The article is here; the Introduction:
Surely, probably the most broadly learn and intently studied argument for the liberty of speech ever written seems in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Marking in 1959 the centennial of the essay’s publication, Isaiah Berlin opined that Mill’s “phrases are at the moment alive and related to our personal issues; whereas the works of James Mill, and of Buckle and Comte and Spencer, stay enormous, half-forgotten hulks within the river of nineteenth-century thought.” In accordance with Berlin:
Mill’s central propositions are usually not truisms, they aren’t in any respect self-evident…. They’re nonetheless assailed as a result of they’re nonetheless modern…. Mill regarded on the questions that puzzled him immediately, and never by way of spectacles supplied by any orthodoxy…. One of many signs of this type of three-dimensional, rounded, genuine high quality is that we really feel positive that we are able to inform the place he would have stood on the problems of our day…. Certainly that alone is a few proof of the permanence of the problems with which Mill dealt and the diploma of his perception into them. As a result of … his conception of man was deeper, and his imaginative and prescient of historical past and life wider and fewer easy than that of his utilitarian predecessors or liberal followers, he has emerged as a serious political thinker in our personal day.
Berlin’s “day” was the center of the 20 th century. My query is whether or not sixty-five years later he plausibly might have maintained Mill’s contemporaneity within the face of the assorted ways in which digital expertise has altered the dynamics of human perception formation and persuasion.
To deal with this query, I determine the distinctive considerations, assumptions, ideas, targets, and derivations which have given Mill’s argument its preeminence for a century and a half. Then I canvass the modifications wrought by digital expertise in how audio system formulate their messages and generate consideration to them, and the way audiences discover, obtain, and probably act on such messages. Lastly, I assess whether or not, within the mild of such modifications, On Liberty stays an instructive useful resource for enthusiastic about what Mill phrases “the freedom of thought and dialogue” and its cognate liberties.
And the concluding paragraphs:
Definitely, a utilitarian, particularly one whose measuring rod is “the everlasting pursuits of man as a progressive being,” must be forward-looking within the sense of not assuming that present patterns of perception formation that bear on societal well-being represent the inevitable future. If the corrigibility of perception is as necessary as Mill claims it’s, and if preserving alive the best of the open thoughts is a manner to assist revitalize the energetic holding of unfrozen opinions, and even simply protect what corrigibility of perception stays within the digital age, On Liberty has one thing to say to modern readers.
In that regard, regardless of six subsequent a long time of evolution within the processes of opinion formation, Isaiah Berlin’s centennial evaluation of On Liberty‘s sturdiness stays apt:
Mill’s defence of his place within the tract on Liberty isn’t, as has typically been identified, of the best mental high quality…. However, the interior citadel—the central thesis—has stood the take a look at. It might want elaboration or qualification, however it’s nonetheless the clearest, most candid, persuasive, and shifting exposition of the viewpoint of those that need an open and tolerant society. The rationale for this isn’t merely the honesty of Mill’s thoughts, or the ethical and mental appeal of his prose, however the truth that he’s saying one thing true and necessary about a number of the most basic traits and aspirations of human beings.
