John Stuart Mill's View Of Progress

John Stuart Mill views progress in two ways. The first is that progress sits a top of Mill’s hierarchy. In giving his five points for progress, as a result of the equality of women, Mill shows that progress is closely tied to the way progress would be defined by conservative philosophy such as William F. Buckley or Milton Friedman. Progress defined in this way can be easily connected to inevitability. As society has moved from agriculture to feudalism to mercantilism to capitalism in the modern sense society has moved away from war, towards democracy and towards general prosperity. This is definitively the result of progress at the hands of the state subscribing to more laissez faire approach, the kind Mill would seemingly support. Mill has the benefit of seeing human progress as American capitalism and Adam Smith begin to take root. I have the benefit of reading Mill at a time where human wealth has never been so great.

This is evidenced in On Liberty specifically in reference to the harm principle. Although I mentioned On the Subjection of Women first to make clear Mill’s ideas of an ideal society, the main idea of his first work is how that progress is achieved. In the practice of a society that only has laws to prevent the harm of others, Mill sees humans as flourishing in their natural state. The hampering of progress can be achieved through regulation that extends outside of the basic preservation of the harm principle. Although this can be seen as Mill viewing progress as being able to be controlled I believe Mill’s view of the natural human state of progress is more fundamental to his philosophy. This is not to say, if he were alive today, he would not advocate for state intervention to preserve some rights and advocate for the limitations of the state in other places but rather to suggest that Mill would see the world in 2018 as the by product of the natural man at