On John Mill's Liberalism

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), a famous British philosopher and political thinker of the nineteenth century, was the main representative of the Liberalism. He was the son of James Mill, a famous British thinker. John Mill was born at a time when Industrial Bourgeois were just beginning to grasp the power of the state and the social ideology was faced with great changes. Enlightened and educated by his father and based on his own education and experience, Mill discarded the social philosophical thoughts about liberty, utility, democracy, etc that were held by the predecessors and the other bourgeois thinkers, and formed his own system of liberal thoughts.Before Mill' time, Jeremy Bentham was the main representative of the British Utilitarianism. This article focuses on Mill's Liberal Thoughts by comparing Mill's Liberalism with Bentham's Utilitarianism. Mill's Liberal Thoughts were mainly elaborated in his book "On Liberty". In his work "On Liberty", taking "the human improvement" as the central conception, Mill defined the connotation of liberty and elaborated the value of liberty for individual development and human progress. He advanced to divide individual liberty from social interference; that is the famous "Harm Principle". He thought that liberty included three realms: ideological argumentation liberty, individuality liberty and unity liberty, each of them having their relatively independent value. He laid an emphasis on the liberty of idea and speech, thinking that suppressing different opinions could harm and restrict human spiritual development and social progress. Besides, his works such as "Utilitarianism" also reflected the thoughts that supplemented and complemented Liberalism.The philosophical foundation of Mill's liberal thoughts was based on the reconstruction of Bentham's narrow utilitarianism. He realized that individual liberty was liable to lead to selfishness and couldn't necessarily promote overall well-being. Therefore, Mill took Utilitarianism as the standard of individual morals. But different from Bentham's, the motivation of Mill's Utilitarianism was social emotion, pursuing noble character in quality. However, in his ideological system, Liberalism and Utilitarianism did not contradict each other; on the contrary, they complemented each other, Liberalism paying attention to how to give full play to individual latent capacity, while Utilitarianism deals with how to improve individual morals.Although Liberalism may trace back to the seventeenth-century Britain, yet unlike the general Liberalism, especially the early Liberalism, Mill's Liberalism was restricted by many factors, such as the background of times and education, class stand, etc, so it was characterized by distinctive utility, conservation and compatibility. These three characteristics are different from those of many other liberalists.In terms of historic value and status, Mill's liberal thoughts possessed the progressive ideas of promoting the development of human ideological culture, but it was hard to avoid limitations of abstract discussion. Notwithstanding, looked at from the west liberal ideological history, Mill was in a key position of transforming from Classic Liberalism to Modern New Liberalism. He not only carried on and reformed Classic Liberalism, but also opened up a new direction for the development of Liberalism, leaving an abundant ideological heritage to the mankind.