Term Paper on "Thomas Carlyle's Views on the Limits of Personal Liberty in His Book Past and Present"

Term Paper 12 pages (3796 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

personal freedom and also the limits of that freedom have been key in Western civilization for centuries. The problems raised were addressed by various writes and ethical theorists, including the political theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the nineteenth century English essayist Thomas Carlyle, who discussed his particular views on personal freedom and its limits in his work Past and Present written in 1843.

The book Past and Present was an effort to explain the social order of Britain at a time of crisis, the crisis being an economic crisis then prevailing in England. The Industrial Revolution was changing the nature of work and the society organized around work, and the process was now affected by a recession that led to the closure of factories, the loss of jobs, an increase in the slums of the cities, and more people starving in the streets. This crisis caused Carlyle to consider the nature of the leadership the nation then had and to compare them to leaders from other eras and other situations. Carlyle offered the Abbot Samson as a cleric from the past who had devoted himself unselfishly to the monasteries he governed and worked to improve. This contrasted with many of the leaders of Carlyle's own day, men who were more interested in their own concerns and needs than in shaping the economy of the country for the benefit of all. He indeed sees the leaders in government as incapable of providing the guidance needed and instead sees the leaders of industry as the hope for the future, but even then, they would have to change their ways and work to bring about the changes needed.

In this book, Carlyle addressed the situation by calling for a reassessment of the social discourse of the time in terms of Labor, which he sought to express as something sacred. By doing so, "Carlyle underwrites its transcendent status, a status mirrored in a particular code of labor relations, the Chivalry of Work, that Carlyle offers as an ideological justification for a recentering of the workplace around the all-penetrating gaze of the Captains of Industry. In so doing, Carlyle would thus bring the structural relations of commodity production in line with his vision of the centralized structure of symbolic production, the production of meaning" (Ulrich para. 6). He proposes a relation that in each case is hierarchical, centralized, and orderly and that further functions as a final symbolic effort to intervene in what Carlyle pictures as society's "imminent descent into meaninglessness" (Ulrich para. 6).

Carlyle also describes the existing social situation, or what he calls the "Condition of England," as something utterly unfamiliar and historically unprecedented. Carlyle uses the metaphor of "enchantment" to describe this strange new world, and he also describes the contradiction: that England is among the most productive and wealthiest of nations even as it is seemingly dying because of "a lack of food, work, morals and spirit" (Ulrich para. 7). Wealth is also described as a contradiction because it seems to belong to no one, to signify nothing, and yet circulates freely in the free market.

Ulrich further points out that Carlyle's analysis of the social crisis differs markedly from the position Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were developing at approximately the same time and with reference to many of the same conditions. Their approach "concerns the mystification of the masses through an historically-determined nexus of bourgeois ideology and economic oppression. The Marxist position, of course, readily identifies the agents of that oppression and ideology as belonging to a particular class, with interests that are coterminous with a specific political formation, the State. Collective revolutionary action, on the part of an historically conscious proletariat, is thus provided with a clear target for the expenditure of its energy" (Ulrich para. 8).

For Carlyle, one of the concerns to be addressed is freedom, and he writes of this social element,

Freedom, not nomad's or ape's Freedom, but man's Freedom; this is indispensable. We must have it, and will have it! To reconcile Despotism with Freedom: -- well, is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism "just." Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no 'Freedom' at all but in obeying them. The way is already known, part of the way; -- and courage and some qualities are needed for walking on it! (Carlyle Chapter Book II V)

For Carlyle, the monastic community was one unified by human and spiritual values. The culture of England at the time was seen as having deified impersonal economic forces and abstract theories about human rights and natural laws. Carlyle saw the important communal values collapsing into isolated individualism and a ruthless laissez-faire system, suggesting that personal; freedom for Carlyle was not an absolute freedom but carried with it a requirement for the individual to serve the communal interests and not merely his or her own.

Mill approaches the obligations of both the state and the individual in terms of his Harm Principle as introduced in on Liberty, a principle addressing the basic issue of when power can be exercised over any individual member of a civilized community against his or her will. Mill says such power cannot be wielded except to prevent harm to others. Mill thus takes an anti-parentalist view. There are those who see the government acting in loco parentis, or in place of the parent, imposing restrictions for the individual's own good. Mill opposes any such notion.

Mill begins his discussion of moral theory with a definition of utilitarianism, stating that this is the creed that accepts utility as the foundation of morals, meaning the greatest happiness principle. This holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, and wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. Happiness means the intended pleasure and the absence of pain, while unhappiness means pain and the privation of pleasure. While Mill agrees that those actions which produce happiness are good and those that produce pain are bad, it is not the happiness or pain of the person taking action that is necessarily the guide. Rather, it is a more abstract happiness overall that is being considered so that actions which add to happiness overall is good while actions reducing happiness are bad. Happiness for Mill is a unified way of life rather than an abstraction toward which we tend as we make our choices and behave as our analyses dictate. "Living right" is a moral proposition that is more than an abstraction based on concepts of pleasure and pain and the development of a sum total of happiness. For Mill, living right is itself part of the happiness and the pleasure we seek. He also sees the individual as a coherent part of a social whole, and as the individual develops as a social being, morality adds to the sum total of happiness on the individual and the social level as the individual acts in a conscious way to be part of and enjoy the social level.

For Mill, the individual has a moral duty to live according to the laws of the state, but this is not an absolute duty. The element of utility takes precedence so that some laws might be considered unjust because they would produce unhappiness rather than happiness. Some laws may be unjust, giving rise to the question of whether it is right to disobey it:

Some maintain that no law, however, bad, ought to be disobeyed by an individual citizen; that his opposition to it, if shown at all, should only be shown in endeavoring to get it altered by competent authority... Other persons, again, hold the directly contrary opinion that any law, judged to be bad, may blamelessly be disobeyed, even though it be not judged to be unjust but only inexpedient, while others would confine the license of disobedience to the case of unjust laws. (Mill 43)

Mill himself would propose limits for criminal law and also for the moral force of social disapproval. The general test of law is utilitarian, based on the standard of whether the law tends to maximize pleasure and minimize pain (Kelly 340).

Mill argues that right and wrong cannot be equated merely with whether or not something maximizes happiness and sees a number of potential sources for the punishment that accrues to the individual who transgresses certain laws, punishment from the law, from his fellow citizens, or from his conscience. For Mill, the individual also helps see that justice is done through the action of his or her conscience. Mill says that the individual is, after all, the person most interested in his or her own welfare. Mill admits that many people refuse to recognize the distinction between that part of a person's life that concerns only himself and that part which concerns society. They state that the… READ MORE

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