No Kings & No Crowds. Mill, Individuality, and Liberty

“The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement. But the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals.”
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859, Ch. III

London, 1859. Victorian Britain. The empire swelled, Parliament preened, and progress had the air of dogma. Steam, trade, and certainty seemed to have replaced sin and salvation. Into this confident dusk John Stuart Mill dropped a small bomb called On Liberty. No revolutionary, he nonetheless committed heresy against his own civilization.

Mill’s warning was simple and devastating: freedom does not die at the hands of tyrants—it evaporates in the minds of the comfortable crowds. “The will of the people,” he wrote, “practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority.” (On Liberty, 1859). Once power belongs to “the people,” its exercise feels innocent. Oppression returns, now smiling.

Raised to be Reason incarnate, Mill was the prodigy of Benthamite certainty. But he was deeply human. By twenty, the machine broke. “I seemed to have nothing left to live for,” he wrote in his Autobiography (1873). Poetry—Wordsworth’s “still, sad music of humanity”—restored what logic had withered. From that crisis came a new belief: liberty as moral education. “The free development of individuality,” he argued, “is one of the leading essentials of well-being.” (On Liberty, 1859). Freedom was apprenticeship in judgment. “He who knows only his own side of the case,” Mill added, “knows little of that.”

Mill feared societies that ceased to argue. The greatest enemy of freedom, he saw consensus—the smug quiet of moral certainty. “The spirit of improvement,” he warned, “is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people”, "but the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty," he recognized.

“The spirit of improvement,” he warned, “is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people”, "but the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty," he recognized.

In Victorian England, the threat Mill described often came cloaked in virtue. Moral reform societies—campaigns against alcohol, gambling, prostitution, or Sabbath-breaking—claimed to uplift the public but often did so by policing it. The impulse to improve others became a substitute for self-examination; moral energy turned outward, enforcing respectability through shame. Mill saw in these movements the seeds of a “tyranny of the majority,” where social pressure replaced legal coercion.

Today the forms have changed, but not the instinct. The digital age has birthed its own moral reformers—online communities that punish deviation and reward outrage. These “righteous epistemic bubbles,” as social psychologists might call them, resemble the temperance halls of the 1850s more than we admit: both seek purification through consensus. Mill would diagnose our polarization as the triumph of moral excitement over moral reasoning. For him, a healthy democracy depends on the reverse—on citizens disciplined enough to question their own side, to treat doubt not as weakness but as civic duty.

Our platforms reward heat, not light. They thrive on outrage, not inquiry. What Mill called “the despotism of custom”—the quiet coercion of opinion—has found its modern engine in algorithms that favor imitation over reflection. To echo, to denounce, to perform conviction: these are now the currencies of belonging. Mill warned against precisely this instinct—the desire to be seen as virtuous rather than to seek what is true.

Mill warned against precisely this instinct—the desire to be seen as virtuous rather than to seek what is true.

His remedy remains demanding: humility before judgment, patience before certainty. “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion,” he wrote, “mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he… in silencing mankind.” (On Liberty, 1859). Freedom, for Mill, required not the triumph of correct ideas but the ongoing contest between them.

Contemporary scholars have given Mill’s old warning new vocabulary. Legal theorist Cass R. Sunstein describes what he calls “information cascades”—moments when people suppress their doubts and imitate others because they fear social isolation more than error. “Once many people express a particular view,” Sunstein writes, “others tend to follow, not because they have truly rethought the issue, but because they assume the view must be right or fear the costs of dissent” (Why Societies Need Dissent, Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 12). Online, such cascades are amplified by algorithms that reward conformity and penalize hesitation, creating feedback loops of moral enthusiasm and collective silence.

Mill would have recognized the phenomenon instantly. He saw in public opinion a subtler tyranny than law—the compulsion to agree lest one be cast out of respectable company. In On Liberty (1859), he warned that “the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.” To him, what we now call “information cascades” were not primarily failures of technology or policy but of character: a quiet cowardice, the mind’s unwillingness to think without applause.

To him, what we now call “information cascades” were not primarily failures of technology or policy but of character: a quiet cowardice, the mind’s unwillingness to think without applause.

Writing in 1859, John Stuart Mill presented individuality as the living conscience of a free society. In On Liberty, he argued that progress depends on those willing to think against the current, insisting that “genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.” But Mill’s conception of liberty was not a plea for indulgence or isolation—it was a moral apprenticeship. Freedom, he believed, must be trained by reason. A belief untested by opposition, even if true, degenerates into “a dead dogma.” Genuine understanding arises only when one can defend a conviction against its critics. This is what Mill called the discipline of judgment: the slow education of conscience through argument.

A century later, Hannah Arendt confronted the abyss that opens when that discipline collapses. Reporting on Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), she saw not a fanatic but a functionary—“unable to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.” His evil was not passion but vacancy. “The longer one listened,” she observed, “the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think.” Eichmann’s mind had no inner witness, no private tribunal of conscience. In The Life of the Mind (1971), Arendt tried to name what had vanished. Thinking, she wrote, “is the silent dialogue of me and myself”—the “two-in-one” whose conversation is the essence of moral life. This inner dialogue is not mere solitude; it is the rehearsal of conscience, the space where judgment precedes obedience. When that inner exchange falls silent, the self becomes hollow, and any command can enter unopposed.

Mill and Arendt converge on a single, austere insight: freedom begins in the integrity of the inner life. Mill’s discipline of judgment—forcing one’s beliefs to stand trial before opposing reason—is the public counterpart to Arendt’s dialogue between self and self. Both saw tyranny as beginning not with censorship or force but with the quiet death of that interior argument, the surrender of the solitary courage to ask, is this right?

At this point, philosophy brushes against theology. Mill would have resisted the comparison, yet his defense of inner liberty finds an unexpected echo in Christian thought. In his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1874), St. John Henry Newman called conscience “the aboriginal Vicar of Christ”—a monarch and a prophet within. “I shall drink,” Newman wrote, “to the Pope if you please—still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.” Nearly a century later, the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes (1965) affirmed the same principle: “In the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself... His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God.” The Council added that human dignity requires acting “from a knowing and free choice... not under blind internal impulse nor from mere external pressure.”

Mill, Arendt, and the theologians all reject the same idol: the crowd. Each defends the person’s inner sovereignty against the seductions of consensus. The difference is one of horizon, not essence: Christianity orders liberty toward transcendent Love; Mill, toward immanent Truth. But they share a creed older than politics—that no conscience may be coerced, even for its own good, and that the silence of thought is the first symptom of servitude.

Mill died quietly in Avignon in 1873, leaving no movement, no disciples—only a discipline: think, listen, doubt, repeat. “The worth of a State,” he wrote, “in the long run is the worth of the individuals composing it.” That sentence remains the measure of every republic. Political institutions endure only as long as citizens are willing to exercise the difficult freedom of thought—the freedom that begins in solitude and matures in conversation.

“The worth of a State,” he wrote, “in the long run is the worth of the individuals composing it.” That sentence remains the measure of every republic. Political institutions endure only as long as citizens are willing to exercise the difficult freedom of thought—the freedom that begins in solitude and matures in conversation.

His challenge to us is simple and severe: can individuals stay honest amid applause? Can democracies defend truth without demanding unanimity? The test of our age is not whether we can silence lies, but whether we can still recognize truth without enforcing it.

No kings. No crowds. Only the arduous freedom of the thinking soul

No kings. No crowds. Only the arduous freedom of the thinking soul—and, if we are fortunate, the grace to make that soul a friend rather than a weapon. ◳