• 1 This article summarises and extends parts of the arguments presented in my Mill and Paternalism (Ca (...)
• 2 His speeches are reprinted in the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 vols, eds. Francis E. Min (...)

1It is well known that John Stuart Mill's early encounter with Owenite socialism shaped much of his subsequent response to socialist and communist criticisms of liberalism.1 Mill first grappled with Owenism during debates at the London Co-operative Society in 1825 on the population question and other issues, when his opponent was Owen's chief rival amongst the early British socialists, the Irish landowner William Thompson, who had resided with Bentham for some fifteen months in 1822-23 and who produced a sophisticated utilitarian interpretation of socialism.2 At this time Mill was resolutely opposed to Owen's communism, and his robust adherence to Ricardian political economy was not dislodged by the confrontation. (Harriet Taylor would later play a major role in amending this prejudice.) He was nonetheless at this point sympathetic to Owen's neo-Malthusianism and atheism, though respecting the latter issue in particular it was well nigh impossible to say so publicly.

• 3 Ryan, Alan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (London, Macmillan, 1987), p. 107, and generally pp. (...)
• 4 Ryan, Alan, John Stuart Mill (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 18.
• 5 Capaldi, Nicholas, John Stuart Mill. A Biography (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. (...)

2During his famous mental "crisis" of 1826-27, however, another consequence of this engagement with Owen's ideas began to haunt Mill. He came to blame his profound depression on his father's systematic over-emphasis on rationality during his education, which he feared had turned him into a reasoning machine incapable of feeling, and equally unable to modify his personality. But he soon realised that this was only a specific instance of applying the general principle that character was formed by the environment, which was also Owen's central doctrine, with the implication that improvements in "circumstances" would ameliorate behaviour. His father's view, adopted from David Hartley in particular, was that in the educational process teachers associated the moral values they sought to inculcate (like publicly-minded behaviour) with pleasures felt by children, and could shape any character accordingly. Mill revolted against the determinist implications of this approach, and came to cherish an idea of self-formation involving an affirmation of free will, which became central to his later outlook. In Alan Ryan's description, Mill felt vulnerable "to the charge that his own character had been made for him by Bentham and James Mill".3 He "never ceased to see Owen's views on the formation of character as a threat to his own doctrine of 'self-culture'".4 Here Owenism thus stood in proxy for a rejection of his father's and Bentham's overly rigid system of education. Mill's response to this was not passive, but active, and he felt compelled to integrate this principle into his philosophy. But Mill only evolved his idea of "self-culture" in reaction to Owenism: they did not confront one another initially. "Self-culture" was thus a response to Owenism, not a doctrine Mill had previously formed. And this reaction was not, as is sometimes asserted, simply because the Owenites de-emphasised individualism. Nicholas Capaldi, for instance, writes that "Owen believed that the source of the workers' problems lay in conditions completely beyond their control, and that the solution to their problems lay in a communal arrangement that deemphasized individuality. This is why it was so important for Mill to argue in favor of autonomy, the ability of individuals to transform their own lives."5 The problem lay rather much more in Owen's view of necessity than in his theories of community.

• 6 Even compendia such as Kane, Robert (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (Oxford, Oxford Univers (...)
• 7 Honderich, Ted, How Free Are You? (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 84.
• 8 Amongst the contemporary responses, Rowland G. Hazard observed that "to answer the Owenites require (...)
• 9 Many well-known studies of Mill and "liberty" generally have very little or nothing to say about th (...)
• 10 Semmel, B., John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue, p. 165.
• 11 "The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to th (...)

3This article considers how Mill's relationship with philosophical necessitarianism, or the idea that character is formed by external circumstances, came to pervade his later thought, and was central to his eventual presentation of the famous theory of liberty outlined in On Liberty, for which he remains best known today. Mill still features in some accounts of the free will debate.6 Some philosophers still experience determinism as an "incubus".7 Mill's engagement with Owenism is however rarely part of these discussions.8 Nor has the scholarly literature on Mill generally probed very far into the issues raised.9 My main argument here extends Bernard Semmel's suggestion that "The conflict between philosophical liberty and necessity, between free will and determinism, was critical to the argument of On Liberty, in keeping with the central role it played in Mill's thought", by providing a more extended discussion of the Owenite background in particular.10 It is contended here that, contrary to the disingenuous disclaimer Mill offers initially in On Liberty,11 which most readers accept at face value, the doctrine of free will is actually central to his case for individuality, and to his defence of social liberty. This was in turn the outcome of a process of deliberation about these issues which had been ongoing since 1826. My concern here is not with the philosophical issues surrounding the free will debate, but more specifically with the imputed moral consequences of a belief in necessitarianism as Owen and Mill understood them. Moreover, a number of leading Owenite writers, notably Charles Bray and Henry Travis, came in turn to respond to Mill's critique of Owen. Their contribution to this debate indicates that Owenites too were conscious of the need to render their position on this issue more sophisticated. Here Mill's view of self-formation proved helpful.

• 12 For the background see Frede, Michael, Free Will. Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought (Univers (...)
• 13 On the eighteenth century context, see Harris, James A., Of Liberty and Necessity. The Free Will De (...)
• 14 O'Connor, D.J., Free Will (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1972), p. 72.
• 15 Collins, Anthony, Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1717) (4th edn, 1749), pp. iii, v
• 16 Priestley, Joseph, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (1777), pp. 74, 76-77, 82, 8 (...)
• 17 Thomas, D. O., The Honest Mind. The Thought and Work of Richard Price (London, Clarendon Press, 197 (...)

4Philosophical necessitarianism had of course long existed as a problem, with free will being posited by Stoic writers.12 Christian debates commence from at least Augustine's discussion of free will, which he held to be severely disrupted by original sin.13 From Thomas Hobbes onwards most writers sought to distinguish free action from acts which were caused and those which were compelled.14 The deist Anthony Collins' influential Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1717) argued against the idea of liberty as "a power in man, to do as he wills, or pleases", offered a brief but powerful defence of necessity defined as being "determined by his reason and his senses", which excluded "such necessity, as is in clocks, watches, and such other beings, which for want of sensation and intelligence are subject to an absolute, physical, or mechanical necessity".15 In the late eighteenth century Joseph Priestley's The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (1777) contended that philosophical necessity and Christianity could be reconciled, and a benevolent God created natural laws aiming eventually at the perfection of humanity. All behaviour was necessary, in the sense that all acts proceeded from causes determined both by materialism and by the deity, so that human beings did not possess free will. Priestley was also much concerned with the consequences of belief in necessity, especially in relation to ideas of reward and punishment. He denied that the doctrine implied "no use or propriety of rewards or punishments", instead arguing that it alone permitted their just use, provided motives for good behaviour followed a "train of proper actions" which permitted the "mechanical structure of the mind" to respond appropriately. Where the idea of "freedom from the certain influence of motives" based on a "self-determining power" "supposed to act in a manner independent of motive" was present, by contrast, no such certain result would follow. Instead the doctrine of the "necessary influence of motives upon the mind of man makes him the proper subject of discipline, reward and punishment, praise and blame".16 Another prominent dissenter, Richard Price, emphasised that free will was essential to attaining redemption.17

• 18 Godwin, William, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (London, Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 335, 357.
• 19 Philp, Mark, Godwin's Political Justice (London, Duckworth, 1986), p. 35.
• 20 Hazlitt, William, The Spirit of the Age, or Contemporary Portraits (4th edn, London, G. Bell and So (...)

5More crucial for Owen, given his close friendship with its author, was the position adopted in William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which also rejected the idea of free will, but without a theological context or justification. In Book 4, Chapter Six, following Jonathan Edwards in particular, Godwin described the doctrine of free will as of "no service to morality", and upheld the idea that all actions were necessary, in the sense that they had causes. Universal natural laws governed all bodies, and it was thus possible to predict human conduct on the basis of knowing what impressions were at work in forming and modifying the personality, which was the result of all the impressions made upon it, and which made it impossible for anyone to act in a manner different from that which such causes indicated. Morally this implied the very limited use of punishment as a deterrent, as opposed to a clear presentation of the best course of action to uphold the public good, and promoted a calm and dispassionate treatment of others in which blame was absent.18 This line of reasoning, Mark Philp contends, led Godwin to atheism.19 It also became one of the most famous and influential parts of Political Justice, with William Hazlitt later reporting that an enthusiastic young William Wordsworth had said, "'Throw aside your books of chemistry … and read Godwin on Necessity'."20

• 21 Godwin, W., Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, pp. 355-7.

6Even more important for Owen were the "Inferences from the Doctrine of Necessity" which Godwin outlined in a separate chapter. If all behaviour was necessary and individuals were absolved from responsibility for their actions, blaming people for anything was clearly wrong. Rather than exhorting others to virtue, someone could only show an "exhibition of motives to the pursuit of a certain end, and the delineation of the easiest and most effectual way of attaining that end." "Constancy" and "a spirit of neutrality and indifference" would result once it was realised that it was useless to admonish others for their failings. "It is common for men impressed with the opinion of free will, to entertain resentment, indignation, and anger against those who fall into the commission of vice", insisted Godwin. And this meant that "the doctrine of necessity will teach us to look upon punishment with no complacence, and at all times to prefer the most direct means of encountering error, the development of truth."21 This principle was to become central to Owen's system, as the moral underpinning of a society which rejected anger, violence, and aggression.

• 22 Priestley was a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, to which Owen was elec (...)

7As is well known, Owen befriended Godwin, meeting him more than fifty times between 1813-18. Whether or not Owen had encountered necessitarianism beforehand remains a moot point, though since he moved in Unitarian circles in Manchester in the 1790s this seems highly likely.22 Godwin's doctrine of necessity, and behind it Hartley's associationism, became Owen's starting-point in the formulation of his doctrine of the formation of character, and indeed the bedrock of his entire system. The thrust of Owen's idea was that people lacked any personal responsibility for their character, which instead resulted from environmental influences. In an early formulation of this oft-repeated premise he insisted that

• 26 Owen, R., Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 181.
• 27 Owen, R., Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 83.

10The key target, here, of course, was the Christian idea of original sin and the use of this ideal - still familiar to us today - to rationalise poverty by condemning the poor for their basic immorality, thus excusing all inequality. This attack was central to his intellectual strategy. Owen thought religion was "the most material of all those circumstances, in influencing the formation of his matured character."26 "Character" was not fixed and indelible, much less naturally evil: it was produced by the environment. Owen's counter-proposal, and the foundation of what by 1820 he would call his "social system", later shortened to "socialism", was based on the idea of the malleability of human character and behaviour, such that "'children collectively may be taught any sentiments and habits' or, in other words, 'trained to acquire any character'".27

• 28 Owen, R., Selected Works, vol. 4, p. 8.

11It was Godwin's deductions as to the likely consequences of a belief in necessitarianism which most interested Owen, however. The first was that ceasing to blame individuals for their behaviour would bring a calming influence. Owen described in his own case that once he had understood the theory, "My mind, in consequence, gradually became calm and serene, and anger and ill-will died within me."28 Secondly, punishment was no longer sensible. At his cotton mill at New Lanark Owen first began practising the abolition of punishment. To combat pilfering,

• 30 Owen, R., Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 68.
• 31 Mill's disciple Alexander Bain would later term this view "modified fatalism" (Mental and Moral Sci (...)
• 32 Owen, R., Selected Works, vol. 1, pp. 8-9.
• 33 Owen, R., Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 312.

12At New Lanark Owen was a pioneer in the education of factory children, opening the Institution for the Formation of Character in 1816. Here children were "taught and trained in the institution for forming their character without any punishment". It was thus "the essence of irrationality to suppose that any human being, from the creation to this day, could deserve praise or blame, reward or punishment, for the prepossessions of early education."30 This was thereafter a central doctrine in Owenism. But Owen was not a fatalist, since his conception of character included the premise that circumstances could be ameliorated.31 The presumption that an improvement in "circumstances" would produce an amelioration in "character" was however not more extensively developed by him. It left much to be desired in describing how choice and agency might work, and in explaining how individuals could readily embrace one course of action over another. But Owen did concede (here in 1812) that "we can materially command those circumstances which influence character", citing as an example the possibility of providing "a speedy and radical improvement in society" by giving a "rational education … to all those in the lower walks of life", such that "the character of the whole community will rise many degrees; and, while none can suffer by this measure, all must be essentially benefited." He added that "But this cannot be effected by individual exertion. It requires our collective force to accomplish it; and fortunately this will be found equal to its attainment."32 This left open the question as to just how far individuals participated in the process of self-formation. Superficially, at least, their role seemed negligible. "Society" was the agent Owen usually cited where the creation of "new circumstances" was concerned, and he looked forward to a time when "society shall be taught to govern circumstances".33 The process by which this would take place simply involved becoming acquainted with the new science of circumstances:

• 35 Owen, R., Selected Works, vol. 2, pp. 58, 62, 65.
• 36 Owen, R., Selected Works, vol. 2, p. 97.

13This hinted at individual agency, but no more. Owen asserted of "the overwhelming influence of circumstances over human nature" that "it is most evident that the individual has not the smallest control in all this, for in fact, he possesses nothing of his own creation", and that "man ever has been the creature of the particular faculties, qualities, and propensities, which he has been forced to receive at birth, and of the circumstances in which he has been forced to exist after birth. Man therefore never was, nor can he ever become a free agent or a responsible being… he does not in any degree form himself, physically or mentally, and therefore cannot be a free or responsible agent ". This makes it clear that a fatalist conclusion could be reached from his central doctrine.35 Indeed he thought "the doctrine of free-will and responsibility is not only implicitly believed in by the great mass of mankind, but is considered as the very foundation stone of the social fabric."36 So to concede much ground on this point could undermine his central argument. Only rarely would Owen project how intellectual ability might serve to show how "circumstances" would evolve in the future:

• 40 Packe, M., The Life of John Stuart Mill, p. 265.

16As Mill's leading biographer, Michael Packe, expressed it, Mill initially "found himself in a dilemma. If the will of man was subject to causation, how could a man be held responsible for his actions? Since every effect must have a cause, his volitions were determined by circumstances beyond his own control, by his upbringing and education, by his mental and physical condition."40 This was a very personal issue; Mill felt that he had successfully resisted becoming what it appeared his father had intended to make him, a mere reasoning machine. If he could change, and remake his own character, this needed to be generalised at the theoretical level, as some variant of free will. 

• 41 Ryan, A., The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, p. 118.

17In Mill's account, necessity implies that all actions result from causes, while fatalism further contends that struggling against such actions is useless since they will occur inevitably. Fatalism thus became Mill's key target. Owenism was and is often identified with it, and portrayed as proposing the view that we cannot alter our characters; Alan Ryan for instance writes of the "overbold Owenite argument that we cannot change (even if we want to)".41 Yet this argument, which if true doubtless would have hampered Owenism's intellectual development, since it sought social change on an extraordinarily wide scale, is clearly exaggerated. Certainly many Owenites were not able to explain adequately how the agency of social change was to be activated, beyond Owen's personal and often paternalistic leadership. Some more educated Owenites, like Charles Bray and Henry Travis, we will see, however, recognised the difficulties of Owen's overly crude formulation of the doctrine, and tried to establish an ideal of self-formation, in Travis's case in response to Mill himself. For the Owenites were not in fact fatalists, no matter how crudely their foundational principle was formulated. And ironically, what Owenism came to mean for many was in fact a doctrine of collective self-organisation, or co-operation, an expression of working-class consciousness manifesting itself as an empowering will to act. Far from implying passivity, thus, it had for many the very reverse effect.

• 42 Mill, J.S., On Liberty, p. 7.
• 43 Mill, J.S., On Liberty, p. 103.
• 44 Mill, J.S., Collected Works, vol. 10, p. 488.

18What is notable about the narrative Mill offered in the Autobiography is that he did not draw attention to the impact of his recrafting of necessitarianism for On Liberty, where indeed at the outset, as we have seen, he explicitly denied that the doctrine of free will was at issue, describing instead its subject instead as the defence of "Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual".42 Yet what Victorian and many subsequent readers often took to be the core of On Liberty, the defence of individuality, in fact relies on an idea of the self-formation of character. It is not only crucial to Mill's doctrine of liberty as such, but was his most explicit deduction from the bruising encounter with necessitarianism in 1826. On Liberty was thus in fact centrally concerned with the doctrine of free will. Individuality was precisely the assertion of the doctrine of self-formation, which was the expression of the "'individual vigour and manifold diversity,' which combine themselves in 'originality'" (quoting from Wilhelm von Humboldt).43 This "originality" represented a summing up of Mill's fears about the prospect of the inevitable triumph of mass democracy, which he had expressed since the early 1830s, notably in his brief essay "On Genius" (1831), and which had been bolstered by his reading of Tocqueville in the mid '30s. His defence of the necessity of a progressive elite, educated minority would be central to the politics of the Considerations on Representative Government (1861), and to the philosophy of Utilitarianism (1863), where it was presented chiefly in the form of the superiority of the "higher" to the "lower" pleasures. So the defence of free will was not only central to On Liberty: it represented the wedding of Mill's social and political with his moral philosophy. To defend a free society meant that we had to be capable of freedom individually, which meant we had to possess a free will. Mill came to believe that morality involved a constant struggle between good and evil, such that, as he put it in his essay, "Theism", "a battle is constantly going on, in which the humblest human creature is not incapable of taking some part, between the powers of good and those of evil, and in which every even the smallest help to the right side has its value in promoting the very slow and often almost insensible progress by which good is gradually gaining ground from evil". This postulate in Mill's view was "the most animating and invigorating thought which can inspire a human creature".44

• 45 He wrote in 1860, before crossing the passage out, that "the chapter on Free Will & Necessity, to w (...)

19To clarify the process by which Mill reached this position we need briefly to summarise his approach to these arguments fifteen years earlier, in his best known statement of the subject. In Book 6, chapter 2 of A System of Logic, on "the Logic of the Moral Sciences", Mill reflected on what value the philosophy of necessity might have. The chapter "Of Liberty and Necessity", which he considered the best part of the book, laid out his views as they had evolved since 1826.45 Here Mill established that the choice lay between the

• 51 Mill, J.S., A System of Logic, vol. 2, p. 489.

24Mill now considered that "the doctrine of the causation of our volitions by motives, and of motives by the desirable objects offered to us, combined with our particular susceptibilities of desire" was "sufficiently established".51 Determining that some part of our behaviour lay under our control so long as we willed it did not prevent the generalisation that a knowledge of circumstances could still permit the forecasting of behaviour, however. "We are exactly as capable", Mill asserted in the Logic, "of making our own character,

• 53 Mill, J.S., A System of Logic, vol. 2, p. 576.

25This was true collectively as well as individually, that is to say, as sociology as well as psychology. Mill (in)famously here later attempted to plot what these sciences might look like, describing the "science of the formation of character" as "ethology", and "political ethology" as "the science of the causes which determine the type of character belonging to a people or to an age."53 The magnitude of the task of ascertaining how causes formed collective character, however, led him to abandon the task of ever setting out such general principles at length. He was particularly interested in the motives which offset an obsessive desire for accumulating wealth, as the latter was more prominent in Britain and America than in continental nations. Mill's vision of the future, particularly as outlined in the Principles of Political Economy (1848), hinted at a necessary shift here towards the continental and away from the Anglo-American model. Here he sought to explain why some nations (notably France, which he knew well) sought greater leisure, pleasure, culture, and the enjoyment of life, whilst others - chiefly Britain and America - concentrated on money-making, which to Mill produced an inferior experience of life.

• 54 See my "'Individualism', 'Socialism', and 'Social Science': Further Notes on Process of Conceptual (...)
• 55 In his 1854 diary: The Letters of John Stuart Mill (2 vols, London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1910), v (...)

26Necessitarianism thus had two main implications for Mill by 1843. On the one hand, the assertion of definite social laws respecting the formation of character alone made a "social science" possible. This had already been present in Owenism, which popularised this phrase from the mid 1820s onwards.54 On the other, the assertion of free will alone made virtue possible. Both positions, Mill remarked in 1854, "rightly understood", were true, since "It is necessary, that is, it was inevitable from the beginning of things, that I should freely will whatever things I do will".55 If there were no ascertainable pattern to human behaviour, no social science could exist. But if people were not capable of choice over at least some of their actions, virtue was impossible.

• 56 Mill, J.S., On Liberty, p. 111.
• 57 See my John Stuart Mill, pp. 104-111. The term "secularism" was coined by his Owenite friend George (...)

27More successful than the vain attempt to elaborate on the concept of ethology was the exposition of the idea of the self-formation of character in On Liberty, which would become Mill's best-known account of the process. As we have seen, Mill denied in his Introductory chapter that the book concerns "the so-called Liberty of the Will". The chapter on Individuality, however, reveals that exercising our will freely is actually central to Mill's argument, for this alone makes virtue and intellectual progress possible. A key focus here is "the Calvinistic theory", where "the one great offence of man is Self-will. All the good of which humanity is capable, is comprised in Obedience [...]. Human nature being radically corrupt, there is no redemption for any one until human nature is killed within him."56 As with Owen, thus, one main target here is the paralysing idea of original sin - and we should recall that Mill was a secularist avant la lettre, although he was often compelled to disguise his beliefs.57 For Mill the antidote to the passive implications of such doctrines is "Pagan self-assertion", and the free development of human capacities. This process centres on the development of individuality, the cultivation of genius and originality, and an avoidance of the collective mediocrity of the masses and of the "despotism of custom". On Liberty was of course centrally concerned with defending the freedoms of opinion and action which would assist this individuality, but tends today to be associated more with the former than the latter ideals. Individuality, however, not merely required, but was essentially defined by the exercise of free will, without which the self-formation of character was impossible. Merely following custom and tradition implied the passive formation of character:

• 59 Mill, J.S., On Liberty, pp. 105-6.

28By contrast individual spontaneity implied a capacity and willingness to act against the views predominating at any one time: "He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice [...]. He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties."59 Not everyone, however, was capable of exercising this choice:

• 61 Mill, J.S., On Liberty, p. 121.

29A few, however, were capable of exercising "genius, mental vigour, and moral courage". 61 These few could act as beacons to the rest, who should nonetheless, Mill observed, with Carlyle's doctrine of the hero in mind, not passively follow them, but rather endeavour to think through the consequences of their thoughts and actions themselves.

• 64 Mill, J.S., Collected Works, vol. 8, p. 841 (Logic).
• 65 Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism (Parker, Son, and Bourne, 1863), p. 23.
• 66 Ryan, Allan, On Politics (London, Allen Lane, 2012), p. 708.

33Mill's mature position, then, reworked in the Logic, On Liberty, and his response to Hamilton, asserted that the progress of civilisation depended on the ability of an educated or talented minority to possess "character", meaning both the ability, and willingness, to craft our own personality and the ability to choose virtue over vice. A Stoic form of "self-command", or self-mastery, captures both of these attributes. For so long as we remain at the mercy of desires which we cannot control, we are not "free". "And hence", Mill said in the 1868 edition of the Logic, "it is said with truth that none but a person of confirmed virtue is completely free."64 And we should also recall here that in Utilitarianism (1863), Mill wrote that the "highest virtue which can be found in man" was to "serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own".65 Such a sacrifice of course required great awareness of the possibility of exercising free will, and of the choices involved. Doubtless Mill presumed that the educated minority were tasked with making just such a sacrifice, though he expressed scepticism on various occasions about their capacity to do so as a group. But an essentially republican ideal of self-government required just such sacrifices from its rulers. And this notion of personal sacrifice for the common good gelled with Owenism's demand for deferral to the greater social good. Mill's utilitarianism was, Alan Ryan insists, secular and universalist, and Mill like the Owenites relied on conscience to carry much of the burden of the enforcement of norms.66 His revised utilitarianism can thus be conceived as indebted to Owenism in part.

• 67 Haslam, C.J., A Defence of the Social Principles (1838), p. 8.
• 68 Holyoake, George Jacob, Rationalism (J. Watson, 1845), p. 42, quoted in Claeys, Gregory, ed., Oweni (...)

34Surprisingly little has been written on Owenite attempts to grapple with the implications of necessitarianism, and even less on how it triangulates with Mill's engagement with the issue. Owenites were fond of claiming that their central principle had a calming effect on those who adopted it. The lecturer C. J. Haslam, for instance, noted that "The moment a man embraces our principles, that moment he is stripped of anger and revenge for ever. That moment his feelings are reversed, and this is effected by him believing in the irresponsibility of man, which, they say, is a doctrine so dangerous".67 Others, however, claimed that it made Owen's followers unduly passive, and uncritical. Holyoake, for instance, complained that "an audience of English communists who eschew praise and blame, are as free from animation as Egyptian mummies. They are very obliging but are very mute. Truth and falsehood, right and wrong, are received by them with the same respectful attention".68

• 69 Bray, Charles, Phases of Opinion and Experience During a Long Life (Longmans, Green & Co., 1884), p (...)
• 70 Bray, Charles, The Philosophy of Necessity (Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1863), pp. 422-23.

35The most impressive contribution to the Owenite debate over necessity came from the Coventry ribbon manufacturer, Charles Bray (1811-84), who published a two-volume account of it entitled The Philosophy of Necessity; or, The Law of Consequences; As Applicable to Mental, Moral, and Social Science (1842), with a 2nd edition appearing in 1863 with the title, The Philosophy of Necessity; or, Natural law as Applicable to Moral, Mental, and Social Science. Bray's 1884 autobiography confronted Mill's mental crisis directly, and declared himself in perfect agreement with the harm principle in Mill's On Liberty.69 He did not mention Mill in the first edition of The Philosophy of Necessity, but paid homage to On Liberty in the second.70

• 71 There is a brief discussion of his activities in Harrison, J.F.C., Robert Owen and the Owenites in (...)
• 72 Travis, Henry, Moral Freedom Reconciled with Causation (Longmans, Green & Co., 1865), pp. 16-17, 19 (...)
• 73 Bain, Alexander, On the Study of Character (Parker and Son, 1861), p. 13.

36The second Owenite writer to tackle these issues was Henry Travis (1807-84), a Scarborough physician who became Owen's lieutenant in his later years.71 Travis thought Owen's approach to necessity flawed, and believed it was at least partly responsible for the failure of the great communitarian effort at Queenwood, Hampshire (1839-45), going further than Bray on this issue. In Moral Freedom Reconciled with Causation (1865) Travis argued instead for a measure of free will and a "power of self-determination", engaging extensively with Mill on the question, and, while faulting Mill too for insufficiently grasping the issue, agreeing that the crude necessitarian view that there was no self-determination was erroneous. He also took issue with a central deduction of Owen's, against the justice of punishment, contending that Mill's defence of punishment was untenable, while nonetheless conceding that an aversion to punishment could well serve as a motive to good conduct before punishment could be eventually abolished.72 A few other efforts to develop Mill's account of ethology occurred, notably by one of his foremost disciples, Alexander Bain, whose On the Study of Character (1861) reduced the problem to "the art of Education, in the widest sense of the term, including the formation of national or collective character, as well as individual."73

• 74 Harrison, J.F.C., Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America, p. 243.
• 75 Rees, J.C., Mill and His Early Critics (University College, Leicester, 1956), p. 8.

37For most readers it may well be the case, as J. F. C. Harrison wrote some fifty years ago, that "Today the paradox of free will and determinism with which Bray and Travis wrestled seems sterile and remote."74 In an age where "fake news" and propaganda are often central to our understanding of reality, this issue may take on a more contemporary relevance. Nonetheless the momentousness of this debate to Mill's development is unquestionable. The idea of a free will was central to the key doctrine of individuality in On Liberty. Possessing a free will meant being able to challenge mere custom and tradition, and thinking for oneself. This alone permitted the forward progressive movement of any society, which would otherwise fall into a condition of stasis and immobility. The doctrine of the self-formation of character was thus at the root of the defence of the concept of individuality, which is in turn the key argument in On Liberty as a whole, which the text centrally defends against the conformity and mediocrity of modern society. Nor was the problem marginal to social theory in the coming years: the free will problem is still a staple of philosophic discourse. Mill's "incubus", or nightmare, turned out to furnish plentiful philosophic inspiration from 1826 onwards. His attempt to confront its implications provided the basis for his mature moral, social and political philosophy. The necessitarian accusation that he was himself nothing other than the creation of circumstances produced the most robust defence of liberty and free will of the epoch. It may well be, as J. C. Rees has written, that "No conclusions about the free-will problem entail any particular theory of civil or political liberty".75 But in Mill's case, certainly, the affirmation of free will helped to spawn western liberalism's best known defence of liberty. Would that all bad dreams were so productive.