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Essay on Compare The Role Of Reason And Liberty In Locke And Mill
John Stuart Mill's broad underlying aim was to replace the traditional and corrupted Christian basis of society with a Positive religion based on a moral authority and Positive values. This severs Mill's attachment to classic liberalism. There is an alternative and more plausible interpretation. Mill's admiration for Comte's opposition to theological and metaphysical explanations of man and society was permanent and he saw that Positivism was indeed part of phenomenal and experiential philosophy, part, in fact, of that great tradition which insisted on the empirical and the inductive. But, whatever the extent and nature of Mill's belief in consolidated opinion, at no time did he accept the social doctrines of Positivism.
Certainly he never argued for the imposition of moral and political truths on authority. This was perhaps, his main objection to the doctrines of St Simon and Comte in which the age of positive science would enable an elite to administer truths and hence prescribe conduct for the non-elite. To Mill this implied the mental subjection of one group to another and supposed an uncritical deference characteristic of hierarchical systems. His own position was completely unambiguous. Just as increases in happiness which were due solely to changes of outward circumstances and not to a change in the state of desires were hopeless, so were rules of conduct imposed on authority as truths of science. Consequently the majority would neither experience happiness nor freely accept obligations without self-education and substantial social reform. (Hamburger, 1999)
Locke's concept of property encompassed more than material goods. In his Second Treatise On Government, Locke (1952) remarked that "people united for the general purpose of the preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name--property." By property, Locke added "I must be understood here as in other places to mean that property which men have in their persons as well as goods.".................
