Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 January 2010
Summary
IN On Liberty, John Stuart Mill saw clearly a problem whose importance contemporary liberals have forgotten. The following quotation from On Liberty will serve as a motto for this book.
… when society itself is the tyrant – society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it – its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough….
Mill saw that the social and cultural environment of a society can prevent its members from leading the best life possible just as surely as can repression by the state. To Mill, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, it seemed that stringent protection for freedom of expression would produce the necessary reforms to the cultural environment. To us, living at the end of the twentieth century, there is now much less reason to be optimistic about the efficacy of Mill's laissez-faire attitude toward the cultural environment. Expression in its various forms produces and sustains our cultural environment, and that environment is still, more than a century after Mill wrote, polluted with racist, sexist, classist, ableist, and heterosexist attitudes.
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- Information
- Liberalism, Equality, and Cultural Oppression , pp. vii - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998