As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
In the coming weeks, the entries are in Part I. They are About Leadership.
Today we are turning to John Stuart Mill – of whom critic Adam Gopnik wrote, “Certainly no one has ever been so right about so many things so much of the time as John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth -century English philosopher, politician, and know-it-all nonpareil.”
It’s a lovely, witty, comment, testimony to Mill’s being the quintessential, near perfect, liberal. A champion of equality between and among everyone, everywhere in the world. Which of course has implications for leadership – and followership.
The timeless essay from which I draw below – “On Liberty” – is as vivid testimony to the right to autonomy as anything written in English. It was penned in 1859 by which time, of course, the American and French revolutions had already taken place and the old order ostensibly overthrown. But as the persistence of slavery in the West all too vividly testified, the new order had still to find its footing not just in the United States but in Europe.
In “On Liberty,” Mill speaks to this issue. Specifically, to the work that still had to be done to realize every man’s full potential. And… every woman’s. For Mill was a famous feminist – married, not incidentally, to a famous feminist, Harriet Taylor – almost before there was such a thing.
The essay, or treatise, is not directly about either leaders or followers. Indirectly, however, it is about both. For above all it is an ode to human freedom. Mill’s insistence that “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign,” is as compelling a claim as there is of your right to captain your ship, and my right to captain mine. Mill was not a libertarian. He would not have argued against the role of government, with a few necessarily doing the governing while the many must consent to being governed. Still, he would have insisted that in so far as possible, and in so far as it does not intrude on anyone else, all leaders should give all followers a free hand to live as they see fit.
From “On Liberty” ….
- The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people But if he refrains from molesting others in what concerns them, and merely acts according to his own inclination and judgement in things which concern himself, the same reasons which allow that opinion should be free, prove also that he should be allowed without molestation, to carry out his opinions into practice at his own cost.
- Neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it.
- Considerations to aid his judgment, exhortations to strengthen his will, may be offered to him, even obtruded on him, by others. But he himself is the final judge. All errors which he is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good.