ON LIBERTY
I went upstairs this morning to the shelves where I keep my favorite books and found a paperback copy of brittle pages and largely illegible handwritten notes in a work I had read as a freshman in college. On the first page I managed to make out that I had written “One tremendous book.” On the last page, “Amen.”
The book was John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. I had gone back to it because of David Brooks’ evocative panegyric, “Democracy as a Way of Life,” treating the Victorian philosopher as a “hero of democracy”
The book had been assigned in a Freshman Seminar at Hamilton College; we read it under the unrelenting eye of George Nesbit, the chair of the English Department. Only now, so many decades later, do I realize that reading it had been for me a life-shaping experience, continuing to the present when democracy and freedom are so imperiled both by scrofulous opponents and by well-intentioned advocates.
What gives this book its enduring greatness? In part, surely, it is its vision of freedom and its companion democracy as something more than the least bad of all the systems, or than a means of making decisions that increase individual wealth or the GDP. Liberty energizes, engages, helps us grow. Brooks quotes Mill’s biographer, Richard Reeves: “At the heart of his liberalism was a clearly and repeatedly articulated vision of a flourishing human life — self-improving, passionate, truth-seeking, engaged and colorful.”
I am grateful that I had the experience of reading this text at the beginning of my college years. Now, holding in my hands that battered, brittle paperback I hope that somewhere students today are having a similar life-shaping experience. Mill, however, I suspect, would hope for something more demanding. Brooks writes:
“Mill showed that real citizenship ... involves, at base, cultivating the ability to discern good from evil, developing the intellectual virtues required to separate the rigorous from the sloppy, living an adventurous life so that you are rooting yourself among and serving those who are completely unlike yourself.
The demands of democracy are clear — the elevation and transformation of your very self. If you are not transformed, you’re just skating by.”
Yes. Amen.
January 2018
I went upstairs this morning to the shelves where I keep my favorite books and found a paperback copy of brittle pages and largely illegible handwritten notes in a work I had read as a freshman in college. On the first page I managed to make out that I had written “One tremendous book.” On the last page, “Amen.”
The book was John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. I had gone back to it because of David Brooks’ evocative panegyric, “Democracy as a Way of Life,” treating the Victorian philosopher as a “hero of democracy”
The book had been assigned in a Freshman Seminar at Hamilton College; we read it under the unrelenting eye of George Nesbit, the chair of the English Department. Only now, so many decades later, do I realize that reading it had been for me a life-shaping experience, continuing to the present when democracy and freedom are so imperiled both by scrofulous opponents and by well-intentioned advocates.
What gives this book its enduring greatness? In part, surely, it is its vision of freedom and its companion democracy as something more than the least bad of all the systems, or than a means of making decisions that increase individual wealth or the GDP. Liberty energizes, engages, helps us grow. Brooks quotes Mill’s biographer, Richard Reeves: “At the heart of his liberalism was a clearly and repeatedly articulated vision of a flourishing human life — self-improving, passionate, truth-seeking, engaged and colorful.”
I am grateful that I had the experience of reading this text at the beginning of my college years. Now, holding in my hands that battered, brittle paperback I hope that somewhere students today are having a similar life-shaping experience. Mill, however, I suspect, would hope for something more demanding. Brooks writes:
“Mill showed that real citizenship ... involves, at base, cultivating the ability to discern good from evil, developing the intellectual virtues required to separate the rigorous from the sloppy, living an adventurous life so that you are rooting yourself among and serving those who are completely unlike yourself.
The demands of democracy are clear — the elevation and transformation of your very self. If you are not transformed, you’re just skating by.”
Yes. Amen.
January 2018
RSS Feed
