Everybody supports freedom—even authoritarians, though what they call freedom looks suspiciously like bondage. Rousseau begins The Social Contract with a flourish: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’ He ends up by trying to persuade us that the chains, the restraints of law and organized society, are necessary for true freedom. He wants us to believe that true freedom, the freedom essential for human existence, is not the happy-go-lucky freedom of Liberty Hall, do as you like, but the straight and narrow path of duty, of conformity to law. The universal popularity of the idea of freedom does not mean that everybody is really agreed about it. Plato, Rousseau, Hegel and his followers—they all talk of a true or genuine freedom, but they oppose this to Liberty Hall, to doing as you please.

The philosophical problems of liberty may be classified as those of definition, of justification and of distribution. They are so complex that there is a danger of being unable to see the wood for the trees. It may be helpful, therefore, to provide an aerial photograph of a large part of the wood, namely, the liberty of individual persons. But it is, of course, a photograph taken from an individual point of view, as Leibniz would have put it.

It might surprise someone, who knew only On Liberty, to hear J. S. Mill called the father of British socialism. That would sound a careless bid for a respectable pedigree, on a par with hailing King Canute as father of the British seaside holiday. Mill is passionate there about making the individual a protected species, not to be interfered with even for his own good, unless to prevent harm to others. He is so passionate that government seems at times to have no other task than to protect. The Principles of Political Economy, on the other hand, displays clear, if intermittent, socialist leanings. There too ‘there is a circle round every individual human being, which no government… ought to be permitted to overstep’ (PPE V.xi.2, p. 306). But, subject to this constraint, government is urged to do all the utilitarian good it can and some nasty worries for democratic socialists surface instructively. They centre on the social aspects of individuality and give rise to problems in what my title calls the Social Liberty Game. British socialism, with its Lib-Lab origins and tolerant respect for individual liberty, embodies a tension between the rights of each and the good of all, which makes the Principles a living part of its intellectual history.

But if you want to be free, you've got to be a prisoner. It's the condition of freedom—true freedom.

‘True freedom!’ Anthony repeated in the parody of a clerical voice. ‘I always love that kind of argument. The contrary of a thing isn't the contrary; oh, dear me, no! It's the thing itself, but as it truly is. Ask any die-hard what conservatism is; he'll tell you it's true socialism. And the brewer's trade papers; they're full of articles about the beauty of true temperance. Ordinary temperance is just gross refusal to drink; but true temperance, true temperance is something much more refined. True temperance is a bottle of claret with each meal and three double whiskies after dinner…

Professor Flew interprets my book Freedom and Liberation as a defence of a sort of radical authoritarianism disguised as a theory of freedom. He supposes me to be looking for a ‘Guardian élite’, a group of ‘new philosopher kings who will … create, and impose their own values upon, what Gibbs wants to honour as “a free society”’. In the title of his lecture Flew suggests that the message of the book might accurately be summed up in the Orwellian slogan ‘Freedom is Slavery’.

Judgments about the extent to which an individual is free are easily among the more intractable of the various raw materials which present themselves for philosophical processing. On the one hand, few of us have any qualms about making statements to the effect that Blue is more free than Red. Explicitly or otherwise, such claims are the commonplaces of most history textbooks and of much that passes before us in the news media. And yet, good evidence for the presence of a philosophical puzzle here is to be found in the familiar hesitation we experience when we first reflect on the grounds for such claims. Is it really the case that the average Russian is less free than an Englishman in a dole queue? Are we quite certain that a dirt farmer in the Appalachians enjoys greater personal liberty than the inmate of a well-appointed modern prison? Were citizens of classical Athens more free, or less free, than their counterparts in today's welfare states?

I want to begin this paper by recalling a once-lively school of English political and legal thinking which has fallen undeservedly into neglect. I refer to the pluralists, notably the lawyer F. W. Maitland, the religious scholar J. N. Figgis, and, early in their careers, the political theorists Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole. All were influenced by the writings of the German legal scholar Otto von Gierke, which Maitland as editor and translator had first introduced into England. The pluralists' concerns were at once political and legal; virtually alone among English writers in this century until the 1970s, their work avoided the barrenness that comes of treating political theory and jurisprudence as unrelated enterprises. I shall describe the problems that preoccupied them and some of their resultant theories, and also the way in which specifically legal doctrine was both a target of their criticism and an important element in their thinking.

Although it is primarily concerned with the value of liberty and the justification of compulsory education, what lies behind much of this paper is the question ‘;Why treat children like children?’ The fact is that we do not regard children as having the same rights, privileges and liberties as adults, and children may not be thought of as deserving the same degree of respect or consideration as their seniors. In the past this has led to some horrific states of affairs, and while matters have undoubtedly improved, it is still the case that most people accept what Graham Haydon describes as ‘;the assumption that one thing can go for children and quite another for adults’. One likely consequence of this, and an important example of the different treatment reserved for children is compulsory education. Illiterate and innumerate adults are not compelled to practise their letters or play with counters or watch prescribed television programmes. Even when, to quote Mill, we have an adult ‘;who shows rashness, obstinacy and self-conceit—who cannot live within moderate means—who cannot restrain himself from hurtful indulgencies—who pursues animal pleasures at the expense of those of feeling and intellect’, we do not subject him to character-building games or uplifting scripture readings, or initiate him into the mysteries of home economics, or read Shakespeare at him. But we compulsorily do all of this and more to children. Moreover, compulsory education, as we have it, is not something from which the young can gain remission. The law that requires ‘;every child of compulsory school age…to receive an efficient full-time education suitable to his age, ability, and aptitude’ effectively defines an approach where what counts is the arbitrariness of chronology, not standards or excellence.

Not long after the historian, Seeley, had defined ‘perfect liberty’ as ‘the absence of all government’, Oscar Wilde wrote that a man can be totally free even in that granite embodiment of governmental constraint, prison. Ten years after Mill's famous defence of civil freedoms, On Liberty, Richard Wagner declaimed:

I'll put up with everything—police, soldiers, muzzling of the press, limits on parliament… Freedom of the spiriti is the only thing for men to be proud of and which raises them above animals.

What I wish to do in this paper is to look at a part of John Stuart Mill's ‘one very simple principle’ for determining the limits of state intervention. This principle is, you will remember, that ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.’

Mill says that the object of his essay On Liberty is to defend a certain principle, which I will call the ‘liberty principle’, and will take to say the following: ‘It is permissible, in principle, for the state (through law) or society (through social pressure) to control the actions of individuals “only in respect to those actions of each, which concern the interest of other people”’. The liberty principle is a prescription of intermediate generality. Mill intends it to support more specific political prescriptions, such as liberty of conscience, of expressing and publishing opinions, of framing a plan of life to suit our own character, and of combination for any purpose not involving harm to others (p. 75). The liberty principle is more general than these prescriptions but less general than its possible moral foundations, such as utilitarianism. My concern will be with attempts to defend the liberty principle by showing it to be supported by an acceptable moral position.

There is a certain attitude which makes freedom the main business of political thought and civil liberty the aim of government. I shall use the word ‘liberalism’ to refer to this attitude, in the hope that established usage will condone my description. And I shall explore and criticize two aspects of liberal thought: first, the concept of freedom in which it is based; secondly, the attack upon what Mill (liberalism's most eloquent exponent) called the ‘despotism of custom’. My conclusions will be tentative; but I should like to suggest that, properly understood, freedom and custom may require each other. Moreover to describe them as opposites is to make it impossible to see how either could be valued by a rational being, or why any politician should concern himself with their support or propagation.

The word ‘freedom’ leads a double life. As a rallying cry in the mouths of politicians and publicists, it features in speech acts which inspire men to brave endeavours. Freedom or death are the proffered alternatives, and they are generally linked with fatiguing dispositions such as vigilance. As a philosophical concept, on the other hand, freedom is a territory in which battles are fought about such issues as positivity and negativity, virtue, determinism and the character of the will. There is remarkably little connection between these two lives. Philosophers do not seem to take much interest in courage, and politicians do not tarry to specify whether it is negative or positive liberty they are talking about.

There are at least three tolerably distinct views about the connections between liberty and property; two of these I shall discuss fairly briefly in order to get on to Mill's central claims about the relationship between property rights and freedom, but in conclusion I shall return to them to show how they bear on what Mill has to say.