John Stuart Mill's principle of liberty and the problem of ethnocentrism

This project examines John Stuart Mill's writings on liberty and representative government in the context of the British administration of India during the mid-nineteenth century. I examine the principle of liberty, and particularly his utilitarian justification of that principle, in order to reveal the extent to which his political thought contains a decidedly western mindset, one associated with modern liberalism. Specifically, I argue that Mill's defense of the liberty principle relies on conception of rationality which presupposes a context among ideas. Mill believed that such a conflict would eventually produce a consensus among viewpoints and the accumulation of knowledge. In other words, Mill believed that creating the conditions of freedom in society would inevitably further "the permanent interests of man as a progressive being." Mill's conduct as Assistant Examiner at the East India House reveals the extent to which he regarded Britain's Indian subjects as incapable of the sorts of rationality that his liberty principle presupposed. In the absence of purportedly rational conduct among India's many religious communities. Mill was quite willing to exempt them from the protection his liberty principle promised. I conclude that to the extent modern liberalism embraces a similar commitment to an essentially western notion of rationality, it remains insensitive to the values and beliefs of people who ar either unwilling or unable to adopt an approach to the production of knowledge which presupposes the validity of either conflict or consensus. I argue that modern liberalism must remain open to a wide diversity of beliefs if it is to live up to its promise as a humane and liberating theory.