The State Of Freedom And Institutional Guarantee - An Interpretation Of Mill 's "Freedom" And "Representative Government"

Freedom, an eternal topic of human society,is the common pursuit of human rationality and spiritual yearning, and liberalism is also the mainline that runs through the history of western political philosophy and the dominant project that drives contemporary human to explore repeatedly.As one of the most famous political thinker of liberalism in the 19th century, John Mill has always occupied the important position in the history of western liberalism thought. On the one hand, Mill inherited the basic standpoint of classical liberalism, taking the preservation and realization of individual freedom as the core of liberalism thought.On the other hand, he carried on and amended Bentham’the utilitarianism thought, inspecting the original status of liberalism from the perspective of utilitarianism.It is these theories that made Mill’s liberalism thought to be a transitional bridge from classical liberalism to new liberalism. As a key turning point in the history of development of liberalism, Mill’s liberalism thought has important theory value and practical significance, which is worth of research. It is no doubt that there are also some obvious flaws due to its inherent class limitation and time mark, which is more worth of identification.This article was divided into six parts:Part One:It focused on the historical background and thought origin of liberalism thought. In the 19th century, the rapid development of England economy required to expand the scope of freedom further, meanwhile, the growth of working class brought about that people demanded for universal suffrage. Based on the inheritance and amendment of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism thought, Mill absorbed the reasonable elements of Locke’s liberalism thought to integrate a complete theory.Part Two:It mainly introduced the basic of Mill’s liberalism thought——utilitarianism. Mill pushed the relationship of freedom and utilitarian closer by inheriting and amending Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism thought, advocating the protection of personal freedom and the realization of social progress.Part Three:It is the main part of this article, which inspected the content and motive of Mill’s liberalism thought, based on the detail interpretation of Mill’s On Liberty.This part elaborated emphatically that freedom of thought and freedom of expression is the absolute field of liberty issue and the kernel of freedom theory, then it discussed Mill’s freedom view of human nature and some contents concerning "social authority".Part Four:What this part talked out was institutional guarantees of Mill’s liberty issue, which probed into Mill’s multidimensional propositions related to "representative government" in his liberalism thought. In his view, representative government is the most competent government type that can guarantee personal freedom and promote personal progress.Part Five:It is another purport of this article, which compared Mill’s freedom views with Marx’s. Based on expounding Marx’s freedom views briefly, this part placed extra emphasis on two aspects, the standpoint of freedom and the core of freedom, to analyze and compare so that the author found out the theory heterogeneity of these two views.Part Six:It evaluated briefly the modern value of Mill’s liberalism political thought.The author analyzed the theory significance of Mill’s liberalism thought and its enlightenment to China’s political civilization construction, at the same time, it also pointed out some congenital deficiencies of this theory.