One can find passages in Mill's writings that suggest he was a skeptic about the very possibility of an art of government. But some of the works that endured endorse the art, and even suggest it, as above, that it is a "comprehensive science." In Mill, this tends to mean, amongst other things, that it is a body of rules (see System of Logic). But in the quoted passage he also emphasizes that these involve certain "doctrines."
In virtue of the fact that these rules are context insensitive, Mill is willing to call these rules a 'science.' Presumably the rules, which are built on a body of empirical generalizations (in the indicative), have the character of (what he and his followers) would call 'imperative statements' (recall this post). These have the task of providing one the means for given ends, that is, a kind of instrumental or conditional rationality. This is actually something meta, because government itself has this kind of instrumental rationality baked into its purpose according to Mill; it exists (no surprise here given his utilitarianism) to promote "the interests of any given society."
Interestingly enough, and this anticipates Foucault's observation (recall here) on the liberal art of government as such in the first few sentences of the Birth of Biopolitics, for Mill there is a version of the art 'which is best under a free government.' Now undoubtedly he does not mean to say, in the first instance, that this is the optimal art of government, but in the second instance he notes that is best sans phrase. It turns out that there is a normative art of government that would be context invariant.
Obviously, I overstate Mill's explicit position. As the ancients teach there are more modes of tyrannical government, where, as he notes, the normative art of government is impossible by definition because it would be self-underming ("A government...so bad in itself, or so opposed to public feeling, as to be unable to maintain itself in existence by honest means").* But what Mill calls a 'free constitution' and an 'absolute monarchy' do not exhaust the non-tyrannical options. (By a 'free constitution' Mill means something like what we call a 'liberal democracy' to considerable degree.) I return to this issue below. But Mill allows (and there are echoes of Hume here), that good government is, in principle, possible in an absolute monarchy even if it is rare in practice.
I take it that the 'art of government' just is, for Mill, well grounded skill at what he calls 'the practical business of government.' And this happens to be subdivided into a whole number of practical disciplines commonly taught we might surmise in law schools ("General jurisprudence, civil and penal legislation") and public policy or and/or economics departments ("financial and commercial policy.") The point is not just that within the art of government there is a cognitive division of labor, specialization, but also that these disciplines are ultimately subordinate to a larger purpose.
Some of you may be eager to remind me that strictly speaking the art of government is not really context insensitive. Mill quite clearly presupposes something like a distinction between advanced civilization, and those cultures that still require some tutelage. As he puts it at the start of the chapter that I have been quoting, "the proper functions of a government are not a fixed thing, but different in different states of society; much more extensive in a backward than in an advanced state." This stadial idea of cultural development is deeply woven into Mill's social theory (and, obviously, is a part of his support for a certain kind of reformed imperialism.) Strictly speaking, and this is a further strain of elitism in Mill, only those that would have to apply the art of government need to 'advance' to the level familiar from civilized culture.
As an aside, every time I confront these features of Mill's thought I always despair a little bit for the liberal tradition. But I also find in it a salutary lesson that great moral sensitivity is compatible with great obtuseness, and this should make us skeptical in our dispositions about our own certitudes. (No, I won't preach more of my skepticism today.)
Be that as it may, somewhat paradoxically, where the art of government is most needed (the underdeveloped state), according to Mill, because there government must have many functions, it is unavailable because (to put in modern slightly more neutral terms, well only slightly) of a lack of human capital to develop and implement it. Mill himself uses puts it as follows: "the most important point of excellence which any form of government can possess is to promote the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves." So, lurking here is the idea that real development presupposes considerable state capacity and expertise that rests on considerable human capital. And as a people develop government functions disappear or wither away. (I put it like that because there is something analogous in Marxism.) A nation of super-intelligent spinozist sages would not need any government. But the tragedy of human life (and development) is, on Mill's view, that (knowledgeable) investment in human capital only really gets going after decent enough government has been achieved.
For Mill, "one criterion of the goodness of a government, the degree in which it tends to increase the sum of good qualities in the governed, collectively and individually, since, besides that their well-being is the sole object of government, their good qualities supply the moving force which works the machinery [of government]." When I started this post, I wanted to say something about how we can discern here in Mill a response to Tocqueville but about that some time more. I do note that we can see here some non-trivial kinship between Becker and Stigler and Mill. So, when discussing the programming of human capital by Chicago, Foucault's tendency to treat Becker and Stigler as the natural culmination and intensification of the utilitarian-philosophical-radical traditon (in context Mill is clear that his views on this point have an affinity with Bentham's) is actually well grounded. (I have a suspicion that Halevy and Lepage have something to do with this. But again, some other time more.)
One element of the art of government is guided by the following doctrine (which looks back to Hume and Spinoza and Madison): "The ideally perfect constitution of a public office is that in which the interest of the functionary is entirely coincident with his duty." And this, for Mill, scales up to what Rawls calls the 'basic institutions:' "What we have said of the arrangements for the detailed administration of the government is still more evidently true of its general constitution. All government which aims at being good is an organization of some part of the good qualities existing in the individual members of the community for the conduct of its collective affairs."
That is, we may say then, that Mill divides what we can call political theory/philosophy in two. One is engaged with the basic structure or as he puts it, the "fundamental constitution of the government." This is institutional design. (Recall this post.) And the other, is the art of government, that is, the understanding of the mode of conducting the practical business of government, Obviously, there is an important connection between the two because there are going to be many interaction effects between them. While it is tempting to see the designing of the 'fundamental constitution' as the more important institution (since it molds the rest), as the argument above has revealed, without the proper clay it won't get off the ground. And so that means that, in practice, the constitution, and even the most general principles that enter into the art of government must respect context. (The rest of the chapter articulates this very point.) In this chapter, Mill treats the art of government as part of political philosophy.**
Here I want to close with an observation. One may well think in light of the significance of professional schools above, that fundamentally the art of government is something technocratic for Mill. But I don't think that's quite right. Not only because of the ways in which empirical and normative elements blend in it. For the aim of the art is something programmatic: the capacity to articulate and implement modes of government that "favor and promote, not some one improvement, but all forms and degrees of it." And while that presupposes an ideal constitution, which is to be developed theoretically, it also presupposes a program of open-ended intellectual, moral, and social progress in our capacities for (and this is the significance of my Spinozist joke above), self-government.
*Sidgwick and (recall) Peter Singer (with De Lazari‐Radek) notably deny that honest means are really necessary in the way Mill assumes.
** As regular readers know, my view is that as political economy and philosophy split apart, the art of government fell between the cracks and became a Kuhn loss. And some other time I return to this.
Comments