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A little over 100 years ago John Stuart Mill wrote in his essay On Liberty that "… there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered." The sentence from which this is taken is not obiter: Chapter Two of his book is devoted to arguments, putatively philosophical in character, which if they were sound would warrant precisely such a conclusion; we have therefore every reason to assume that Mill meant by the sentence just what it says. The topic of Chapter Two is the entire "communications" process in civilized society ("advanced" society, as Mill puts it); and the question he raises is whether there should be limitations on that process. He treats that problem as the central problem of all civilized societies, the one to which all other problems are subordinate, because of the consequences, good or ill, that a society must bring upon itself according as it adopts this or that solution to it. And he has supreme confidence in the Tightness of the solution he offers. Presumably to avoid all possible misunderstanding, he provides several alternative statements of it, each of which makes his intention abundantly clear, namely, that society must be so organized as to make that solution its supreme law. "Fullest," that is, absolute freedom of thought and speech, he asserts by clear implication in the entire argument of the chapter, is not to be one of several competing goods society is to foster, one that on occasion might reasonably be sacrificed, in part at least, to the preservation of other goods; i.e., he refuses to recognize any competing good in the name of which it can be limited.

It is now fashionable, in part because of a recent book by the sci'st-philosopher K. R. Popper, to call the kind of society Mill had in mind in his essay 'On Liberty' an open society by at least implied contrast with a closed society in which Mill's grand principle is not observed. We are still dealing then with Mill's issue: ought there to exist in organized society-the US, e.g.-that 'fullest liberty of professing & discussing'? In fact, Mill's most daring ddmarche (& Popper's) is that of confronting the reader with a series of false dilemmas: unlimited freedom of speech, even for the enemies of freedom of speech, or all-out thought-control; the open society or the closed society, etc. Mill's proposals have as tacit premises unrealistic conceptions of the nature of society & of human beings. Society is not a debating club. Such a society will become intolerant where the pursuit of truth can only come to a halt in name of a conventional scepticism. The question then is not of a choice between an open or a closed society, but of a choice between which of the 2 we accept as an ideal. IPSA.

Reply to an article entitled, The fallacy of absolute majority rule, by Herbert McClosky, and listed in the 1950 P.A.I.S. annual.