distinct ways.30 Moreover, propo-
nents of IQ testing have often regarded it as offering a fair, meritocratic, and, thus,
‘democratic’ mode of educational selection that would replace forms of educational
selection and tracking based on inherited (and thus unearned) class positions
with selection based on ability (or ‘intelligence’) and educational achievement
(Sutherland, 1984, pp. 97–127; Wooldridge, 1995, pp. 164–200, 363–420). In their
overall impact, however, these practices have worked to propagate widely the view
that people differ significantly in innate cognitive abilities and that existing inequal-
ities in advanced capitalist democracies are due largely to differences in merit –
an effect that has gained renewed impetus from recent defenses of the efficacy of
IQ testing, particularly in the USA (Jacoby and Glauberman, 1995; Wooldridge,
1995, pp. 363–83). According to this view, equality of opportunity has been
largely achieved in these countries and the distribution of educational achieve-
ment, incomes, wealth, careers, power and authority, and success and failure
roughly corresponds to differences in innate ability and exertions (Bourdieu, 1998,
p. 42).
The new class-segmenting educational practices have worked in tandem with
similar ‘scientific’ refinements to processes of class-stratification in industrial rela-
tions and in the management of economic enterprises more generally: Taylorism
(Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theory of efficient labor relations) and related ‘scien-
tific management’ and ‘human relations’ management theories. Consequently, in
stark contrast to Mill’s vision of a gradual transition to economic democracy, con-
temporary capitalist democracies have generally adopted as fact the ideological
notion that managing economic enterprises requires a specialized kind of knowl-
edge that few people are able to attain (see Baum, n.d.).
420 BRUCE BAUM

Together, these various contemporary liberal governmental practices provide a the-

oretical rationale for a sharp retreat from the more radical democratic and egali-
tarian aspect of Millian liberalism in two respects. First, they confirm and refine
the idea, which is already present at the margin of Mill’s theory, that some people
are simply not equipped, perhaps by nature, for the kind of expansive education
for freedom that Mill himself recommends. Second, they replace Mill’s claim that
most members of society, including most members of the working class, can and
should be educated for self-government in democratically organized firms with the
view that only a relatively small and élite class of people have capacity to effec-
tively and efficiently manage economic enterprises. This amounts to a reversal of
Mill’s political economic ideal wherein most workers would eventually achieve the
status of self-governing worker-managers in democratic co-operatives (as well as
full citizens of democratic states) and only a few are left with the status of hired
laborers. In most contemporary capitalist economies only a relatively small number
of people are self-governing or relatively autonomous in significant aspects of their
work lives (for example, partners in law firms and medical practices; self-employed
persons; university professors; capitalists and senior executives) and the work lives
of the vast majority of working people (including most people who work for wages
and salaries) are characterized by dependence on the rule of others and limited
autonomy.31

Conclusion
For Mill, the liberal democratic commitment to the freedom of individuals ‘to
govern [their] own conduct by [their] own feelings of duty, and by such laws and
social constraints as [their] conscience can subscribe to’, once they have been
educated for freedom, has radical democratic implications. With respect to the orga-
nization of economic institutions in particular, Mill, as we have seen, looked
forward to a post-capitalist economy of democratic co-operatives as ‘the millen-
nium towards which we should strive’. This system would largely overcome the
standing class division between labor and capital.
My aim in this essay has not been to assess whether Mill’s particular model of a
democratic economy is workable under current circumstances. Instead, it has been
to reconsider the divided legacy of his egalitarianism as a way to highlight certain
limitations and mystifications in the egalitarian pretensions of today’s ‘meritocratic’
neo-liberalism. His notions of education for freedom, democratic equality, and a
maximally freedom-supporting post-capitalist co-operative economics extend
liberal principles in a radical democratic direction; yet his demarcation of a proto-
underclass anticipates later exclusionary liberal governmental practices that have
served to prematurely jettison the very idea of a more democratic and egalitarian ordering
of economic and educational institutions and practices.
These governmental practices (for example, ‘scientific management’, educational
tracking, ‘scientific’ racism, IQ testing, and ‘underclass’ theories) have achieved this
end in two interrelated ways. First, they have validated the dubious idea that exist-
ing democratic capitalism comes close to realizing ‘equality of opportunity’ and a
distribution of rewards according to merit. This enables governing élites to declare
that prevailing social institutions and policies effectively promote equal opportu-
MILLIAN RADICAL DEMOCRACY 421

nity and democratic equality while they maintain governmental practices that actu-
ally hide systemic class structured economic inequalities under a meritocratic
veneer. Second, the governmental practices in question also work to insulate the
meritocratic ideal itself from democratic critique.32 In short, these liberal govern-
mental practices reinforce the questionable view that once ‘democratic’ capitalism
is joined with a system of universal compulsory elementary and secondary school-
ing, the resulting inequalities of income and wealth, economic positions, and eco-
nomic power are the ‘natural’ expression of prior ‘inequalities’ among people in
talent, intelligence, initiative, and effort.33 According to this theory, the rich are
rich because, generally speaking, they possess greater talent, intellect, and inven-
tiveness and exert greater effort than most other people; middle-class and working
class people have earned their economic status, nothing more, nothing less; and
the ‘underclasses’ (variously conceived) have only their own moral, ‘racial’, cul-
tural, and/or intellectual ‘deficiencies’ to blame for their plight.
Despite Mill’s expectation that there remain (at least for the foreseeable future) a
sub-class with ‘too little understanding, or too little virtue’, to be capable of being
fully included in political and economic relationships of democratic equality and
democratic self-government, his own theory of education for freedom offers a more
optimistic take on this conclusion. It suggests that when certain people fail to
develop the ‘mental cultivation’ necessary for responsible democratic self-govern-
ment, this is typically due to bad (or at least ineffective) formal schooling and other
stultifying social conditions.34 Indeed, the undemocratic and inegalitarian charac-
ter of modern capitalist economies calls to mind the converse of Mill’s claim in
Representative Government with which I started this essay: any education – includ-
ing any educative social circumstances beyond schooling – that treats people as
machines rather than as free agents capable of self-determination tends to dimin-
ish their sense of efficacy for and expectations concerning practices of democratic
self-government. As the late Pierre Bourdieu has said, ‘A large part of social
suffering stems from the poverty of people’s relationship to the education
system, which not only shapes social destinies but also the image they have of their
destiny (which undoubtedly helps to explain what is called the passivity of the
dominated ...)’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 42).
If this argument is correct, then egalitarian democrats still have some grounds for
optimism concerning the possibility of building a more fully democratic society. To
approach this goal, however, a society would have to strive, following Mill’s more
persistent line of argument, to create broad systems of education that seek to
develop in all persons the capacities for autonomy and self-government.35 This
would require a decisive shift away from current tendencies to educate different
individuals according to their ‘scholastic aptitude’ as measured by standardized
tests, and away from what Doris Lessing calls the tendency to regard people’s
talents ‘as commodities with a value in the success-stakes’ (Lessing, [1962] 1981,
p. xv). For more immediate purposes and in a more modest social democratic vein,
Mill’s analysis also indicates the deficiency of proposals to reform popular school-
ing (that is, education in the narrower sense) that are isolated from any effort to
ameliorate broader inegalitarian social conditions that produce unequal educa-
tional outcomes between differently situated social groups and classes.36 In addi-
tion, his theory of education for freedom suggests compellingly that the task of
422 BRUCE BAUM

effectively educating all members of society for freedom and democratic equality
will inevitably be limited by the failure to achieve a more egalitarian, participatory,
and democratic economic system. These considerations pose serious practical obsta-
cles to a radical democratic vision such as Mill’s given the persistence of pervasive
social inequalities in democratic capitalist societies. Nonetheless, Mill’s notions of
education for freedom and democratic equality offer important theoretical
resources for those of us who continue to aspire to and work for a more substan-
tial and inclusion practice of democratic egalitarianism.
(Accepted: 8 January 2003)

About the Author

Bruce Baum, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, 1866 Main Mall,
Buchanan C472, Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1, Canada; email: bbaum@interchange.ubc.ca

Notes
Thank you to Wendy Donner and three anonymous reviewers for Political Studies for comments on earlier
versions of this article.
1 Mill’s radicalism can be usefully contrasted to that of his contemporary Karl Marx. Where Marx tends
to presume that almost all people are always already prepared to be equally self-governing with
respect to otherwise alienating forms of political and economic power in modern capitalist societies,
Mill is a more measured radical. He insists that people must be educated for self-government, and
he sees possibilities for majority tyranny and social conformism and a place for authority and author-
ities even in the most fully realized democratic society (Baum, 2000, chapters 2, 5–8). Summing
up how the influences of such disparate thinkers as Coleridge and the Saint-Simonians led him to
distinguish his own thinking from that of the utilitarian Philosophic Radicals, Mill once called for
‘not radicalism but neoradicalism’ (1963c, p. 312). This has led Bernard Semmel to speak of his
‘Coleridgean Neoradicalism’ (Semmel, 1998). Without denying Mill’s Coleridgean side, my charac-
terization of Mill’s radicalism is more in line with the late Richard Ashcraft’s emphasis on his radical
sociology of power and commitment to a form of democratic socialism (Ashcraft, 1998; see also
Sarvacy, 1984; Claeys, 1987; Morales, 1996).
2 A full account of exclusionary aspects of Mill’s political thought would have to address, in addition,
the Eurocentric and unduly rationalistic features of his notion of ‘rational conduct’ that went along
with his defense of British colonialism in India. It would also have to contend with Mill’s relation to
racist and neo-racist modes of thought and political practice. On the former, see Parekh, 1994; Robson,
1998; Mehta, 1999, pp. 97–114; Baum, 2000, pp. 36–43. On the latter, see Varouxakis, 1998;
Goldberg, 2000.
3 Hofstadter, 1966, chapter 13; Jones and Williamson, 1979, ‘History of Education’, pp. 42–54; Green,
1990.
4 During the Reform debates of 1867, conservative commentators like Robert Lowe warned that further
extensions of the franchise would degrade the franchise ‘to the level of those persons who have no
sense of decency or morality’ (Lowe, Speeches and Letters on Reform [1867], pp. 61–2, quoted in Briggs,
1965, p. 499). On the general state of British formal education in this period, see Sutherland, 1990.
5 Concerning association psychology, Mill explains that our more complex ideas and states of con-
sciousness are built up out of associations among more elementary impressions in relation to our
awareness of similarities, differences, conjunctions, and successions among our sensations (Mill, 1974,
pp. 852–3; Baum, 2000, pp. 105–11).
6 Much like the liberal pragmatist John Dewey after him, Mill was quite optimistic overall about the
potential of social science to identify the social conditions necessary to educate citizens for freedom.
See Ryan, 2001, 19–20.
7 Taken together, formal schooling and the educative effects of the various social and political rela-
tionships situating people comprise what Mill calls ‘all the powers of education’ (1977c, p. 282; Baum,
2000, chapter 4). For a comprehensive treatment of Mill’s view of education in a democratic society,
see Garforth, 1980.
8 Mill elaborates upon this point in a variety of contexts. In The Subjection of Women, for instance, he
says that for women to simply reject the idea that ‘all the wider subjects of thought and action ... are
MILLIAN RADICAL DEMOCRACY 423

men’s business, ... the mere consciousness a woman would then have of being a human being like
any other, entitled to pursue her own pursuits, ... would effect an immense expansion of the facul-
ties of women’ (1984c, p. 327). Mill is somewhat ambivalent, however, about the effects of despotic
government. In Representative Government he says that for ‘civilized’ societies even a ‘good despotism’
enervates the active faculties of its subjects (1977b, pp. 399–403). Yet he contends that ‘despotism
is a legitimate mode of government for barbarians, provided the end be their improvement’ (1977c,
p. 224; 1977b, pp. 567–77).
9 This is where Mill’s radical democratic concerns depart from the social democratic approach Nussbaum
favors. I do not mean to overdraw the contrast between radical democratic and social democratic
visions. For instance, if we trace social democracy back to Edward Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism,
which aims ultimately at a democratic socialist transformation of modern capitalist economies, we
find a radical democratic edge to social democratic aspirations. Still, social democracy, including Nuss-
baum’s version of it, has increasingly become a program of comprehensive welfare state regulation
of capitalist economies rather than a program for radical democratic transformation of capitalist soci-
eties. The question of whether this tendency has been due more to political expedience than to
matters of principle is beyond the scope of this paper. On the distinction between social democratic
and radical democratic perspectives, compare Nussbaum, 1990; Lummis, 1996.
10 Concerning his view of equal educational opportunity, see Mill, 1965, pp. 948–50; 1967b, pp. 622,
628; 1977c, pp. 301–2; and Baum, 2000, p. 211. Mill says relatively little about the state’s responsi-
bility to ensure that everyone has sufficient access to formal schooling beyond elementary education.
This is largely for the reason he gives in his posthumous Chapters on Socialism. He says, ‘we are still
only at the first stage of that movement for the education of the whole people’ (1967a, p. 729). Even
after the Education Act of 1870 elementary schools in England were still not free. The beginning of
a coherent national system of free, compulsory elementary and secondary education system in
England was established only with the 1902 Balfour Education Act. See Green, 1990, pp. 302–6;
Grendler, 2001, pp. 343–4.
11 In his second review of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, he remarks, ‘Equality may be either equal
freedom, or equal servitude’ (1977e, p. 159). In a letter to Arthur Helps he explains his commitment
to equality as follows: ‘As I look upon inequality as in itself always an evil, I do not agree with anyone
who would use the machinery of society for the purpose of promoting it. As much inequality as nec-
essarily arises from protecting all persons in the free use of their faculties of mind and body and in
enjoyment of what these can obtain for them, must be submitted to for the sake of the greater good’
(Letter to Arthur Helps [1847?], in Mill, 1972, p. 2002, Mill’s emphasis).
12 Berger summarizes Mill’s baseline conception of equality in terms of the following four points: ‘1.
Substantive inequalities of wealth, education, and power are prima facie wrong, and require justifi-
cation. 2. Substantive inequalities must not permit any to “go to the wall”; redistribution to provide
subsistence must be guaranteed. 3. Inequalities must not undermine the status of persons as equals
... 4. Only certain kinds of grounds serve to justify inequality – the inequality will make no one worse
off, or that is the result of rewarding according to desert’ (Berger, 1984, pp. 159–60, emphasis in the
original).
13 ‘The claims of different people to such power’, he says at one point, ‘differ as much as their qualifi-
cations for exercising it beneficially’ (1977d, p. 323).
14 Here I am slightly revising my own earlier account of Mill’s conception of equality (Baum, 2000,
pp. 63–5). There I follow Berger too closely, even though my interpretation does highlight Mill’s
construal of equality in terms of practices of democratic self-government. For a related analysis of
Mill’s egalitarianism, see Morales, 1996.
15 In this respect, Mill’s view of equality has affinities to Elizabeth Anderson’s notion of democratic
equality. Democratic equality, she says, entails that ‘Equals are not dominated by others; they do not
live at the mercy of others’ wills. This means that they govern their lives by their own wills, which
is freedom.’ She also says that ‘the primary subject of justice is the institutional arrangements that
generate people’s opportunities over time’ (Anderson, 1999, pp. 315, 309). Mill’s democratic social-
ist commitments, however, distinguish his view of democratic equality from Anderson’s. He seeks to
democratize the economic structures that produce economic inequalities whereas Anderson remains
focused largely on the distribution of resources and opportunities. See Ashcraft, 1998; Baum, 2000,
chapter 7.
16 After making his case for co-operative associations, he says: ‘I agree, then, with the Socialist
writers in their conception of the form which industrial operations tend to assume in the advance of
improvement; and I entirely share their opinion that the time is ripe for commencing this transfor-
mation, and that it should by all just and effectual means be aided and encouraged’ (1965, p. 794).
Mill relies largely on the self-organization of working people and ‘a kind of spontaneous process’
to bring about a post-capitalist co-operative economy. See Riley, 1996, pp. 39–71; Baum, 2000,
chapter 7.
424 BRUCE BAUM

17 In this regard, it is a mistake to see the historically conditional élitist elements of Mill’s democratic
theory in Representative Government as evidence that his democratic commitments are tenuous. Mill
shares with more recent participatory and radical democrats the view that the democratic character
of modern representative government is crucially dependent upon the extent to which the broader
society in which it is embedded is democratically organized. See Sarvacy, 1984; Ashcraft, 1998; Baum,
2000, chapter 8.
18 Something roughly in the spirit of Mill’s ideal, I think, can be found in the lineaments of Swedish
and Norwegian Social Democracy. Nussbaum notes that the Scandinavian approach to social welfare,
as formulated by theoreticians like Robert Erickson, includes attention to such things as the capac-
ity of citizens ‘to control and consciously direct (their) living conditions; that is, the individual’s level
of living will be an expression of his [or her] “scope of action” ’ (Erickson, quoted in Nussbaum, 1990,
p. 240).
19 In a slightly different transcription of this speech (published in The Reasoner, 1 May 1864), Mill wrote,
more ominously, ‘for as long as there are working people, there will also be the idle, the imprudent,
and the spendthrift, who will remain the receivers of wages’ (1988, p. 7, editor’s note). The tran-
scription of this passage that is privileged in Mill’s Collected Works, which I quoted above, was pub-
lished in The Co-operator, June 1864.
20 I am not suggesting that Mill actually conceived of his sub-class of working people as an underclass
in the contemporary sense. See Baum, n.d.
21 Society is at fault, they argued, ‘either because [it] is incapable of providing its fundamental needs,
or because it destroys or effaces in [the criminal] possibilities, aspirations or needs that later emerge
in crime’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 287). Mill himself was much influenced by French socialist theories of
this era.
22 Mill himself uses the concept of ‘delinquents’ in this way in the footnote to the 1867 and 1872 edi-
tions of his book, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. Responding to a critic of his argu-
ment in On Liberty that people should not be punished for their own good, he says that it is a
perversion of his doctrines to claim that he means ‘that children not be punished for their own good
... that parents, and even the magistrates, when dealing with that class of delinquents, are not entitled to
constitute themselves judges of the delinquents’ good ... . Did I not expressly leave open, as similar to the
case of children, that of adult communities which are still in the infantine stage of development?’
(1979, p. 459n, emphasis added).
23 It is significant that Mill makes this point in Principles of Political Economy, since he regards econom-
ics as the most ‘scientific’ of the social sciences. See Mill’s 1844 essay, ‘On the Definition of Political
Economy’ (Mill, 1967d).
24 Mill also refers in other writings to a part of the working class that has ‘low moral qualities’. For
instance, in his 1834 ‘Notes on the Newspapers’, he says that he as much as anyone detests, ‘the self-
ishness with which the demoralized and brutal part of the working population squander their earning
... leaving their families in want’ (1982, p. 234). Later, testifying to a Royal Commission on the Con-
tagious Disease Acts, in 1870, he refers to ‘the criminal and vicious classes, the dangerous classes’, in
response to a question about whether the Acts have had the effect of ‘raising the lowest and most
demoralised portion’ of the class ‘of common prostitutes’ (1984a, p. 366). And in The Subjection of
Women he discusses domestic violence against women by men of ‘the most naturally brutal and
morally uneducated part of the lower classes’ (1984c, p. 296). In these remarks he tends to consider
the ‘immoralities’ of these people in relation to circumstances that ‘render them immoral’ (1982,
p. 213, Mill’s emphasis).
25 I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer for Political Studies. On Mill’s career as a public moralist,
see Collini, 1991, chapter 4. Mill celebrates working class activities for self-improvement in his chapter
in the Principles, ‘On the Probable Futurity of the Labouring Classes’.
26 This interpretation finds support in Mill’s statement, quoted above, that ‘It is only when the
entire working class shall be as much improved as the best portion of them now are that our
[co-operativist] hopes will be realised, and the whole mass of the people will practically adopt
co-operation’ (1988, p. 8). In the report of Mill’s speech on co-operation published in The Reasoner,
he is quoted as follows: ‘We are looking forward to the time when the whole mass of the people shall
adopt the true principles of co-operation’ (quoted in Mill, 1988, p. 8, editor’s note). Further support
for this interpretation can be found in Samuel Hollander’s recounting of Mill’s analysis of the effects
of population pressures on the condition of workers and his hope for ‘universal improvement’ among
the working classes (Hollander, 1985, pp. 888–907, quoting Mill at p. 903). For a more critical view
of Mill on these matters, see Carlisle, 1991, chapter 3.
27 The past century and a half suggests that such ambivalence may have been (and may continue
to be) well warranted. The salient question, however, is whether it was warranted because such a
reform agenda is highly ambitious and politically contentious, or because it would have made
MILLIAN RADICAL DEMOCRACY 425

demands on people that exceed the capabilities of many of us (in terms of capacities for democratic
self-government).
28 To be clear concerning scientific racism, my point is that the exclusionary logic Mill deploys in his
specification of a proto-underclass as well as in his cultural defense of English colonialism prefigures
the kind of exclusionary logic operative in later forms of scientific racism and contemporary ‘neo-
racism’. This is so despite the ways in which Mill himself explicitly challenges racist thinking in his
time. See Varouxakis, 1998; Goldberg, 2000.
29 See Sutherland, 1984; Oakes, 1985; Hanson, 1993; Lemann, 1995; Wooldridge, 1995.
30 Sutherland, 1984, pp. 3, 283–90; Green, 1990; Grendler, 1995; Wooldridge, 1995, pp. 1–17, 402–20.
Among the North Atlantic democratic capitalist societies, for instance, the English national education
system remained perhaps the most deeply class structured through the twentieth century. This legacy
is exemplified in English secondary education by the persistence of what Green describes as its ‘anti-
quated system of gentry education in the public schools [which are actually exclusive private schools]
and the absence of normatively middle-class schooling such as has been achieved with the conti-
nental lycée and Realschule, and the American high school’ (Green, 1990, p. 313). At the same time,
due to the extreme class segmentation in English education, English élites between 1900 and 1940
effectively resisted the new, supposedly ‘meritocratic’ forms of educational selection represented by
IQ testing and competitive examinations (Sutherland, 1984, pp. 283–90).
31 What Mill said about the ‘restraints to freedom’ imposed by nineteenth century capitalism is still
largely true about contemporary capitalism: most workers have ‘little choice of occupation or freedom
of locomotion, [and] are practically dependent on fixed rules and on the will of others’ (1965,
p. 209). The situation of dependent caretakers, whose work involves child care, housework, and
elder care but who do not work for wages, poses a related challenge and one that Mill himself does
not address directly.
32 This is not to deny that the meritocratic ideal has occasionally been subjected to powerful critiques.
See Wooldridge, 1995, pp. 306–18.
33 Mill knew better. He maintains that under unreformed capitalism the distribution of the produce
between the rich and poor is ‘obviously unjust ... so slightly connected as it is with merit and demerit,
or even with exertion’ (Mill, 1967c, p. 444; see also 1967a, p. 714). On Mill’s view of distributive
justice, see Hollander, 1985, p. 782; Baum, 2000, pp. 213–19.
34 Another possibility is that some people are resistant to certain approaches to ‘liberal’ education, but
not to an education for freedom in its fundamentals. Perhaps what they require is an education that
more effectively hooks up to their life experiences. Mill himself considers this possibility in an article
on Ireland. After saying that intended lessons about industry, prudence, and respect for law will be
of little use in teaching the peasants ‘if everything which the peasant, throughout life, sees and hears,
tells him ... that he has nothing to gain by industry or prudence, and everything to lose by submit-
ting to the law’, he adds: ‘Nothing that you can say will alter the state of his mind, only something
that you can do. Make it his interest to be industrious and prudent, and engage his interest on the
side of the law’ (1986b, p. 955).
35 I am inclined to agree with Anderson, however, that within such a framework ‘[s]ome exceptions
would have to be made for those so severely mentally disabled or insane that they cannot function
as agents’ (Anderson, 1998, p. 331 n. 97).
36 Due to Mill’s ambivalence about the use of the state power to foster quality schooling for all (1965,
p. 950; 1977c, pp. 301–2), his specific policy prescriptions offer only limited guidance in this domain.
See Garforth, 1980, chapter 6; Hollander, 1985, pp. 724–9; Baum, 2000, 211–12.

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