From the Bin: Mill on Coleridge on the State

Cleaning up some old notes, I stumble on this from the exemplar of all individualist/utilitarians, on a great individualist/utilitarian shortcoming: its failure to grasp the importance of the state as teacher. John Stuart Mill argues that this blindness is rooted in the attitude of the radical philosophers of the 18^th Century, who saw the world as governed by malign and restrictive forces. Mill speaks rather for a realm in which

…the habitual submission to law and government has been firmly and durably established, and yet the vigour and manliness of character which resisted its establishment has been … preserved. (121)

He says all this requires “a system of education, beginning with infancy and continued through life, of which, whatever else it might include, one main and incessant ingredient was restraining discipline.” (121)

A second requisite is “the existence, in some form or other, of the feeling of allegiance, or loyalty,” which may include loyalty to god or gods, to persons, to laws, ancient liberties, etc., or even “it may attach itself to the principles of individual freedom and political and social equality, as realized in institutions which as yet exist nowhere, or exist only in a rudimentary state.” (122-3)

A third requisite is “a strong and active principle of cohesion among the members of the same community or state.” (124)

Mill credits Samuel Taylor Coleridge with having rescued ideas of this sort form the corruptions of the 18^th Century.

My notes don’t list an exact source. I believe it is John Stuart Mill, Mill on Benthan and Coleridge, reprinted by Greenwood Press in 1980, though my edition was earlier.