John Stuart Mill regards individuality as the most essential of all human interests. For Mill, individuality is synonymous with freedom understood as self-determination – the primary condition and central ingredient of self-development. Accordingly, non-interference, or the absence of external coercion, is for him a vital prerequisite of the good life. It is a fundamental presupposition of his liberalism that individuals should not be interfered with unless their actions can be shown to harm the interests of others. However, Mill’s sociology and theory of history made him acutely aware of the inadequacy of the purely ‘negative’ conception of freedom as non-interference when addressing the problems of liberty in the context of the newly emerging mass society. This paper offers an interpretation of the connection between individuality and a more ‘positive’ conception of freedom as it arises in Mill’s critique of such a society. To grasp this connection, one must consider a distinction that Mill draws – though not always with full explicitness – between, on the one hand, social coercion and, on the other, the oppressive yet non-coercive pressures exerted by social conformity.
George Mousourakis (Mon,) studied this question.