Almost exactly two hundred years ago, a twenty-year-old Englishman posed himself a pointed question: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” Something within him answered with an unmistakable “No!”, and this answer drove him into a lengthy, suicidal depression: “The whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down,” he would remember nearly fifty years later in his Autobiography. “I seemed to have nothing left to live for.”
While existential crises afflict many people on the cusp of adulthood, the particulars of this one are striking. How many twenty-year-olds attach all their prospects for joy and happiness to the project of changing the world’s “institutions and opinions”? But this young man was a unique case, a kind of human experiment, brought up to a greater degree than perhaps anyone else who ever lived to be an engine of social betterment.
Throughout his early life, John Stuart Mill was kept from playing with children his own age or conversing about trivial matters. He spent his days seated at a desk beside his father, the economist and political theorist James Mill, who directed his education while working on his own voluminous writings, with the aim of demonstrating “how much more than is commonly supposed may be taught, and well taught, in those early years which, in the common mode of instruction, are little better than wasted.”
By age seven, the younger Mill had read most of Plato’s dialogues in the original Greek. By eight, he had added “the whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Memorials of Socrates; some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian, and Isocrates’ Ad Demonicum and Ad Nicoclem.” He soon took up Latin and differential calculus.
“By age seven, the younger Mill had read most of Plato’s dialogues.”
While James Mill made every effort to impress upon his son the practical value of all that he learned, he made no effort to foster a love of learning or any sense that one might take pleasure in it. The elder Mill himself took very little pleasure in anything, which was ironic given his dedication to a philosophy that treated pleasure as the greatest possible good. “He would sometimes say, that if life were made what it might be, by good government and good education, it would be worth having,” John Stuart later wrote of his father. “But he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of that possibility.”
This sort of dour, joyless atmosphere is often associated (fairly or not) with religious upbringings, but the younger Mill also described himself as “one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it.” James Mill had studied for the ministry in his own youth, but by the time he was licensed to preach, he had already lost his faith. He set out to make a living as a writer and editor, at which point he fell under the powerful influence of the era’s most controversial public figure, Jeremy Bentham.
Bentham argued that all human acts should be judged by what he called the “principle of utility.” An action can be deemed good or bad solely on the basis of whether it tends to “augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.” In the political context, the “party whose interest is in question” is the community at large, and the purpose of government is to maximize the sum total of pleasure and minimize the sum total of pain among its members.
The utility principle led Bentham to positions that were radical for his age and surprisingly progressive even for our own. His great cause was criminal justice reform, limiting sentences to the minimum required for effective deterrence, which meant eliminating corporal and capital punishment. He opposed slavery and imperialism. He wrote (though never published) a defense of homosexuality, and generally argued that sexual relations between consenting adults tended to increase their own happiness with no harm to society, so that virtually any attempt to regulate sexual morality was unjust. He argued strongly for the full legal equality of women, and he insisted that the ability of nonhuman animals to experience pleasure and pain ought to include them in our moral calculus.
These views attracted a movement of followers devoted to reorganizing society along Benthamite lines, and James Mill was the most devoted among them. He served for many years as Bentham’s secretary and leading spokesperson, and he raised his son to carry on this work. At the same time, John Stuart’s education was itself a radical experiment in Benthamism, in which rational efficiency was prized at every turn.
For a time, it seemed to work. As a teenager, John Stuart Mill started a weekly reading group of young Benthamites, which he called the “Utilitarian Club,” making him the first person to apply this term to Bentham’s philosophy. In advancing the cause of utilitarianism, the young Mill found “what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world.” He spent several years working tirelessly toward this goal, until he was brought to a dramatic stop in 1826 by the mental collapse later described in his Autobiography.
Part of Mill’s problem was that this crisis seemed by its very nature to challenge Bentham’s assumptions. While elevating happiness as the sole moral good, utilitarianism can’t tell us anything about what will in fact make us happy, and this proves to be a much more difficult question than some people allow. Following our instinct on such matters often leads to catastrophic results; following reason does not do much better. More profoundly, many of us suspect that a life dedicated to seeking our own happiness would ultimately be an empty and, paradoxically, unhappy one. This is the conclusion that brought Mill’s life to a stop.
What finally brought some relief was a chance encounter with the memoirs of the French encyclopedist Jean-François Marmontel, which moved Mill to tears. “I was no longer hopeless,” he wrote of the experience. “I was not a stock or a stone.” Marmontel’s book was a piece of sentimental literature, rather than a philosophical argument, and Mill had picked it up “accidentally,” as a diversion. He took from these facts the lesson that happiness could not be approached self-consciously, as an end in itself. He still believed it rational to treat human happiness as the greatest possible good, but he did not believe that happiness itself could be attained by rational means.
“He did not believe that happiness itself could be attained by rational means.”
After these events, Mill came for the first time to place the “internal culture of the individual”—precisely the thing left out of his own education—among life’s central concerns. Having been raised squarely within an Enlightenment tradition that judged individuals entirely on the basis of externally observable behavior, he began to take up reactionary English Romantics such as Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, men who thought the great significance of a person’s life might rest in interior emotional events invisible to the larger world.
This experience echoed throughout his later writing, particularly in his most famous essay, On Liberty, in which Mill takes up the familiar Enlightenment problem of the circumstances under which a society can justly coerce its members and offers the now-classic liberal answer: “The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.” Starting from this negative limit, Mill maps out a positive “region of human liberty” that includes complete freedom in the “inward domain of consciousness”—thought and belief and, by extension, expression—as well as a broader freedom to “fram[e] the plan of our life to suit our own character.”
Mill’s essay is a foundational text of the liberal tradition, articulating the principle that government should stay out of citizens’ private affairs, but he was equally concerned with the power of informal social forces—what he called “the despotism of custom.” He recognized that every age was governed by custom, but he felt that the particular custom of his time encouraged a conformist mediocrity. For most of history, Mill wrote, “the individual was a power in himself; and if he had either great talents or a high social position, he was a considerable power.” In the democratic age, by contrast, “individuals are lost in the crowd.”
Treating individuals as components of an aggregate crowd is precisely the utilitarian way, but Mill recognized the approach’s limits even as he continued to advocate for utilitarian ethics. From the outset, Mill understood a fact about liberalism that remains true today: It is unmatched as a system for allowing people with vastly different conceptions of the good to live together peacefully, but it struggles to generate a conception of the good that people will find satisfying.
For his own conception of the good, Mill came to draw on the Romantic ideal of the energetic, great-souled individual who stands out from the crowd. His ultimate defense of this figure, however, remained thoroughly utilitarian. Each individual is the best judge of what actions will bring him happiness, and so the greatest-happiness principle requires the maximization of personal choice. When we allow ourselves to be shackled by custom, we limit our choices, and society as a whole loses out on the example of our experiment. Mill’s personal experience synthesizing the Enlightenment and Romantic traditions had taught him that arriving at truth often means “reconciling and combining opposites,” a process that occurs through “the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.” Mill saw free human choice and the contest of ideas as means of social progress.
Ever since Mill’s time, political and economic liberalism have been closely bound to empirical epistemology and utilitarian ethics, and these different schools of thought have reinforced each other in powerful ways.
Liberalism has largely justified itself on the basis of utility, boasting that it simply works better than any other system. For a long time, this argument seemed more than enough. Economic liberalism produced innovation, growth, and radical improvements to the quality of human life. Political liberalism delivered us more and more autonomy to pursue happiness in our own way, without imposing pre-existing visions of the good. Liberalism’s greatest proof was the simple fact that when given a choice, people tended to choose it over the alternatives.
It is said that only systems in crisis theorize about themselves. At the moment, technocratic liberalism is facing arguably the greatest crisis in its history. Liberalism has always dealt with external threats from rival frameworks, beginning with the entrenched powers in the Anglo-American world where it gained its first foothold, and it has faced many setbacks in its subsequent spread throughout the globe. Something quite different is happening now. Large numbers of people in the liberal west who were supposed to be the system’s prime beneficiaries are giving up on liberalism. What is a worldview long justified on utilitarian grounds to do when many of its own adherents have stopped believing that it works?
Many of liberalism’s champions treated post-liberalism’s initial rise as a perverse reaction to their own success. In this telling, a large sector of society (middle and upper class white men) had long flourished under a system of “liberalism for me, oppression for thee.” What these men had blindly understood as the just fruits of their own free enterprise was really the exploited labor of others. Some of these others lived on the other side of the world, suffering under explicitly illiberal regimes; some lived in the urban centers these men had abandoned, suffering under so-called liberal regimes that hypocritically denied them basic rights; and some slept in their very beds, raising their children and providing countless hours of unpaid domestic and emotional labor.
In this view, there is nothing particularly “broken” about twenty-first century liberalism. It continues to produce growth, innovation, and opportunity, but it does a marginally better job at distributing these goods equitably. Faced with what is objectively a more just social arrangement, those who benefited from injustice have now embraced an illiberal protectionist strongman who promises to return to them advantages they never deserved in the first place.
There is some truth to this story, but it is inconvenient truth, from the perspective of technocratic liberalism. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it is never in a person’s narrow self-interest to give up economic, political, social, or cultural power. Abandoning liberalism when it demands such a sacrifice is precisely what Benthamite theory would expect people to do.
Some political movements can credibly make this demand in the name of some larger ideal, but technocratic liberalism is simply not one of them. Larger ideals are just what technocratic liberalism tells us to do without. History has not been kind to the bloodless mathematics of the 2016 Clinton campaign, which wrote off large swathes of Donald Trump’s constituency as unpersuadable “deplorables” while dividing the rest of the population into interest groups to be secured in piecemeal fashion. But it is difficult to see what alternative they had, given this rhetorical limitation.
“Larger ideals are just what technocratic liberalism tells us to do without.”
As it happens, this strategy earned Clinton a majority of the popular vote, and it might well have earned her the White House, absent a number of arguably unrelated campaign missteps. But 2024 seems to have put the approach to bed. By making Trump’s threat to democracy the centerpiece of their campaign, Biden and Harris effectively put technocratic liberalism itself on the ballot, and the results were not kind to it.
As Democrats have attempted to regroup from this loss, a new strategy has emerged, one that acknowledges that liberalism has not been “working,” but doubles down on the power of technocratic efficiency. In the pages of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s best-selling book Abundance, the posts of Matt Yglesias’s Substack Slow Boring, and the campaign speeches of Josh Shapiro and other 2028 hopefuls, the argument sounds: Well-intentioned but misguided and fundamentally illiberal progressive policies have stifled liberalism’s natural tendency to produce growth and innovation. Trumpism arose as a response to an artificial scarcity; to defeat Trumpism, liberalism simply needs to return us to the promise of abundance.
The great appeal of abundance liberalism is that it promises to attract Trump voters without betraying the larger progressive project of social and economic equality that seems to run against these voters’ interest. Abundance liberalism says that we can generate enough growth in absolute terms to keep everyone happy, even as we ensure that the proportional share of this growth is more fairly distributed. In the process, liberalism can do what it has always done at its best: Work well enough in practical terms to put theoretical questions to rest.
Abundance liberalism’s left-wing critics argue that inequality rather than scarcity is the great economic problem of the age. The goods that middle class white men used to enjoy are not going to China or immigrants or women of color or some other Trumpist boogeyman, but to a tiny number of (white male) billionaires now on their way to becoming trillionaires, and pro-growth abundance policies will only make this problem worse. In this view, it already is in the narrow self-interest of most Trump voters to support progressive policies. They just don’t recognize it. But it is a foundational liberal principle that people get to determine their own self-interest, and so far Trump voters don’t seem to agree.
Still, let’s presume that some combination of deregulation, YIMBYism, and technological investment could bring about sufficient growth and innovation to vastly improve the material condition of every American man, woman, and child. The question that John Stuart Mill’s two-hundred-year-old example raises is whether even this will be enough.
Klein and Thompson begin their book with a hopeful picture of the world that abundance policies promise us by the year 2050. The reader is asked to imagine waking up in perfect comfort, wrapped in a “cocoon” of clean and cheap energy and looking out the window, where “an autonomous drone is dropping off the latest shipment of star pills,” pharmaceutical cures for every imaginable physical and psychological complaint. Soon the reader’s embedded “micro-earpiece” announces a “voice text” from a friend who is on a weekend vacation, having hopped the two-hour flight from New York to London.
“I don’t want to see armies of drones when I look out the window.”
The authors’ chief worry in putting forward this vision is that we won’t believe such good fortune possible. To me, the future they describe seems on the contrary entirely plausible. The trouble is that it terrifies and disgusts me. I don’t want to see armies of drones when I look out the window. I don’t want to be continuously distracted from the world in front of me by a pinging earpiece. I don’t want every instance of my waking and sleeping life mediated by technology, no matter how smoothly functioning and environmentally friendly. The imagined reader in this tableau seems to live entirely alone and doesn’t even set eyes on another human being. No doubt there’s a star pill you can take to alleviate the sense of isolation resulting from this condition, but it hardly seems like an ideal to be working toward.
Of course Klein and Thompson are entitled to disagree with me about the nature of the good life, and they might note that they have intentionally limited their picture to the kinds of goods that technological innovation and economic growth can provide. But that is precisely the point. These are the goods that technocratic liberalism inevitably tends to recognize as good, and it is not clear that they are the ones whose lack we most acutely feel.
One of the most salient features of contemporary American life is how anxious, depressed, isolated, angry—simply put, how unhappy—many of us are. If we take seriously the utilitarian view of happiness as the great measure of the good, this would seem to be liberalism’s most profound failure. We are unhappy although in absolute terms we remain the richest nation on the planet. We are far less happy than many far less affluent societies. We already have technological powers beyond the imagining of Bentham or Mill or even our own great-grandparents, and we are not happier than any of them. We have cut the distance from New York to London from months to weeks to days to seven hours. Will cutting it from seven to two finally deliver us from our existential distress?
What does flourishing look like for us? It is all well and good to celebrate the fact that liberalism won’t dictate an answer to that question, but many of us don’t have a satisfactory one to hand, and we are looking for some help. This is the question of meaning that led Mill to his mental collapse. He saw that the strictly quantitative utilitarianism that Bentham and his own father had preached was helpless in the face of this question.
After his mental collapse, Mill began to believe that we could, and must, distinguish between “higher” and “lower” pleasures, and that there was a greater good to be had in life than bare happiness. “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” he wrote; “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” Toward the end of his life, he wrote a series of essays about religion and theistic belief. While he never became a believer, he expressed a surprising sympathy for the power of religion to give life meaning, to provide for precisely those emotional needs that his father had ignored in Mill’s upbringing.
“Liberals would do well to take more seriously the anti-liberal critique of technocracy.”
Just as Mill came to temper his Benthamism with an opposing strain of Romanticism, today’s liberals would do well to take more seriously the anti-liberal critique of technocracy. Critics of liberalism on both the left and the right have long argued that its claim to create a neutral space for the individual pursuit of the good is a kind of subterfuge. To quantify goods in a way that makes them essentially fungible just is the expression of a particular conception of the good. In particular, it expresses the idea that there are no truly ultimate goods, that everything is up for negotiation and every man has his price.
We might also take more seriously the post-liberal view that the liberal conception of the good as the relentless pursuit of personal self-interest is a low and paltry thing. We might take seriously the claim that technocratic liberalism has hollowed out the traditions, communities, structures, and norms that have long made life worth living for the preponderance of human beings. We might try to recognize what is so deeply dissatisfying to so many people about the vision of affluent, atomized individuals sleeping alone in comfortable beds, getting their meds dropped off by drones they never have to greet or thank, exchanging asynchronous voice texts with “friends” to whom they never actually talk, let alone seeing them face-to-face.
None of this means giving up on liberalism itself, or making anything less than a full-throated defense of it. Certainly Mill never did. But he understood that liberalism at its best creates the context in which debates about the good can be productively conducted, without imposing technocratic terms on that debate. When liberals insist that only arguments grounded in reason and evidence as they themselves understand these terms have a place in the public square, they are short-circuiting the very deliberation that liberalism exists to support. When they treat any defense of a policy position that rests in religious belief as a de facto violation of the separation of church and state, they are actually betraying the true spirit of liberalism as Mill understood it. This is not just wrong on principled grounds; all the evidence suggests that it just isn’t going to work.