Reviewing Richard Reeves's new book on Mill, David Marquand concludes by expressing his doubts about the value of Mill's On Liberty for the 21st century. Mill's principal target, Marquand argues, was the tyranny of opinion, and the conformism it led to in Victorian society; but what he wrote is not so apt to our own times:
In a sense, there are no longer any deviant opinions or lifestyles to be intolerant about: there are no fixed standards to deviate from. There is only a cacophony of divergent voices.This seems to me wrong in at least two ways. First, moral and political principles are needed not only in order to achieve certain desirable objectives, but also to defend them once they've been won. Such gains are never definitive. When religious fanatics threaten death against others for not respecting their beliefs, and when even in would-be liberal circles the argument is often heard that principles of free speech might have to be restrained in the light of a requirement not to offend other people, Mill's principles remain very much to the point. Second, they are applicable in the area in which Marquand himself holds there is now a threat to individual liberty - that is, in thinking about what the state may and may not legitimately forbid.