When Adams chose the word “suicide” to describe the death of democracies, he was making a deliberate and important point. Democracies fail from within. They are not usually overwhelmed by external forces, such as invasion or insurrection, or overthrown by internal coups. They fail because people spontaneously turn to more authoritarian forms of government.

Adams had in mind the democracies of the ancient world, the only precedents available before the foundation of the United States. According to the orthodox narrative, the democracies of the ancient world had died because people succumbed to the appeal of demagogues, who promised them security at home and triumphs abroad in return for their acceptance of autocracy. People simply lost interest in democratic government.

John Adams’s sombre prediction did not come true in his own day. The question I want to address is whether it is becoming true in ours.

The Pew Research Centre has been tracking attitudes to democracy in different countries for some 30 years. Dissatisfaction with democracy has been rising in advanced democracies for most of that time. This is especially true of young people living in the oldest democracies: the United States, the United Kingdom and France. In the most recent survey, the United Kingdom has had one of the highest levels of dissatisfaction in the world, at 69%. It seems that only Bulgaria and Greece think less of democracy than the British.

Dissatisfaction with democracy does not necessarily imply a preference for some other system. But more disturbing findings emerge from the regular surveys of political engagement conducted in the UK by the Hansard Society. In the 2019 survey, the latest available, 54% of respondents agreed with the statement that “Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules”. Only 23% disagreed. Nearly half of those who wanted a strong leader willing to break the rules thought that he “shouldn’t have to worry so much about votes in Parliament.”

Polling evidence is not infallible, but these polls track attitudes over a considerable period of time, and indicate the direction in which we are travelling. They are consistent with the historically high levels of electoral support for authoritarian figures such as Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and the leading lights of Alternative für Deutschland.

The first thing that we need to be clear about is what we mean by democracy. We are so familiar with its use as a general hurrah word that some definition seems necessary. What I mean by democracy is a constitutional mechanism for collective self-government. Democracy is a way of entrusting decision-making to people acceptable to the majority, whose power is defined and limited, and whose mandate is revocable.

But the institutional framework is not enough. Plenty of countries have the institutional framework of a democracy without being one. This is because democracy can only work in a legal and social culture where there is freedom of thought, speech and association, uncontrolled access to reliable information, and a large tolerance of political dissent. A culture of this kind is fragile. Where democracies fail, it is not usually because the institutional framework has failed. It is because the necessary cultural foundation has gone.

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By Freddie Sayers

The opposite of democracy is some form of authoritarian government. It is of course possible for democracies to confer considerable coercive power on the state without losing their democratic character. But there is a point beyond which the systematic application of coercion is no longer consistent with any notion of collective self-government. The fact that it is hard to define where that point lies does not mean that there isn’t one. A degree of respect for individual autonomy seems to me to be a necessary feature of anything which deserves to be called a democracy.

The polling evidence which I have cited suggests that democracy is now increasingly vulnerable in the very countries that gave birth to it. Why has this happened?

The chief enemies of democracy are economic insecurity, intolerance, and fear. Let me first address economic insecurity.

Historically, democracies have always been heavily dependent on economic optimism. Except for two short periods, the United States has enjoyed continuously rising levels of prosperity, both absolutely and relative to other countries, until quite recently. Britain’s economic history, like that of other European countries, has been slightly more chequered. But the trajectory has generally been upward.

Today, the outlook is darker. We face problems of faltering growth, relative economic decline, redundant skills and capricious patterns of inequality. In most western democracies, including ours, GDP is still rising, albeit slowly. But people measure their wellbeing against their expectations. 60 years of post-war expansion have raised those expectations to a very high level.

Economic misfortune usually bears hardest on the poorest members of society. It marginalises them, and makes them feel that the current organisation of their country has nothing to offer them. But in a more fundamental sense, the impact of economic hardship is likely to be felt at every level of society. The shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment in the life of any community. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the 30-year crisis of Europe which began in 1914 and ended in 1945. That crisis was characterised by a resort to totalitarianism in much of Europe. Britain, the United States and France escaped that fate, but in all three countries there were powerful authoritarian movements of Left and Right which drew their strength mainly from economic misfortune. Russia and Germany were widely regarded as the models which showed the way out, just as China sometimes is today.

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The second of democracy’s great enemies is fear. People who are sufficiently frightened will submit to an authoritarian regime which offers them security against some real or imagined threat. Historically, the threat has usually been war. In the two world wars of the twentieth century Britain transformed itself into a temporary despotism with substantial public support. Wars, however, are rare. This country has generally conducted its wars at a distance. It has not faced an existential threat from external enemies since 1940, unless you count the high point of the nuclear threat in the 1960s.

The real threat to democracy’s survival is not major disasters like war. It is comparatively minor perils, which in the nature of things occur more frequently. This may seem paradoxical. But reflect for a moment. The more routine the perils from which we demand protection, the more frequently will those demands arise. If we confer despotic powers on government to deal with perils, which are an ordinary feature of human existence, we will end up doing it most or all of the time. It is because the perils against which we now demand protection from the state are so much more numerous than they were that they are likely to lead to a more fundamental and durable change in our attitudes to the state. This is a more serious problem for the future of democracy than war.

It arises because of the growing aversion of western societies to risk. We crave protection from many risks which are inherent in life itself: financial loss, economic insecurity, crime, sexual violence and abuse, sickness, accidental injury. Even the late pandemic, serious as it was, was well within the broad range of mortal diseases with which human beings have always had to live. It is certainly within the broad range of diseases with which we must expect to live with in future.

We call upon the state to save us from these things. This is not irrational. It is in some ways a natural response to the remarkable increase in the technical competence of mankind since the middle of the nineteenth century, which has considerably increased the range of things that the state can do. As a result, we have inordinately high expectations of the state. We are less inclined to accept that there are things that it cannot or should not do to protect us. For all perils, there must be a governmental solution. If there is none, that implies a lack of governmental competence.

Attitudes to death provide a striking example. There are few things as routine as death. “In the midst of life, we are in death,” says the Book of Common Prayer. Yet the technical possibilities of modern, publicly-financed medicine have accustomed us to the idea that, except in extreme old age, any death from disease is premature, and that all premature death is avoidable. Starting as a natural event, death has become a symptom of societal failure.

In modern conditions, risk-aversion and the fear that goes with it are a standing invitation to authoritarian government. If we hold governments responsible for everything that goes wrong, they will take away our autonomy so that nothing can go wrong. We have had a spectacular demonstration of this during the pandemic, where coercive measures with radical effects on our lives were made by ministers with strong public support but minimal parliamentary input. A minister told me some months ago that he thought liberal democracy an unsuitable instrument for dealing with a pandemic, and that something more “Napoleonic” was needed. He was making a more significant point than he realised. Whatever one thinks about this — and my own views are well known — it unquestionably marks a significant change in our collective mentality.

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The quest for security at the price of coercive state intervention is a feature of democratic politics which was pointed out in the 1830s by the great political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville in his remarkable study of American democracy, a book whose uncanny relevance still takes one by surprise even after nearly two centuries. His description of the process cannot be bettered. The protecting power of the state, he wrote,

“extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered. But it is softened, bent, and guided. Men are seldom forced to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes. It stupefies a people until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

In many ways, the biggest threat to democracy is not oppression by the state, but the intolerance of our fellow citizens. In the early years of British democracy, the great apostle of Victorian liberalism John Stuart Mill foresaw that the main threat to its survival would be the conformity imposed by public opinion. Roger Scruton once wrote that “the freedom to entertain and express opinions, however offensive… [is] the precondition of a political society.” Roger had more personal experience of this than any of us. He was a persistent, and joyful dissentient. In the same article, he identified the problem with unerring accuracy. To guarantee freedom of opinion,” he wrote,

“goes against the grain of social life, and imposes risks that people may be reluctant to take. For in criticising orthodoxy, you are not just questioning a belief — you are threatening the social order that has been built on it.”

The deliberate campaigns of suppression conducted by pressure groups against politically unfashionable or “incorrect” opinions on, for example, race, gender reassignment, or same-sex relationships; the attempts to impose a new vocabulary which implicitly accepts the campaigners’ point of view: these things are symptoms of the narrowing of our intellectual world.

The tests recently imposed on freshers at the University of St. Andrews and the campaign against Kathleen Stock at the University of Sussex suggest that intellectual persecution is alive even in our universities, for the first time perhaps since Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake just 200 yards from here. Demonstrations, such as those organised by Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain, are based on the notion that the campaigners’ point of view is the only legitimate one. It is therefore perfectly acceptable deliberately to bully people and disrupt their lives until they submit, instead of resorting to ordinary democratic procedures. This is the mentality of terrorists, but without the violence.

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Democracy can only survive if our differences are transcended by our common acceptance of the legitimacy of the decision-making process, even when we disagree profoundly with the outcome. This implicit bargain breaks down if a society repeatedly finds itself resorting to coercion to enforce the majority view about controversial moral issues. It breaks down if people feel more strongly about the issues than they do about democratic procedures for settling them. The result is the abandonment of political engagement and a growing resort to direct action of one kind or another.

Direct action is an invitation to authoritarian government, because it implicitly rejects diversity of opinion. It assesses the value of democratic institutions by one criterion only, namely the degree to which the activists’ program has prevailed. Those who engage in direct action instinctively feel that the end is so important that it justifies the means, but they rarely confront the implications of their acts. What holds us together as a society is precisely the means by which we do things. Since we are never likely to agree on controversial issues of principle, what holds us together is not consensus, but a common respect for a method of resolving our differences, whether or not we approve of the resulting decisions.

Conflicts of opinion and interest are natural features of any free society. The task of a political community is to accommodate them so that we can live together in peace without systematic coercion. This is necessarily a political process, which is why the contempt for politics expressed by so many people is potentially a mortal threat to our democracy.

The successive surveys of the Hansard Society paint a picture of a society in which interest in public affairs is strong, but willingness to engage actively in politics has declined. The Conservative Party has been the dominant party of government for the past century. It obtained 43.6% of the vote at the last election. Yet its membership has declined from about 2.8 million in the mid-1950s to about 180,000 according to the latest (three-year-old) figures. Labour party membership is larger, at about 430,000, but still a long way below its earlier peak.

This pattern is fairly typical internationally. The membership rolls of established political parties have declined steeply in most European democracies. By comparison, support for new parties dedicated to the wholesale rejection of normal party politics has increased, jerkily but noticeably: La Republique en Marche in France, the Five Star Movement in Italy, and Podemos in Spain have all presented themselves as representatives of a new electorate, spontaneous expressions of the popular will and not as traditional political parties. Podemos has declared that there is no left or right. There is only “the people”, identified with Podemos itself, versus “the caste”, that is to say the caste of professional politicians. In Italy, the Five Star Movement claims not to be a political party but a movement, and has promoted direct democracy with electronic voting. Remarkably, lack of political experience was a central part of the successful candidates’ pitch in the US presidential election of 2016, the French Presidential election of 2017 and the Italian legislative elections of 2018.

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These facts reflect a fundamental problem about democracy, which was pointed out more than two millennia ago by Aristotle. Democratic representation creates a class of professional politicians. Aristotle regarded professional politics as an evil because he thought that any political elite would end up serving its own interests. This has been the received opinion for centuries, from Aristotle to Noam Chomsky. In my experience it is untrue. Professional politicians can never be intellectually pure. They are constrained by the need to compromise in order to build majorities. But the great majority of them are public-spirited individuals with a genuine ambition to serve the interests of their country. Most of them would achieve a great deal more money and status by pursuing other careers. Nevertheless, the old trope that politicians are a bunch of corrupt, self-interested and power-crazed hypocrites is deeply embedded in the public mind and always has been.

Aristotle’s solution was to abolish the political class, and replace it with a system in which public offices would be held for short periods by men chosen by lot or serving in rotation. Everyone can then feel that they were at least potentially engaged in a system of self-government. This is hardly realistic in an electorate of 47 million or so. But Aristotle had put his finger on the reason why many people reject democracy. They feel alienated from the political class which democracies inevitably generate. They do not regard politicians as representative of themselves, even if they voted for them.

There is no cure for this condition. Successful politicians are in the nature of things unlikely to be representative of the electorate. They require an altogether exceptional degree of ambition, application and intellect. Those of them who are in government have to apply themselves to complex issues with an intensity for which most of us have neither time nor inclination. If one object of representative politics is to choose politicians who are best-qualified to perform the exceptionally difficult job of governing, then our representatives will always be unrepresentative.

None of this has stopped enthusiasts for constitutional innovation from exploring a variety of ways of side-lining the political class. Referenda are one possibility, but Britain’s experience with referenda has not been entirely happy. They only work if people are voting about precise proposals (necessarily formulated by politicians) whose acceptance or rejection by the electorate will resolve the whole issue. Otherwise, they are simply the prelude to further rounds of political infighting, as we have seen.

Citizens’ Assemblies are the current favourites. They are the modern equivalent of Aristotle’s selection by lot. They seek to substitute for our semi-permanent political class a succession of focus groups. They are chosen to be socially representative, on the assumption that each individual will be politically representative of the categories to which they belong. That assumption seems likely to be wrong. Groups such as manual workers, members of particular ethnic groups or over-65s are no more uniform or consistent in their political opinions than the electorate at large. It is therefore largely a matter of accident whether our divisions are replicated in a Citizen’s Assembly of, say, 100 people. But the fundamental problem about these assemblies is that they have not been chosen by the electorate and are not answerable to anyone. They have no democratic or other legitimacy.

There are measures which might palliate the current problems of democracy, but without solving them. Foremost among them is proportional representation. Proportional representation would probably create a multiplicity of political parties. That would more fairly reflect the diversity of opinion among the electorate than the current two-party system. It would also, partly for that reason, increase the degree of participation in the political process. It is not going to happen, because it is contrary to the interests of the two major national parties and there is no real demand for it among the electorate. The alternative vote referendum of 2011 suggests that the British prefer the crude simplicity of first-past-the-post to anything more elaborate. The critical point for present purposes is that it would do nothing to address the alienation of the electorate from the political process. Indeed, it might well increase it, since it would lead to less stable governments and more political infighting.

I am not about to suggest my own solution to that problem, because I do not believe that there is one. Whatever we may think of our politicians, it is an inescapable truth that we cannot have democracy without politics or politics without politicians. We have to learn to accept the vices and virtues of professional politics, because they are inherent in the whole nature of government. Getting rid of professional politics would almost certainly lead to the replacement of the current political elite by a different one, which would be more permanent, more authoritarian and less representative. Ultimately all political systems are aristocracies of knowledge. Democracies are no different, except that the aristocracies of the moment are removable — something which profoundly affects their exercise of power.

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A generation ago, the enemies of democracy were small groups of cranks and extremists of Left and Right. But today democracy needs a coherent defence, not just against those who would like to dispense with it in favour of more authoritarian models, but against those who would like to redefine it out of existence. We have to say something to the 54% of our fellow-citizens who would apparently prefer to be ruled by a British Putin. Why are they wrong?

The simplest thing to be said in favour of democracy is that it is an efficient way of getting rid of unsatisfactory governments without violence. But there are at least three other more profound reasons why people living in a country like ours ought to believe in democracy.

In the first place, it is the best protection that we have for liberty. Since a large measure of individual autonomy is a necessary condition for human happiness and creativity, this is a consideration of some importance. I am well aware of the oppressive possibilities of democracy. I do not doubt that democracy has an immense potential to oppress not just ethnic or social minorities, but political or moral minorities — people who believe something which majorities object to. That was pointed out by Madison and Mill at the birth of modern democracy, and indeed by Aristotle more than 20 centuries before that.

In most periods of history, the best guarantee of liberty has been the powerlessness and ignorance of the state. Historically, it was relatively easy to escape its scrutiny, and take shelter in the domain of private life. The immense power of the modern state, and its almost unlimited access to information, makes it harder to hide. Access to the levers of state power by democratic majorities is therefore potentially more dangerous today than it has ever been before. But democracy at least offers the possibility of redemption. Its values can be turned against those currently in power. By comparison, authoritarian states entrench themselves in power. They institutionalise repression and cultural control in a way that is more difficult to reverse.

Secondly, the creation of a political class, which Aristotle regarded as the great vice of democracy, may well be its chief merit. Political parties operate in what I have previously called the political market. They are coalitions of opinion, united by a loose consistency of outlook and the desire to win elections. To command a Parliamentary majority, parties have traditionally had to bid for support from a highly diverse electorate. Their policy offerings mutate in response to changes in the public’s sentiments which seem likely to influence voting patterns. Their whole object is to produce a slate of policies which perhaps only a minority would have chosen as their preferred option, but which the broadest possible range of people can live with. This has traditionally made them powerful engines of national compromise and effective mediators between the state and the electorate. It has also served as a good protection against extremes. Autocracy offers no protection at all against extremes.

Thirdly, democracy is more efficient in implementing policy choices. There is a common delusion, which I suspect is shared by many of the 54%, that strongmen get things done. They do not waste time in argument or debate. Historical experience should warn us that this idea is almost always wrong. The concentration of power in a small number of hands and the absence of wider deliberation and scrutiny enables authoritarian governments to make major decisions on the hoof, without proper forethought, planning, research or consultation. Within the government’s ranks, it promotes loyalty at the expense of wisdom, flattery at the expense of objective advice, and self-interest at the expense of the public interest. The want of criticism encourages self-confidence, and self-confidence banishes moderation and restraint. The opacity of authoritarian governments is a standing invitation to corruption.

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These have always been the obvious advantages of representative democracy, and they are just as obvious today. But will they prevail? I am a natural optimist, but I have to say that I am not optimistic about the future of democracy, in this country or elsewhere in the West. All of the threats to democracy discussed above seem likely to intensify in the coming years.

The essential problem is that the public attitudes that I have been talking about are all too natural to human beings. Democracy has existed for barely two centuries in Europe and the United States, less time in other places. It was the creation of an exceptional combination of political and cultural factors, which would never have been easy to sustain and whose impact is now fading. The craving for security is too deeply embedded in human nature to go away. Three centuries ago, Thomas Hobbes made it the foundation of his case for absolute government and it is certainly stronger in out day than it was in his.

Fear will never lose its capacity to distort our collective judgments. The decline of political tolerance and the rise of moral absolutism are trends which are just as unlikely to be reversed, for tolerance too is not natural to mankind. Again, it was Hobbes who expressed it best. People, he observed, are too fond of their own ideas, for they see them from close quarters but other men’s at a distance.

The major challenge to democracy in the coming years will, I believe, be climate change. Climate change will be the main generator of collective fear in the decades to come and quite possibly the main temptation to direct action. It is of course possible that we will do nothing very much about climate change and simply chug along dealing locally with the consequences as and when they arise. But I do not doubt that measures to deal with climate change are necessary, and on the assumption that some action is taken, it is likely to run into strong democratic headwinds. Most of the measures to deal with climate change involve curtailing economic growth. This will not be popular and may not be accepted by democratic electorates, especially if groups come forward to offer easier and perhaps specious alternatives.

The main problem is that climate change can only be dealt with at an international level. This will require major decisions to be made internationally, in a world where democracy is still national. That will be hard to square with traditional notions of democratic accountability. Democracy depends on a common sense of identity and a large measure of mutual solidarity, a feeling that we are “in it together”. Otherwise people are unlikely to feel a common loyalty to the decision-making process, which is strong enough to transcend their disagreements about the issues. At the moment this sense of solidarity exists, if at all, only at the level of the nation state. We have had a stark reminder of that in the Brexit referendum.

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Perhaps in future, climate change will generate a measure of international solidarity, but I would not count on it. National identities are becoming stronger, and climate change is likely to make them stronger still. This is because although all humanity has a common interest in dealing with climate change, they do not have a common interest in the measures necessary to do it. We have seen this on issues like fossil fuels and deforestation. Countries like India, China, Malaysia and Brazil are not likely to accept measures which will restrict their ability to achieve the same standard of living as the West. Especially when they reflect that historically the West has to some degree achieved that standard of living by polluting the world. Countries like the United States and Britain are not likely to accept a disproportionate reduction of their own standard of living as the price of international agreement. The logical outcome of the threat of climate change is not international harmony in the face of a common danger. It is a world of competitive despotisms.

The transition from democracy to authoritarian rule is generally smooth and unnoticed. It is easy to sleepwalk into it. The outward forms, the language of politics, are unchanged. But the substance is gone. These things do not happen with a clap of thunder. Democracy is not formally abolished but quietly redefined. It ceases to be a method of government, and becomes instead a set of political values, like communism or human rights, which are said to represent the people’s true wishes without regard to anything that they may actually have chosen for themselves.

Historically, the default position of human societies has always been some form of autocracy. The world is full of countries which have reverted to type. The democratic label is still on the bottle, but the substance has been poured out of it by governments, usually with substantial public support. Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Hungary, Egypt, Turkey, Russia. The list gets longer every year. Will Britain will end up on that list? A generation ago, it would have seemed strange even to ask the question. But I think that I have persuaded you that it is a real issue.

This is the fourth and final lecture in the inaugural series of Sir Roger Scruton Memorial Lectures delivered at the Sheldonian Theatre on 27 October 2021.

Something of the 1990s Tories’ Caligula-lite vibe has crept into the current administration. Boris Johnson’s extra-marital affair with pole-dancing American entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri has emulsified queasily with a lobbying scandal involving former Prime Minister David Cameron. This has blended in turn with an increasingly bitter fall-out between Boris and Dominic Cummings, a rift that’s resulted in a series of escalating leaks of the sort that drive lobby journalists into a feeding frenzy. Meanwhile, onlookers are agog at the rumours of Boris taking private donations to redecorate the flat above No. 11 Downing Street, while also remaining avid for Before and After shots.

And yet Johnson seems unembarrassable. As the whiff of corruption emanates from Cameron’s lobbying antics and Covid procurement alike, pundits lament the moral decline of our “shameless elites”. But in truth the relationship between elites and shame has long been contested — and no one is quite on the “side” they claim to be on.

Shame is a fundamentally social emotion. Even if you’ve done something bad, you’ll probably just feel guilt — until you get found out. By then you’ve broken the proverbial Eleventh Commandment: ‘Thou Shalt Not Get Caught’. And when that happens, historically communities have used shame — often combined with creatively humiliating forms of violence — to exact retribution in brutally public ways.

In premodern times, someone who both breached social codes and violated the Eleventh Commandment was often held in a pillory of some kind, so they could be mocked, flogged or pelted with garbage. Finger stocks were used to punish minor infractions, while in 16^th-century Newcastle people who abused alcohol were paraded through the streets wearing “the drunkard’s cloak”, a large wooden barrel with a hole for the head and sometimes hands.

More brutal forms of public castigation-as-spectacle included tying miscreants to whipping posts or behind a cart where they would be whipped through the streets, starting and ending in the wrongdoer’s own neighbourhood so everyone they knew could point and jeer. Other, permanent forms of punitive disgrace included branding and facial mutilation — a practice intended not just to cause pain but leave an impossible-to-conceal mark of public disapproval.

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This kind of ritualistic public shaming occupies a zone somewhere between politics, violence and public entertainment — a space we mostly like to pretend doesn’t exist. As well as punishing a miscreant, the performance of disapproval works to warn others against the same crime. And seeing someone punished for breaching shared moral codes is a gratifying scene for the moral majority.

Why don’t we do this today? Some imagine this is because we’re more morally advanced. The cultural theorist Michel Foucault (himself recently, posthumously shamed for sexually abusing children) disagreed. He argued in Discipline and Punish that it was more about power and economics: over time prison, surveillance and training regimes came to be understood as effective means of moulding people to fit industrial society than spectacular public punishments such as whipping.

But even if Foucault is right about these large-scale shifts, there are plenty of moral infractions that don’t merit such severe penalties as corporal punishment or prison. And in cases such as these, societies didn’t want to stop using shame, even as reformers campaigned to abolish public flogging. Rather, we discovered new ways of shaming people, at scale, that rendered such practices obsolete.

Chief among these is the mass media. In medieval times, moral standards were largely set by communities, with interventions from aristocrats, the Church or the law. But the rise of newspapers through the 18^th and 19^th centuries drove the adoption of more standardised moral views — and also their enforcement, via public shame.

By the early 19^th century, there were 52 London newspapers and more than 100 other titles. Local and national papers carved out a role covering court cases, and often played a significant role in swaying public opinion for or against more severe punishment. In tandem, punishments became less physical: flogging retreated behind the walls of prisons, and in 1830 the pillory was abolished.

You’d think this would feel less barbaric than the cat o’nine tails, or pelting people with rotten veg. And yet intellectuals chafed under the newfound tyranny of bourgeois public morality — with some actively seeking to undermine its authority.

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By Mary Harrington

In his 1859 work On Liberty, John Stuart Mill condemned the homogenising effects of 19^th-century mass media for imposing a general condition of “mediocrity” upon everyone, including exceptional people. Mill lamented the way “public opinion now rules the world” — for, as he saw it, this rule meant the ascendancy of little minds.

People no longer took moral direction from church or government, Mill complained, but from “men much like themselves” speaking to them through “the newspapers” in support of a deadening consensus he called “Custom”. For exceptional individuals to be liberated so that they can innovate and improve society, this moral stranglehold must be ended. “The progressive principle’, Mill argued, ‘is antagonistic to the sway of Custom.”

Mill set in train a line of liberal argument that amounts, in effect, to a demand for a society’s top echelon to be exempt from both the moral constraints and also the enforcement mechanism of public shame — even as they continue to apply to the masses.

The modern inheritors of Mill’s patrician disdain for the petty moral codes of the bourgeoisie are those liberals who sneer at “Daily Mail readers” and other consumers of the tabloid press. These are generally depicted as mediocre minds induced by their choice of reading to lurch from moral panic to moral panic. A 2014 article on the satirical website Newsbiscuit sums this perspective, with an article claiming the Daily Mail‘s website is to be fitted with a “Moral Panic” button for readers to express their sense of outrage.

Implicit in this attitude is an ambivalent relationship to moral norms as such. It’s not exactly that there shouldn’t be any norms. It’s more that the person sneering at “Daily Mail readers’” views themselves is one of Mill’s “Persons of genius”, and as such is entitled to be freed from such constraints. This, suggested one commentator recently, is at the heart of our Prime Minister’s approach to, well, everything (including marital fidelity, and renovation expenses). That is, Johnson simply doesn’t think rules should apply to him, even if they do to everyone else.

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So Johnson represents an impressively pure expression of Mill’s patrician moral exceptionalism — if not the uprightness Mill perhaps naively assumed would come from it. Those who have not yet attained Johnson’s Olympian state of exemption from ethical pettifogging, though, remain ambivalent about public shame, as well as about which norms it should be used to enforce.

On the one hand, the two most popular British newspapers are those most strongly — albeit sometimes self-contradictorily — associated with outrage: the Sun and the Mail. This fact suggests the population as a whole still sets considerable store by moral norms, and thoroughly enjoys the public shaming of people who breach them.

Yet on the other, received opinion among the elite is firmly set against the notion that there exists such a thing as right and wrong. Not a week goes by without one of our august liberal outlets seeking to bust yet another taboo. And yet it’s John Stuart Mill’s ideological successors, the progressive enemies of “Custom”, who are today’s keenest users of the digital pillory against their enemies through the growing political power of “cancel culture”.

And this, ultimately, gives a clue to why the latest crop of “Tory sleaze” seem so muddled, and so curiously flat. At issue is not just whether or not Johnson did this or that, but what this or that should even mean in moral terms. Ultimately, the outrage lacks force, because we’re no longer sure which court of public opinion has the authority to shame public figures for wrongdoing — or what even constitutes “wrong”.

These questions form the core of today’s “culture wars” and are a long way from being settled. And until they are, we can expect to be governed by relativists, chancers, and the congenitally shameless.

That was Rebecca Long-Bailey’s answer when Laura Kuenssberg asked her about transgender issues — specifically the legal recognition of gender on the basis of self-identification.

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Test article

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But does the principle of letting people be who they want to be apply to gender alone?

What about other personal characteristics that are defined in law, such as age? Should people be able to decide what age they want to be and have that legally recognised?

*

You may remember a Dutchman by the name of Emile Ratelband. In 2018 he launched a legal action to change his official age from 69 to 49. “We live in a time when you can change your name and change your gender. Why can’t I decide my own age?”, he argued.

The Dutch courts, however, disagreed. While Mr Ratelband was “at liberty to feel 20 years younger than his real age and to act accordingly”, the right to change legal documents was judged to be “undesirable”.

Case closed, then?

Not according to Joona Räsänen, a bioethicist at the University of Oslo. In a thought-provoking piece for Aeon, he makes the argument for the right to change one’s legal age. It applies specifically to other people seeking to lower their age, though “in principle”, he is “not opposed to younger people increasing their age”.

So under what circumstances might this right apply? Räsänen sets out three conditions:

“First, the person is at risk of being discriminated against because of age. Second, the person’s body and mind are in better shape than would be expected based on the person’s chronological age (that is, the person is biologically younger than he is chronologically). Third, the person does not feel that his legal age is befitting.”

Ageism certainly exists. People can be discriminated against because they’re considered too old or too young — their actual capabilities discounted in favour of a mere number.

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By Peter Franklin

But isn’t a better solution to outlaw such discrimination? A lot of progress has already been made. For instance, in the UK it’s now illegal to force employees to retire just because they’ve reached a certain age. The employer has to prove that the employee is incapable of doing their job. So, in that context there’s no need for people to pretend they’re 55 when in reality they’re 65.

Ah, but when it comes to age what is reality? Räsänen draws a distinction between chronological and biological age. It’s true that people age at different rates. People of exactly the same age can differ radically in terms of appearance, physical fitness, mental acuity or other measures of youthfulness. Aren’t these qualities more meaningful than the number of birthdays you’ve had? Why shouldn’t you have your biological age recognised as your legal age if that is what you wish?

The key problem is that, as Räsänen admits, “little consensus exists on how it should be determined”. Who would do the determining? The state? A private consultant? Or would it be self-assessed? There’d be no consistency across the population.

Biological age isn’t even consistent within an individual. Somebody might be a physical wreck, but sharp-as-a-tack mentally. A middle-aged, sun-worshipping fitness fanatic might have a face full wrinkles, but stronger muscles than most people half their age. The gardener Monty Don, who is 65 this year, recently observed that his “shot” knees were 85, while “aerobically” the rest of his body was 45.

*

So, performance-wise, different parts of our selves age at different rates — not that a precise figure could be put on any of it. Chronological age remains the only precise, consistent and objective measure of age that we have. But, of course, the third of Joona Räsänen’s conditions — i.e. that “that the person does not feel that his legal age is befitting” isn’t meant to be objective, it is by definition subjective.

Which is why I doubt that all three of his conditions would endure, if used as a basis for reform. In a post-modern society, subjectivity trumps everything else. Before long, self-ID would come to dominate any alternative to the chronological reckoning of age.

Would that matter? After all, in many circumstances people can lie about their age anyway — or refuse to divulge it. Furthermore, if we’re outlawing ageism, then age really would be just a number.

Except that not all age-based discrimination is bad. In fact, a great deal is necessary or, at least, not unfair. For instance, government has to set an age at which someone qualifies for the state old age pension. We can argue over precisely what age that should be, but a line has to be drawn somewhere otherwise everyone would qualify and the system go bankrupt. In deciding who is legally of pensionable age , the only fair and equal way of doing it is years elapsed since birth. Any system of self-ID would be gamed to the point of absurdity.

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Or what about the age at which older drivers must reapply for their licenses (and declare any relevant medical conditions)? In the UK this is 70, which further re-applications required every three years after that. It’s a somewhat arbitrary line to draw and one which applies to all individuals regardless of variations in capability. And yet it makes sense and affects everyone equally on the basis of the same objective measure of age. Self-ID would drive a coach-and-horses through all of that.

The same would be true at the other end of the age spectrum. If young people could self-ID on age then we would have 13-year-olds taking their driving tests. What could possibly go wrong? Of course, it’s undoubtedly the case that some 16-year-olds would make safer drivers than some 18-year-olds. But that doesn’t mean that the driving age of 17 is ‘unfair’. It’s perfectly fair because it collectively applies the same requirement to everybody equally and does so for the common good. The loss of opportunity suffered by the potentially safe-driving 16-year-old is rightly judged a price worth paying for that common good. Self-ID on age, however, would place the boot on the other foot, empowering individuals at the expense of society.

In an era in which individualism and relativism are intellectually dominant, it’s worth pausing to consider just how much of everyday life still depends on restricting individual freedom of action and doing so on the basis of a shared understanding of reality.

*

Is our shared understanding of age under any serious threat? After all, Emile Ratelband’s legal challenge didn’t get very far — not even in a notably liberal country like the Netherlands. However, fringe ideas can become mainstream in the space of a generation or two.

Alongside Keir Starmer, Lisa Nandy and Emily Thornberry, Rebecca Long-Bailey is a candidate in the current Labour leadership contest. Now compare that field with the candidates in the 1976 contest — James Callaghan, Michael Foot, Dennis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn and Anthony Crosland. Can you imagine any of those gentlemen supporting the idea of self-ID on gender? I doubt the concept would have even occurred to them — and that includes Jenkins, author of the permissive society. A lot can change in a few decades.

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However, viewed from a different angle, Long-Bailey’s position is consistent with the 19th century philosophy of utilitarian liberals like John Stuart Mill.

In furthering the liberty of the individual, Mill not only believed in limiting the power of the state, but also the power of society. This is how he puts in his most famous work, On Liberty:

“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

When the contemporary Left — which combines Mill’s liberalism with over-confidence in the state — says “we have to let people be who they want to be”, I want to ask who do they mean by “we” and what do they mean by “have to”? Are we to be forced to speak and act as if something is real when we know very well that it isn’t?

*

Terry Pratchett once said that “inside every old person there’s a young person wondering what happened”. As a middle-aged person, I find that feels truer every day.

And yet the actual truth about the date of my birth remains the same. No one should be compelled to deny it just because of how I feel (especially as feelings are hardly the most constant thing in the world).

That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to go down the street in a pair of spray-on jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt if I want to (don’t worry, I don’t). It isn’t the job of state to protect me from public embarrassment. But, equally, the state has no business forcing society to play along with my delusions. I have no right to falsify my birth certificate. Or to claim a young person’s railcard. Or to claim that I’m 25 on a dating app.

The fact is that I can’t be whoever I want to be. Reality is real and I am what I am.

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Numinous objects of piety and reverence, rights carry an authority no moral or political argument can match. As a result, questions in ethics and politics to which in the past there could be a variety of reasonable responses are now seen as having only one correct answer. If you find that answer unsatisfactory, you are not just disagreeing with other people. You are rejecting an imperative from which dissent is not permitted.

The position of rights is particularly incongruous in this country. More than in any other modern state, Britain’s constitution consists of precedents and conventions arising from historic political settlements. There is no body of rights codified in law that can constrain the sovereignty of parliament, while parliament itself is governed by precedent and accepted procedures.

The European Convention of Human Rights was incorporated into UK law in the Human Rights Act of 1998, and since then, the judges of what has become Britain’s Supreme Court can determine whether the rights recognised in the Convention are being respected by governments and legislators. But authority and legitimacy still reside in parliament rather than in any judicial body, and the ultimate determinant in any major public issue remains a political decision, not a legal interpretation.

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A situation in which major issues are resolved through the compromises of politics is intolerable to contemporary liberal thinkers. For them, law is a repository of moral truth, which can be determined beyond reasonable doubt. Disagreement on basic moral issues is evidence of error, which law should correct. If you think like this, British institutions are fundamentally defective.

So it is that there are continuous demands from legal scholars and journalistic commentators that our constitutional arrangements be overhauled so that human rights can constrain what any government can do. In this way, Britain can approach the higher rationality that is evident in countries such as the US, where law has a far greater role in the political process.

Jonathan Sumption’s Reith lectures on “Law and the Decline of Politics” present a considered response to these demands. His argument throughout is that inflating human rights beyond a baseline guaranteeing individual security and freedoms of expression and association imposes too great a burden on law, and leads to a dangerous shrinkage in political participation. Effectively, law is usurping politics:

“The problem about the legal model is that it marginalises the political process. When a judge identifies something as a constitutional, or a human, or a fundamental right, he is saying that it derives from a higher law than the ordinary decision-making processes of the state. He is declaring that its existence and extent are not to be determined by political choice. Yet, very many judicial decisions about fundamental rights are themselves political choices only made by a smaller and unrepresentative body of people.”

Here, Sumption captures the chief failing of the prevailing doctrine of rights. Politics is not constrained but confined to a small body of people. Judges are assumed to be able to provide answers to questions that the political processes of a democratic state are unfit to decide. Over time, the range of these questions has expanded to the point that practically every public issue is framed in terms of rights. More and more issues are taken to law, while ever fewer are settled by public political choice. As the empire of rights expands, politics shrivels away.

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There is more wisdom in Sumption’s five short lectures than could be gleaned from reading innumerable volumes of political and legal philosophy that have appeared in recent decades. Listening to them, I was reminded of an academic seminar I attended some 30 years ago. It was addressed by one of the leading lights of American jurisprudence. During the discussion that followed the paper, the speaker was asked how people with HIV/AIDS should be treated. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied: “They should be accorded the full protection of their rights under the constitution.”

While sympathising with the speaker’s concern for the wellbeing of people with HIV/AIDS, I could not help noting a certain absurdity in his response. The seminar was taking place in Oxford, and there were no embedded rights in the British constitution at the time. His response made sense only if he was invoking the American constitution (as he interpreted it) and took for granted that its authority was universal. None of the other participants questioned this assumption or gave any sign of finding it strange. I left shortly afterwards.

At that point in the late Eighties, an American discourse of rights had already displaced the British liberal tradition embodied in the work of John Stuart Mill. It tends to be forgotten that Mill is not a theorist of rights. It is true that his celebrated principle of liberty, which forbids curbing individual liberty except when harm to others may be done, stakes out a protected zone of individual freedom. But the scope of that zone is not determined by rights. It is identified by a calculus of utility, the results of which will vary according to changing circumstances.

What is forbidden in one place or time many not be prohibited in others. It may make sense to legalise drugs if the harm done by drug use is mainly to small numbers of drug users. If the number of drug users is large and there are harmful effects on society at large, the calculus may point to other policies. The background to Mill’s liberalism is not a supreme court interpreting human rights but a body like the House of Commons (where Mill himself served as an MP for some years), which frames and amends legislation in the light of its changing impact on general welfare.

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As an attempt to revive this British tradition, Sumption’s lectures make a pivotal contribution to public discourse. We need reminding that the empire of rights is recent and comes with large costs. Whether Sumption’s argument will be heeded is doubtful, however. The hollowing out of politics that has occurred, along with the expansion of rights, is hardly inadvertent. It reflects the anti-political liberalism that is in vogue in English-speaking countries.

As formulated by John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin among others, American liberal legalism understands politics as a sphere of collective decision-making containing only what is left over once the demands of justice and rights have been met. The marginalisation of politics is the principal objective of the new liberalism that has come to power over the past generation.

Of course, politics cannot actually be eradicated from the judicial process. It is clearly visible in the appointment of American Supreme Court judges. Bret Kavanagh was appointed in a hideously embarrassing spectacle of naked and crude political partisanship. But politics is pervasive throughout the judicial process. When competing interpretations of rights are being adjudicated, what is being decided is which among a range of rival political outlooks will prevail.

Jurisprudential disputes between ‘originalists’ who aim to stick to what the constitution was intended to mean, and others who want the freedom to apply its principles in new conditions, are political conflicts pursued by legal means. The underlying questions have to do not with law but the proper functions of government. Theories of rights cannot offer an escape from politics because they are themselves political ideologies.

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At times, Sumption seems to hark back to a time when law was less politicised because more scope was allowed to democratic choice. But law is inevitably shaped in some degree by prevailing political ideas, and today it cannot avoid the formative influence of the ruling version of liberalism. In his first lecture, Sumption observes that ours is “a censorious age”, the product of “growing moral and social absolutism which looks to produce conformity”, not unlike the stifling climate in Victorian England after the Evangelical Movement transformed the lax sensibilities of Georgian times.

But he fails to note how liberalism has mutated from being a philosophy of tolerance that allows individuals and communities with different values to live together peaceably, to one that aims to enforce what are judged to be the correct values on everybody. Along with the practice of public shaming and ostracism, the proliferation of rights is one of the central strategies adopted to achieve this end.

The result is a culture of conformity in some ways more repressive than that of Victorian times. John Stuart Mill may have complained bitterly against the tyranny of public opinion, but what he had to contend with was chiefly unpleasant gossip about his irregular friendship with Harriet Taylor. He was not threatened in his career or livelihood, whereas dissidents from today’s orthodoxies may face being driven from both.

The censoriousness of rights-based cultures today is not accidental. The inflation of rights endangers not only democracy but also personal freedom, for it de-legitimates what was once an accepted diversity of moral viewpoints. If only one view of a contentious issue — abortion, say — is judged to be in accord with human rights, all other views are not only mistaken, but criminal. My own views are strongly pro-choice. But where societies are deeply divided it is worth seeking a compromise, never fixed or final, which most people can live with, and on this basis a liberal abortion regime has been achieved in many countries. If the US remains polarised on this and other issues, one reason is that they have been framed in terms of rights.

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An over-extended empire of rights comes with a number of disadvantages. It hollows out democracy by removing ever more issues from public political choice. It imperils personal freedom by criminalising what used to be legitimate moral differences and polarises society by turning those differences into conflicts that cannot be settled by reasonable compromise. In all of these ways, the empire of rights has the effect of undermining social acceptance of liberal values.

But the illiberal empire of rights has another and more fundamental disadvantage. It is inherently unstable. There are many ways of understanding populism, but one that seems plausible to me is that it is a reaction against an attempt to remove certain issues from the domain of democratic decision-making. If only one view of immigration is deemed rational and morally tolerable, the issue is effectively excluded from public debate. At the same time, a space is created for demagogues.

Denying expression to a widespread public concern is rarely sustainable for long in a functioning democracy. If those who feel this concern are dismissed as retrograde and racist, they will soon flock to leaders who mobilise and accentuate their fears. Populism is a backlash against the expanding empire of rights and a warning that the empire is in danger of bringing about not only its own downfall, but that of liberal societies themselves.

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Those chilling words, the obliteration of the self, have stayed with me ever since I first read them as a teenager. They also came to mind when I read an essay by Graham Tomlin for Prospect magazine. Tomlin is an Anglican theologian and bishop. Not one to duck a challenge, he presents an argument against John Stuart Mill – specifically the Victorian philosopher’s influence on “our contemporary ideas of freedom”.

This is how Tomlin sums up those ideas:

“It is never justifiable to interfere with another person’s freedom to ensure their happiness, wisdom or well-being because that is to determine what that person’s well-being is. Freedom is defined as liberty of conscience, thought, feeling and opinion, as ‘liberty of tastes and pursuits … doing as we like … without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them’.”

Liberals of Left and Right may differ among themselves as to how big a role the state should play in facilitating our freedom, but that’s a disagreement about means not ends.

Tomlin reminds us of “another, older view of freedom”:

“Found in classical literature, this version sees liberty not as freedom from the limitations and social expectations that stop us following our self-chosen desires, but freedom from the ‘passions’.”

Drawing upon both the classical and the Christian traditions, Tomlin’s definition of freedom is in sharp contrast to Mill’s:

“True liberty is, therefore, freedom from internal urges such as greed, laziness or pride that turn us in upon ourselves rather than outwards towards God and each other… It is not so much freedom for ourselves, but freedom from ourselves: freedom from self-centred desires, or the crippling self-absorption that makes us think only of our own interests. It is freedom to create the kind of society where we are more concerned with our neighbours’ well-being than our own.”

In the Gospels, Jesus is asked “who is my neighbour?” Tomlin argues that Mill’s philosophy implies the following answer: “[my neighbour is] at best a limitation; at worst a threat to my freedom.” In Tomlin’s view of freedom, however, “my neighbour becomes… a gift – someone without whom I cannot become someone capable of the primary virtue of love.”

The Bishop presents a powerful challenge, not just to Mill, but also to the way we live our lives today. On the whole I agree with it – and yet Orwell’s words continue to nag away at me.

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Some years ago I had a conversation with a Baptist minister, who politely challenged my conservative politics (which were rather more ‘big C’ in those days than they are now). In his view, conservatism was pretty much the same thing as individualism, and therefore clearly a bad thing. 

And yet, if one believes in God, and that He made us, then the fundamental unit of that creation isn’t some collective entity, but the individual. Only the person has a soul – not nations, or classes, or communities, or even families – only the self. That doesn’t mean that selfishness is good or that we should live in isolation from others; but selfhood must be good (though sadly corruptible) because that is how God made us – and in His own image too! It follows that any concept of the obliteration of the self must be evil, because it seeks to destroy the pinnacle of God’s creation.

I’m not at all suggesting that Graham Tomlin seeks such a goal, but at some points the language he uses – “not so much freedom for ourselves, but freedom from ourselves” – strays too close to obliterationism.

I also worry about the political implications of defining true freedom as the “freedom to create the kind of society where we are more concerned with our neighbours’ well-being than our own”. The historical precedents for societies of this kind are not encouraging.

Tomlin makes it clear that the kind of society he has is mind in one of mutual aid, not a ‘human hive’ in which individuals count for nothing and can be sacrificed in the interests of the all-important collective. However, that still leaves the problem of the extent to which mutual aid ought to be enforced.

Contemporary western society, for all its individualism, is highly cooperative. Never in human history has so much wealth been transferred from the rich to the poor, the healthy to the sick, the lucky to the unlucky. Furthermore, most of this is compulsory (try not paying your taxes and see what happens to you). Tomlin’s account of freedom can be used as a justification for such compulsion, but it does not tell us why it shouldn’t go much, much further. Why, for instance, should we not raise tax rates to 100% or insist that everyone is paid the same or ban people from buying things that they want but don’t need?

All the good reasons are to be found in the Christian tradition (from which liberalism is ultimately derived): we are created not only as individuals, but as free-willed individuals – whose dignity depends in part on being able to exercise that free-will.

Graham Tomlin is absolutely right in seeking a clear distinction between an authentic Christian worldview and liberal individualism, but at a time when the political extremes are mobilising, drawing a line against illiberal collectivism is even more important.

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To this end, Mill proposed a system of plural voting in which graduates would have more votes than the one granted to ordinary citizens. As he framed his proposal in Considerations on Representative Government (1861):

“All graduates of universities, all persons who have passed creditably through the higher schools, all members of the liberal professions, and perhaps some others should be registered, and allowed to give their votes as such in any constituency in which they chose to register: retaining, in addition, their votes as simple citizens in the localities in which they reside.”

Mill’s proposal reflected his belief in the advance of human knowledge. He looked forward to an ‘Exact Science of Human Nature’, which would formulate laws of psychology and society as precise and universal as those of the physical sciences. With the development of Utilitarianism, morality was itself becoming a science. In future, ethics and politics would not be ruled by the primitive intuitions of uneducated people. Decisions would be made on the basis of the expert judgment of people trained in the social sciences. This was the path to progress.

Mill has had a good press lately. The Economist has presented him as a classical liberal who can serve as a guide to the perplexed in a time of liberal confusion. Many who have been alarmed by practices such as de-platforming have urged that we revisit his celebrated defence of free expression in On Liberty.

Here at UnHerd, Victoria Bateman has argued that Mill is “a thinker for our times”, who could help create a freer and fairer type of capitalism. If we returned to Mill’s verities, liberals would have a firmer grip on their values and a shaky liberal order could be set back in place.

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Corbyn’s near-victory last June is an ironic commentary on these hopes. The university graduates whose enhanced influence Mill believed was so essential to human progress were crucial in bringing the Labour leader to the brink of power. A major factor was Labour’s offer to abolish student tuition fees. But graduate support for Corbyn extended well beyond those that would benefit from this policy.

The Remainer internationalism that the party seemed to embrace during the campaign (while officially endorsing Leave in its election manifesto) chimed with a progressive consensus taught in universities for decades. Like Mill, millions of graduates believe liberal values are gradually unfolding in the course of history. Labour managed to project itself as the embodiment of these values.

The ironies here are multiple. If Labour had won, it would have presided over an eclipse of liberal values. Equipped with the resources of British state, the alt-Left party Corbyn has created would have been in a position to condone antisemitic racism and endorse terrorist movements. At the same time, the erosion of freedom of expression in universities would intensify. The progressive consensus would become immovably entrenched. Soon the contestation of received truths Mill celebrated would be barely a memory.

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At this point, a fork in Mill’s liberalism becomes visible. If only one set of values can be grounded in science, why allow others to be promoted in centres of learning? There can be little reason for giving anyone who rejects scientifically established truth equal freedom to speak or shape collective decisions. In effect, this was the rationale of Mill’s proposal for plural voting. But if those who base their values in a science of society are given overriding weight and influence, the result will be intellectual uniformity of the kind Mill attacked in On Liberty.

In fact, Mill’s science of society was nothing of the sort. He aimed to formulate laws as exact as those in the natural sciences, and as powerfully predictive. Yet he was unable to identify a single one of these laws and anticipated none of the great upheavals that were to come. Not only did he fail to anticipate the rise of 20th-century totalitarian movements, such as Nazism and communism, but 21st-century illiberalism was beyond his imagination. The worst he could imagine was that progress would stall and what in On Liberty he called “Chinese stationariness” – intellectual and social stagnation – would settle on Europe. The rise of an innovative and authoritarian China was inconceivable to him.

Mill never doubted that a universal civilisation grounded in liberal values was the eventual destination of all of humankind. With a few perfunctory reservations, this remains liberal orthodoxy today. The empirical basis of this orthodoxy is slight. Twenty-first-century liberals claim to base their values on observation and experience. Some, like Mill, have posited a science of society that supports these values.

But there is nothing scientific in the belief that a liberal way of life that existed in parts of Europe and North America over the few past hundred years is set to spread throughout the world. If we rely on observable facts and trends, the likelihood must be that a liberal world order belongs in the past.

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Writing in the introduction to On Liberty, Mill tells us that he grounds his argument for freedom not on “abstract right” but “utility – the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded in the permanent interests of man as a progressive being”. What is “man”, though? Certainly not an empirically observable species.

All that can actually be observed is the miscellaneous human animal, with its many contending values and ways of life. Again, there are many understandings of progress. If Mill believed it meant increasing freedom and individuality, for the founder of modern utilitarian ethics, Jeremy Bentham, it meant maximising the satisfaction of wants. Mill spent much of his adult life vainly trying to reconcile the two.

Mill’s liberalism did not rest on experience or observation. Though he was not raised as a Christian – his father, a disciple of Bentham, made sure of that – Mill was like other Victorian thinkers in relying on ideas that make little sense outside of a theistic world-view. The belief that “man” is a collective agent working out its destiny in history is a relic of Christianity, unknown in polytheistic cultures and non-western religions such as Buddhism and Taoism.

The very idea that humans share a common historical destination is a remnant of monotheism. Reframing the universal clams of western religion, Mill’s secular liberalism – like his science of society – was not the result of any process of rational inquiry but an expression of faith.

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Viewed historically, the liberal era was a moment in the aftermath of post-Reformation Christianity. If Europe had not been Christianised, it would most likely have been shaped by the polytheistic and mystery cults of the ancient world. Today it might resemble India. A universalistic, evangelising impulse would be weak or absent. Whether it would have been better or worse – or both – the West would not have produced political faiths like liberalism, that aim to project their values throughout the world.

Core liberal values, such as freedom of belief and expression, are by-products of early modern struggles within Christian monotheism. This fact could be passed over as long as successive versions of liberal values were underwritten by Western power. In Mill’s day they rested on European colonialism, and following the collapse of communism on the supposed triumph of free-market capitalism. The illusion persisted that the rise of liberalism revealed a universal law of human development.

In the event, a liberal world order has lasted only as long as Western hegemony. Today, non-Western powers are pursuing different paths of development, while much of the West has become the site of a paralysing culture war between hyper-liberal ideology and the forces of populism.

While Europe’s hegemony was lost as a result of the Great War, Western hegemony was reaffirmed in the American-led international system that was set in place after the Second World War. But it is a system that is palpably crumbling. If Russia is mocking and flouting the “rules-based order”, China is bent on reshaping it in its own image. India goes its own way.

Internally, Western societies are dismantling the liberties that were supposedly spreading throughout the world. Geopolitically, the West is heavily dependent on the authoritarian system that is under construction in China. Western commentators may complain about Xi Jinping’s surveillance state – a high-tech version of Bentham’s Panopticon, in which society was remodelled as an all-seeing prison – but not too loudly. The consequences of any serious upset or slowdown in China would be unfathomable. Any return of Chinese stationariness could be fatal to Western capitalism.

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The time has passed when the West could dictate the terms of human development. Yet the delusion persists that the growth of wealth will give liberal values another lease on life. The sub-Marxian mantra that expanding middle classes will demand liberal freedoms as societies become richer is repeated endlessly in business gatherings and academic seminars.

No matter that Putin and Xi continue to be fêted by the middle classes in Russia and China, while in Europe they flock to Orbán and Salvini, Austria’s Sebastian Kurz and Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the Swedish Democrats. Never mind that that middle-class graduates are demanding that liberal freedoms be shut down in the institutions that once embodied them. Best not dwell on such facts, for they suggest that a liberal world order was an historical accident that cannot be repeated.

Classical liberalism – the default position of The Economist, along with The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times – is a dead end. China is not going to become a liberal democracy, nor will it deviate from its market-Leninist economic system. Putin is not going to be replaced by a Justin Trudeau-like figure with a Harvard degree in economics. The far-Right will continue its advance across Europe for as long as key policies such as immigration remain removed from majority control. Whether or not he is re-elected, Trump marks an irreversible American retreat from the role of global backstop.

The combination of an intractably divided and fast-retreating America with an ascendant China means the post-war global settlement is history. Anyone who looks to classical liberal thinkers to deliver the West from its present difficulties is fixated on an irretrievable past.

It is possible to envision a stoical and realist liberalism that would accept that freedom and toleration must survive in a hostile or indifferent world. Liberalism would be recognised to be a particular form of life, like the others that humans have fashioned and then destroyed, but still worth defending as a civilised way in which humans can live together.

In practice a stance of this kind is hardly possible. Liberals cannot do without the faith that they form the vanguard of an advancing way of life. The appeal of John Stuart Mill is that he allows them to preserve this self-image, while the liberal world continues to evaporate around them.

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