Student Question
What does Mill identify as the difference between modern life and the past?
Quick answer:
Mill states that the modern world differs from the past in that people are free to employ their faculties, and such favorable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.
In The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill argues that physical force has been the primary determinant of power and authority since time immemorial. While he delves into cultural and social distinctions among different eras, his overall conclusion is that the vast difference in physical abilities explains what he views as universal male domination over women. He contends that his pointing out this “universal” custom should not be taken as an endorsement of its validity, and should not “create any prejudice, in favour of the arrangements which place women in social and political subjection to men.” Quite the contrary, Mill asserts. What he identifies as “the course of history” not only fails to support the “inequality of rights” between men and women, but in fact presents a strong “presumption… against it.”
Noting that there has been a continuous “course of human improvement” until the current age, he states that...
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the “whole stream of modern tendencies” indicate that such inequality is a “relic of the past [that] is discordant with the future”: he predicts its disappearance.
Mill then enumerates his vision of what is “peculiar” about the modern world’s character, which is that people are neither born into a specific place in life nor are they fixed to such a place. This difference is what
chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past.
Instead of being “chained down” to their born station, human beings are now
free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.
He further likens the former fixed distinctions between males and females to those between whites and blacks, slaves and freemen, and patricians and plebeians. Mill argues strongly for great personal liberty, seeing regulation as useful only to the extent it protects others’ rights:
The modern conviction…is, that things in which the individual is the person directly interested, never go right but as they are left to his own discretion; and that any regulation of them by authority, except to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous.
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