For today’s Sunday Salon, I finished Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

Last year my friend Amanda pointed me at HumanEvents.com’s Top 10 Most Harmful Books. HumanEvents.com is a rabidly conservative group. I do not criticize them for making a list of books they don’t like; I’ve made my own. In fact, they have links to purchase the entire list from Amazon.com. But to me, this was like waving the red flag in front of the bull. I want to read these books after that.

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is on that list at number 7. Here’s what they wrote:

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in “a comfortable concentration camp”–a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that “Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

As if the only person to criticize something is a person who partook. Bah!

The bulk of my contact with feminism is with friends who bemoan the stereotypes of women in the media that somehow force women to try to achieve an unrealistic position. That is not Friedan’s complaint. Times have changed. Our culture has changed. There are significant challenges in women’s rights, but they are not necessarily the same challenges that Friedan saw hampering women in the 1940s and 1950s. The point being that I come from a different world, and putting myself back into the world of Leave It To Beaver is not possible. My reactions to this book will inevitably be that of a male child of the 1980s.

Friedan’s main thesis of the book is that the life of a housewife does not entail the kind of sense of purpose and intellectual fulfillment that most women require in order to be happy. After the pioneering strides of the women’s movement in the 1920s, she saw a retreat of women back to the home and role of housewife after World War II. Many felt this was the natural place for a woman.

Friedan saw this as aided and abetted by Freud’s theory of penis envy and functionalist psychology, which gave a scientific imprimatur to this retreat. I’d never heard of functionalism before. I know Freud had much more cachet years ago, but it seems that both had far more indirect influence than Friedan gives them. I’d simply call the retreat something of a backlash. It would have happened with Freud or functionalism. Of more direct influence is what Friedan calls the sex-directed educator: a turn to classes in home economics and women and marriage.

Still, Friedan notes that the first feminist movement that earned women the right to vote as well as changes in many laws faced far more opposition. By and large, according to Friedan, women became housewives of their own volition. They chose the path of their own depression. Perhaps as a reaction to a modern world. Perhaps as a reaction to the atrocities of World War II. But Friedan also identifies and identity crisis among women as well. The traditional role for boys forced them to decide what they wanted to be in life. The role of breadwinner was mostly foreordained, but that leaves a wide choice of professions from which boys had to choose. Women on the other hand didn’t really face that choice in large numbers prior to the war. Faced with risking unhappiness in a career, many women fell back on a traditional role that they believed would provide automatic fulfillment: wife and mother.

If there is any group that Friedan blames in The Feminine Mystique, it’s that of business and advertisers who manipulate women through well-planned campaigns in order to sell more product. In a telling and I think under-explored note toward the end of the chapter, Friedan relates a conversation with an advertising researcher:

That’s what I mean, I said. Why doesn’t the pie-mix ad tell the woman he could use the time saved to be an astronomer?

It wouldn’t be too difficult, he replied. A few images—the astronomer gets her man, the astronomer as the heroine, make it glamorous for a woman to be an astronomer … but no, he shrugged again. The client would be too frightened. He wants to sell pie mix. The woman has to want to stay in the kitchen.

The exchange shows the complicity of business perfectly. The pie mix business sole reason for existence is to make money through the selling of pie mix. It isn’t a social betterment agency. While we can change the rules of the game, the purpose of a business will not change. But it also makes me ask, Why isn’t anyone else running these ads? The Army and Marines make all sorts of ads to try to make joining the military sexy and desirable. They are pretty effective. I don’t see the Society for Women Engineers running similar ads. Ads that colleges and universities run, while populated by multi-cultural and gender-balanced students, are uniformly boring. I keep reading in the newspapers about shortages of suitably educated Americans in the sciences. So why aren’t the businesses that depend on a steady supply of new scientists and technicians making recruiting ads that sell the professions needed. Again, the few I see are boring as hell.

In addition to a lack of purpose and fulfillment, Friedan devotes a couple of chapters to ways housewives seek to fill that hole inside that the wind blows through. One method is through ever-expanding housework. She notes that most housework really isn’t a full time job, yet most housewives spend full time on it, and have some left over for the husband when he comes home. She sees this as an unconscious decision from women to create more busywork to fill their time because being a housewife is supposed to fill that need inside. In her view, it doesn’t. The extra housework simply leaves her feeling tired and still empty.

A second method Friedan saw housewives attempt to fill that hole is through sexual adventure. I personally have seen many people, women and men, do exactly this. So it’s no surprise that Friedan saw housewives illicit affairs as manifestations of the same tendency we still see. But it’s at this point that I really started seeing the book go off course. Friedan uses the opportunity to criticize a whole host of sexual practices she sees as harmful. In other words, she was a prude. Particularly galling to me is her description of homosexuals as forever childlike, afraid of age, grasping at youth in their in their continual search for reassurance in some sexual magic. She doesn’t think it a coincidence that homosexuals started coming out in greater numbers at the same time as the feminine mystique took hold. It might not be coincidence, but I doubt it’s causal. Friedan had in mind that smothering moms were creating through a Freudian mechanism greater numbers of gay men. This is where I roll my eyes. And she thought Freud too bound to his cultural prejudices.

After this, Friedan really jumps the rails for one more chapter, in which she blames housewives for a malaise in children during the fifties. Children without purpose or direction getting in more trouble than ever. Friedan’s position is that if women weren’t quite so doting that children would have to find their own way in the world, developing better identities of their own along the way. Instead, she sees them as acting out their mother’s unfulfilled phantasies. (Her spelling of the word weirds me out throughout the book.) Perhaps she’s right. I don’t have the social science background to say otherwise for sure. But my guess is that it’s far more related to a large increase in living standards and attached leisure time after the second World War. In other words, prior to 1940, living standards were much lower, and the United States was far more rural. Kids had extensive chores. They worked. They were kept occupied. Economically, the U.S. experienced a great leap in income for the median American following the war. It was now possible for women to stay at home doing housework, very different from rural homemaking during the 1800s. And it was possible for children to lounge around with little to occupy them.

But she brings it all back together for her final chapter: A New Life Plan for Women. Throughout the book she bemoans the trend for women to cut short their educations, frequently marrying at younger ages than in previous decades. She saw the lack of education as prime cause of the difficulties women had in making any sort of transition away from the house. He first recommendation is for women to imply stop buying in to the feminine mystique and make an effort to find fulfillment away from the role as housewife.

There are, of course, a number of practical problems involved in making a serious professional commitment. But somehow those problems only seem insurmountable a woman is still half-submerged in the false dilemmas and guilts of the feminine mystique—or when her desire for something more is only phantasy, and she is unwilling to make the necessary effort. Over and over, women told me that the crucial first step for them was simply to take the first trip to the alumnae employment agency, or to send for the application for teacher certification, or to make appointments with former job contacts in the city. It is amazing how many obstacles and rationalizations the feminine mystique can throw up to keep a woman from making that trip or writing that letter.

Friedan recommends education. If not earlier, then as soon as is practically possible. She believes that the more education focussed on making women productive members of society as opposed to housewives and as opposed to continuing education the better the chance that women will find fulfillment. She discourages women from dropping out and marrying early. She praises innovative programs at a few universities that allow for part-time and intensive education geared toward older women who still have children to care for as well as impatience with the slow pace of a normal four-year degree.

In order to appease traditionalists, I’ve often heard feminists argue that feminism is really arguing for a choice for women. Friedan really isn’t doing that. She’s does not argue for taking a woman’s choice to stay at home away from her. But she consistently argues throughout the The Feminine Mystique that full-time housewife is the wrong choice. It deprives women of their happiness and society of the contributions the best and the brightest could be making.

Either through the awareness created by Friedan and through economic pressure, the problem of the feminine mystique as Friedan described it is largely in the past. Of course, it’s been replaced by other pressures, perhaps more harmful and insidious. This book, even with warts, is hardly harmful unless one still clings to the idea that a woman’s place is in the home. Which I’m sure the panelists at HumanEvents.com still do.

Title: The feminine mystique
Author: Betty Friedan
Imprint / publisher: Dell
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 384 p. (includes notes and index)
Publication date: 1963 (9th printing Mar 1966)
Subject: Feminism — United States
Subject: Women — United States — Social conditions
Subject: Women — Psychology
Subject: United States — Social conditions — 1945-
LC classification: HQ1420 .F7

The Communist Manifesto is another work of political science that the conservative HumanEvents.com placed on their list of the most harmful books written. However, HumanEvents.com never made clear exactly who these works harm. Marx and Engels argue in this polemic that their Communist plan harms only the bourgeois , that small portion of society (which they put at 1/10 of the population) which owns the means of production. In their view, their revolution would help the proletariat, the working men, the wage laborers, who comprise the other 9/10ths of the world. If they are indeed correct, it would seem that HumanEvents.com is narrowly identifying itself with but a small portion of society. They would essentially be arguing that their list of books contains ideas that are harmful to them, and that their interests are more important than society’s interests. When that list is taken as a whole, I do believe that analysis holds. But in fact I also believe that Communism harms the very wage laborers it holds up as its beneficiaries.

So in reading The Communist Manifesto, I was in fact reading with one major goal in mind: I was looking for where Marx and Engels had gone wrong. I do not believe that these men who studied political economy intended to be the inspiration for the disastrous results that Communism produced. Alas, I shall probably have to wait until I’ve read Marx’s Capital and criticism of that work before I shall be able to fully understand the economic theory of Communism. The manifesto is not an explanation of the theory; it is more akin to the United States Declaration of Independence. It is a short version of the grievances of the working class, a description of the program they desire to institute, and a call to arms. But I’ve got enough economics underneath my belt that I shall attempt to analyze the piece anyway.

The manifesto begins with a description of the bourgeois and proletariat classes as Marx defines them along with a history of how these classes arose. Marx was a proponent of a theory he called historical materialism. Each economic system existed for a period of time after which it would implode on its own foundation spurred by a revolution of the class that would succeed previous ruling classes. History in his view consisted of warring classes of people. The final system that would emerge would be that of Communism, which would equalize everyone in the proletariat after which no further revolution would be necessary. It would be the ultimate version of what the French Revolution was supposed to be. Equality, liberty, and fraternity, both politically and economically.

Key to Marx’s analysis, at least at the time he authored this polemic, was that Communism really could not exist until capitalism first rose and built up the productive capacity of a nation in the ashes of its feudal past. Then, eventually the have-nots of the capitalist period would demand their fair share of the fruits of their labor.

Here, verbatim, is the ten point program of the Communists of the age (yay for public domain!), which is included at the end of the second chapter of the manifesto:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.

This chapter defends this program against the objections of bourgeois arguments. This is the chapter where Marx and Engels fail to grasp the implications and frailties of their proposals.

They defend the abolition of private property against the argument that it appropriates the results of hard work by declaring that the working man and the petty bourgeois (a class of small shopkeepers and similarly situated people that barely climb above wage laborer status) have no real property anyway. The only people with property are the oppressive capitalists. The problem with that argument is one of history. I don’t think Marx and Engels really realized that capitalism had but begun its journey. The division of labor which exploits the comparative advantage between people had not truly solidified. Even today, we are finding finer and finer ways to split our work to allow people to become very good at one extremely narrow job. As such, the working class at the time did not have large amounts of property. Today, they do. It’s still dwarfed by the property controlled by the rich.

To the argument that men will become lazy under a communist regime, the authors erect a straw man and then knock it down. That scarecrow is that all work will cease, and Marx and Engels note that under capitalism, the hardworking acquire nothing, and that the idle retain everything. Even if true, it hardly refutes the then theoretical effects produced by a lack of economic incentive in Communism. At best it merely equates them. If there is no personal benefit to working hard, why would anyone work harder than the next person. In fact, there’s an incentive to be a free rider, to work less proficiently at their labor and still reap the same benefit. The fact that laborers under capitalism did work hard even then is evidence that they were acquiring something, or at least they thought they would. It may have been too small for Marx and Engels to recognize or acknowledge, but it had to be there. While I am no believer of the idea of perfect rationality that is so often taught in today’s economics classes, the general phenomenon is indisputable to anyone with much intelligence. People generally act in their own interests. Under communism, the obligation to work must be maintained by force or implied force. The very word “obligation” implies this. Marx and Engels must have recognized this at some level, even if they believed that a Utopian communist state would transform that obligation into an incentive.

One set of problems with communism that they do not defend against is that which ails a centrally planned economy. Under capitalism, resources are shifted from producing one good to another in a quite messy but very effective way: prices. When a commodity is needed less, there will be less demand for that product, and it’s price will drop. Producers will see less profit from their reduced sales, and will limit production because of this. The reduced supply will raise prices. These two forces will find an equilibrium for a time. (A need for more of a good works similarly.) It subtly directs the correct level of production for that commodity. It is messy because as the prices adjust, all sorts of producers and consumers who had invested their resources based on old assumptions about how much was needed will be hurt. There is a transaction cost to repointing one’s capital.

Under communism, this mechanism either does not exist or is wildly warped so much as to be ineffective. The central planners must then be nearly omniscient to correctly allocate resources. Perhaps in a future day when Star Trek’s computers are powerful, it’s models perfect, and it’s resources so abundant as to nearly eliminate scarcity, that such a computer could manage accurately the massive chaotic system that a wide economy would be. But we aren’t in that perfect world. Not even close. By no means has capitalism’s allocation been ideal, or we would not have starving children in third world countries. Communist countries suffered from these problems more acutely and more chronically.

To my notice, Marx and Engels did not provide an counter to this argument in the manifesto. Perhaps Marx addressed it in other works. Perhaps they were not aware of the complexity.

The last part of the work is the humorous one to me. Marx and Engels list off various other regimes that fall under the banner of socialism, and pick them apart. Some for their lack of purity. Some for their lack of revolutionary zeal. In the end though, for tactical reasons they decline to oppose any political party that genuinely attempts to better the state of workers. Fighting amongst themselves could only be to the benefit of the oppressive bourgeois. Perhaps they hope that these other parties will grow to the realization of the rightness of communist proposals as they struggle and fail to transform capitalist society.

Pretty much just as much of the world’s communists grew to realization of the rightness of capitalism as they struggled and failed to transform anything into a true workers paradise. I still have to admire Marx and Engels for where their hearts were placed, even if they failed intellectually.

Title: The Communist manifesto
Author: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Imprint / publisher: Signet Classics / New American Library / Penguin Group
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 94 p.
Publication date: October 1998 (originally 1848)
ISBN-10: 0-451-52710-0
Subject: Communism
LC classification: HX39.5 .A5213 1998b

Nietzsche is certainly dense reading. I can agree with the conservatives who put this work on their list of most harmful works, simply because it is painful to read. I guess his 7th grade teacher didn’t value brevity and clarity like mine did. I highly recommend reading SparkNotes study guide to Beyond Good and Evil to help make sense of it. I did find that I needed to refer to the study guide less in the later chapters. I just got plain old lost though in the early chapters as to what the hell he was talking about.

And after having read the book, I can certainly see why HumanEvents.com wouldn’t like it.

An oft-scribbled bit of college-campus graffiti says: “‘God is dead’–Nietzsche” followed by “‘Nietzsche is dead’–God.” Nietzsche’s profession that “God is dead” appeared in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, but under-girded the basic theme of Beyond Good and Evil, which was published four years later. Here Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral “Will to Power,” and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them. “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation,” he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.

They are right about this work of Nietzsche’s. I wouldn’t claim it harmful for the same reason. Most of the time conservatives are up in arms about replacing Christian morals with moral relativism. But Nietzsche advocates a particular lack of morals at all. In other words, great men make their own rules, and no further justification is needed. They need not concern themselves with others, except insofar as their equals’ good view of them helps them. But for concern with lesser men? Not only is it not necessary, Nietzsche looked askance at anything but using them. It’s might makes right with a philosophical bent.

Still, I don’t think anyone will be convinced by Nietzsche except those who were already predisposed to thinking this way in the first place.

On The Prejudices Of Philosophers

Not much here except that Nietzsche writes obliquely that he doesn’t believe in absolute truth or dogma. He believed in looking at things from a number of different angles and coming to an overall understanding of matters without necessarily pinning down any unalterable theorems. Though considering how absolute he sounds in later chapters I kind of wonder.

An auspicious beginning.

The Free Spirit

Here Nietzsche expands on his thoughts about lack of absolute truth, including his contention that all moral systems have no basis in truth. He believed that philosophers were really working backward from their existing prejudices to create the moral rules that embody their already existing prejudices. He might have a point. Including his own moral rules, though he doesn’t really mentiont that.

Anyway, he also thinks that we ought to dispense with moral systems completely and simply base morals on our individual emotional or instinctual drives. He believed the first and foremose of those was the will to power. The power to control one’s own life, and as much of the world around us as practical. Whatever fits with that, I guess, is moral.

What is Religious

Nietzsche identifies most religions, particularly Christianity with asceticism. The denial of self. Although it has a certain power to it, he still thinks it is a religion where the weak have managed to rule the strong, but convincing the strong that they need to give up everything that makes themselves strong. In other words, the weak have levelled the playing field, and gotten the strong to do it voluntarily.

Epigrams and Interludes

A lot of short pithy sayings, invented by Nietzsche. Read the ones having to do with women. Here is where he started to fall down in my eyes. Where his general philosophy of no absolute truth started to veer into some pretty wacky stuff.

Natural History of Morals

Everything is geared toward herd morality. What is good for the herd isn’t necessarily good for the individual. And Nietzsche doesn’t have much love for the herd. Mixing races just breeds out the best qualities in each, according to him! One big European herd.

We Scholars

This is gangsta philosophy! Nietzsche makes himself a gansta rap album basically. Yo, Kant! You ain’t shit! Schopenhauer, you can’t bring it!.

Also, lots of stereotyping of the various European nationalities.

Oh, the people that overlook Nietzsche’s faults won’t see all this crap in there. They’ll see the parts where Nietzsche extols the virtues of a kind of skepticism that creates rather than tears down. Blah blah blah. Kind of obvious. Hey, good philosophers use constructive criticism. Who needs that wrapped up in all the Nietzschiean crap?

Our Virtues

Morals and virtues have rank. Rather than base morality on general principles, morality is created by individuals. Of course, better men have better moralities. How one tells who is better or not is simply whether or not the man has subjugated the reality around him or not.

And then Nietzsche goes into a rather long rant about women. Gee, what a way to prove that you have absolutely no insight into ranking things than by ranking half of the species at the very bottom and pretty completely attributing no good qualities to them other than their looks.

Peoples and Fatherlands

Here Nietzsche really gets into stereotyping the various nationalities of Europe. English bad. German, dull but good. Romans, good. While Nietzsche thinks mixing of races will produce a great herd, he does also believe it will give rise to lots of opportunity for great people to take over. However, he doesn’t have a lot of use for nationalistic chest-thumping.

What is Noble

Aristocracy is the crowning achievement of human society, according to Nietzsche. To make mankind better, we need to create better men who will rule over us. By separating from the slaves into an aristocratic class, the charactistics of greatness will be even further embedded in the class. The class will adapt to greatness by Lamarckian type of evolution of abilities.

In one sense, Nietzsche gives his opponents so very little to argue against him. His morality is self-justifying logically. At best, one can say that’s stupid to some of his philosophy.

But in other respects, he gives a lot of ammunition. He bases a lot of his philosophy on stereotypes and very bad theories of social development. If those don’t hold up, a lot of his philosophy doesn’t hold up. And since they don’t, his doesn’t.

I really like the artwork that Penguin chose to grace the cover, so I include here the piece The Path of Genius, by Wenzel Hablik. The version on the cover is but a small piece of the painting though.

Title: Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
Translator: R. J. Hollingdale
Publisher: Penguin
Series: Penguin Classics
Format: Paperback
Publication date: 2003 (previous editions of this translation published in 1973 and 1990)
Length: 240 p. (includes commentary and other notes)
ISBN-10: 0-14-044923-X
Subject: Ethics
Subject: Philosophy
LC classification: B3313.J43 E5 2003

I read the Cambridge University Press book, which actually contains three of John Stuart Mill’s works: On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, and Chapters on Socialism. For brevity’s sake, the title of this review only lists the first.

John Stuart Mill is one of the leading thinkers of the utilitarian movement in philosophy. The central tenet of that movement is that morality of actions is determined by their overall utility. Utility being the goodness of the consequences. What constituted goodness can be multiple things, but generally includes things like happiness and well-being. A well-known formulation of that is the greatest good for the greatest number of people, though the wording doesn’t exactly fit the originator’s (Bentham) intent.

On Liberty

John Stuart Mill lived in Victorian England, a environment that could be culturally stifling to those who don’t fit it’s fairly rigid strictures. On Liberty is partially pushback against that culture as well as an argument for individual liberty against the legislation of the state.

In the Introduction, Mill begins with a review of the history of liberty with respect to government. From when kings ruled by divine right to later years when government was at the sufferance of the governed. He notes that the reason for moving toward the latter is that the interests of the state are not necessarily those of its citizens. While congruent in places, they were not exact. Tyranny results when the interests of the governing do not align with the governed, and it was thought that there would be no need to protect against tyranny when democratic government was instituted. Mill disagrees with this, and argues that democracy is the government by the most numerous, and in a phrase I find particularly prescient, the most active part of the people. In other words, the interests of the people are not monolithic. One group may wish to put down another group. Mill reflects that the tyranny of the majority has come to be generally recognized as a danger in democracy.

But then Mills jumps the shark, so to speak. He goes off script. He expands his reprobation of the majority for not only legislating conformance, but also for using public opinion to fetter individuals. He believes that moral mandates from society also subjugate the individual, and that individuality needs additional protection.

Mill bases his arguments, not surprisingly, on utility rather than on any abstract rights. His argument rests on the idea that liberty is best for human well-being in a broad general sense and he intends his arguments to demonstrate this. Jumping ahead a bit, I think his arguments fall somewhat short. They end up being self-referential and subjective rather than objective measurements. Happiness and goodness aren’t particularly measurable, and particularly not in those days. So he paints himself into a corner with assertions that countries and times respecting liberty have a better well-being, because they are generally accepted as being better off. Which to me, circles back to his approbation of public opinion. How is the public determining that one particular society is better off any different than it’s determination that Victorian values are better. On the other hand, it’s not like Mills has a lot of hard data to go on here. But it would be nice had he recognized the circle in the argument and made an attempt to address it.

Mills thinks that there is but one legitimate reason for government or society intervening against the liberty of an individual: self-protection, individually or collectively. He proposes three areas of liberty that should be preserved from interference. First, that the freedom of thought (and being inseparable from it, the freedom to publish and express thoughts) should be inviolate. Second, that individuals should have the liberty of tastes and pursuits to do what they like, so long as the liberty does not harm others, even if it is foolish. And third, that individuals should have the freedom to unite for any purpose not involving harm to others.

In his second section, Mill justifies the requirement for absolute freedom of thought and expression not by an assertion that morality is relative. Instead, he believes that there are some things that are morally correct. But, being infallible beings, we will never be 100% certain what those truths are.

Thus the interests of utility are served by absolute freedom of thought and expression. If we have a marketplace of competing ideas, the constant battle for survival between the ideas will continually test correct ideas and make them stronger. In other words, if an idea is not the truth, the presence of competing thoughts which may contain better information will expose the lie. And society is enriched by learning better and better truths.

Mills also spends considerable ink on the counter-argument that some truths are so time-tested as to be certain. He thinks they cannot be protected for several reasons. One reason is that what seems to be correct for one age or society may not be correct for others. Another reason is that ideas that are not continually test are not deeply held. He gives by example certain older churches whose teachings are not held so much by converts as by the descendants of the originators. Having simply been taught the tenets of the church rather than coming to believe them through testing them, the ideas become muddled convenience. Adherents will ignore portions that aren’t convenient, or which do not match the tradition of the community. Over time, the differences become larger until the ideas to which the churchmen adhere hardly resemble their professed creed. Mills argues that being forced to defend time-tested ideas against challenges, whether thought of as frivolous or not, will bring about more deeply held knowledge of the truth.

In his third section, Mills write a paean to individuality and against custom. He thinks a strong, vibrant society is one in which eccentrics abound. Rather than bemoan wildness and going out of bounds, he celebrates it. Genius is only a product of more individuality. According to Mills, genius and progress can never come from completely following customs. Doing something new and great by definition is something that is not customary. Someone has to do something not ordinarily done. As an example, Mills proffers China, explaining how it has become stationary because of an extreme adherence to custom, that other countries have passed the once pre-eminent lands of the Far East.

Mills spends most of the fourth section delineating when it is appropriate for society to intervene. He writes about various things that may seem to be harming someone else, but which do not, for the purposes of society’s ability to punish. He argues that specific or risk of damage must occur, not merely a contingent injury. If no perceptible hurt is created, then there is no damage. For something that is merely inconvenience for the public at large, society should be able to bear the burden rather than the individual. On this argument, I have little difficulty.

But where Mills has the most difficulty in drawing up a cogent argument on the limits of the actions a society has over the individual. Remember, Mills is not arguing merely against state power, but also against social limits as well. A telling line is this, speaking of actions of another with which we disagree: We have a right to avoid it (though not to parade our avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. A person cannot express moral reprobation or do anything to make the other uncomfortable.

I have no problem with Mills general argument that societal pressure can be just as harmful as government action, it becomes much more difficult to draw a line in the sand. How shall an individual know when he is expressing his individual choices and when he has crossed the line to inappropriate pressure? Would he then be conforming to just another custom? Isn’t his stricture just another form of restricting individuality? With respect to non-state interference, I think Mills has not made a clear philosophy.

But then, philosophy is rarely clear.

Mills’ fifth section concerns some practical applications of his theories on liberty. He adds a few principles and applications here that are worth repeating, though I won’t go do so here. In some cases, I don’t think his view of the practical implications fits with his theoretical underpinnings. As is often the case with people, Mills finds ways to tweak situations to fit the theory as he would like, rather than apply the theory. I doubt he realized he was doing so. I don’t think this is a great failing of the theory.

I enjoyed the work for the most part. What I didn’t like wasn’t so much Mills’ positions as his writing style. One of these days, I’ll need to learn to read older writings without grimacing. I am addicted to modern, easy to read styles.

The Subjection Of Women

Mill attempts to do a very valiant thing in The Subjection Of Women, to argue that the customs and laws of England and Europe with regard to women were depriving them of greater well-being. By them Mill meant not just women, but also men. At the time, I’m sure his treatise was considered very learned, but in retrospect it doesn’t seem to accomplish his goal in my view.

In the style of the day, everything he attempts to make his point through logic. As in, state an assumption, then attempt to build that into a strong case through logic. But his assumptions are often very false. There’s a page or two he writes on how freeing women would result in less immoral sexual ways, for instance. In other words, since men are holding women down, the women are responding by being extra flirtatious and licentious because they have no outlet for their desire for freedom.

He also spends a number of pages writing an apologia for why women haven’t achieved as much as men in the fields where they are allowed. But rather than prove that women are the equal of men, it simply reverts the real known state to we don’t know.

On the other hand, he make one very cogent argument. That is that the utility of the women is greatly increased, to the point that it outweighs any minor inconvenience with regard to the men losing their prerogatives. Women’s lot improves far more than men’s lot could possibly decrease.

And I think he does a pretty good job of showing that there really isn’t any realistic reason why women should be held back. That logically speaking, that would only need be done if women really were better than men. If their skills are worse, there would be no point in restraining their opportunity, for they couldn’t take advantage of the opportunity.

Chapters On Socialism

Of the three works by Mill in this collection, I enjoyed reading this one the most. I think his ideas in On Liberty are of more importance and are more original, but Chapters On Socialism was concise and clear.

Chapters On Socialism was published after Mill’s death. Helen Taylor, Mill’s step-daughter, allowed them to be published despite lacking Mill’s normal editing procedure. Mill took great care in the phrasing he used. Since the manuscript was among his papers at his death, it’s assumed that he hadn’t yet written his second or third or further drafts. I wonder if that’s partially what makes it so readable compared to the other two works.

The chapters on socialism are: Introductory, Socialist objections to the present order of society, The socialist objections to the present order of society examined, The difficulties of Socialism, and The idea of private property not fixed but variable. In the second chapter, Mill started with some general socialist objections to problems with the then-current form of capitalism. But then he wrote something that scared me:

As I shall have ample opportunity in future chapters to state my own opinion on these topics, and on may others connected with and subordinate to them, I shall now, without further preamble, exhibit the opinions of distinguished Socialists on the present arrangements of society, in a selection of passages from their published writings. For the present I desire to be considered as a mere reporter of the opinions of others.

What follows are selections from Louis Blanc’s Organisation du Travail, Victor-Prosper Considérant’s La Destinée sociale, and Robert Owen’s The Book of the New Moral World. These passages are full of just plain flat out wrong assertions about capitalism. For instance, this objection by Considérant:

It robs society by the adulteration of products, pushed at the present day beyond all bounds. And in fact, if a hundred grocers establish themselves in a town where before there were only twenty, it is plain that people will not begin to consume five times as many groceries. Hereupon the hundred virtuous grocers have to dispute between them the profits which before were honestly made by the twenty; competition obliges them to make it up at the expense of the consumer, either by raising the prices as sometimes happens, or by adulterating the goods as always happens.

But as anyone familiar with microeconomics can tell you, this is not what would happen. Over and again, the objections assume monopoly control and an inability to substitute. In other words, they assume that behavior is inelastic. But people are remarkably adaptable and changeable in the face of changing prices. This is not just on the consumer side, but also on the supplier side. In this example, 100 grocers would not establish themselves. If they were plopped down all at once, fairly soon a number of them would quit being grocers and instead turn to other professions, or move to other cities where there isn’t such a glut of grocers. The situation of adulteration described in the example would occur whether there existed 100 grocers or 20. The incentive to cheat is the same. In fact, it’s greater when there are only twenty, as a larger number of participants in the market is likely to reduce the prices, meaning there’s less room for saving costs with adulterated products as the number of items sold is fewer per grocer. What prevents this adulteration in either case the the ability of the consumer to switch to the honest consumer. And again, with more grocers, the chances of finding an honest grocer through competition go up, not down.

But, Mill did state that he wanted to be considered merely a reporter. I was dearly afraid that because these objections were so far-fetched that Mill had been taken in with them. Luckily, in The socialist objections to the present order of society examined, it becomes clear that he did not. He recognized the assumption of a monopoly and points out the simplest truth that monopolies are hard to establish and maintain. Consistent monopoly power by those selling is wholly imaginary. Mill similarly ripped to shreds most of the other arguments against capitalism.

There are a couple of objections in which he found merit. One being that capitalism doesn’t have a complete solution for poverty. He recognized that capitalism wasn’t, in fact, a zero-sum enterprise. Capitalism doesn’t require the poor to spiral lower and lower in order for the rich to circle higher and higher. But neither is there any guarantee that through hard work and honest living a man can support himself and his family. In addition, many of those who are successful do so through accident of birth or luck. Mill agreed that this was morally objectionable, though to what extent I am unsure. It didn’t seem to me that his objection was particularly vehement.

Mill also examined a couple of socialist proposals as well, to see if they solved the objections to the then-present societal ills. He thought they might. But he also went further and examined the incentives inherent in socialist systems and concluded that few would step forward to volunteer to manage a socialist cooperative, since there is little incentive to do so and considerable risk and disincentive. In addition, he thought that socialist would require considerable moral and intellectual education to substitute for the lack of incentive. Education that simply didn’t exist at the time. He also gave an example of communal running of education being problematic. Since individuals would have no means of choosing a different education for their children, the ability to get the education they desired for them would be dependent on their influence with the collective. Mill concluded his examination by writing that he thought a socialist experiment worthwhile on a small scale, but that it would be impractical for a long time because the kind of education necessary wouldn’t be available.

The very last chapter I loved. In kind of a coda, he rejects the tendency of capitalists to paint property as inviolate. History was replete with things that had previously been considered property having been changed. Ranks in the military were no longer considered the property of the holder, to be bought, sold, or passed on. In previous times, property did not always come with a right of inheritance. New forms of property can be created and other forms can be destroyed, depending on the needs of the present society. Sometimes I wish this principle were better recognized by folks both for and against the idea of intellectual property.

Title: On liberty: with the subjection of women and chapters on socialism
Author: John Stuart Mill
Editor: Stefan Collini
Alternate Title: On liberty and other writings
Series: Cambridge texts in the history of political thought
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Format: Paperback
Publication date: 1989 (1995 reprint edition)
Length: xxxv, 289 p. (includes editorial material and index)
ISBN-10: 0-521-37917-2
Subject: Liberty
Subject: Women’s rights
Subject: Equality
Subject: Socialism
LC classification: JC585.M74 1989