Thread by @delong

@ebruenig #actually, "liberal" was used by John Stuart Mill to mean something very close to what modern Americans mean by "liberal", as opposed to "libertarian". John Stuart Mill did not believe that libertarian "negative liberty" was it, and that "freedom" was overwhelmingly freedom 1/

@ebruenig from Big Gummit requiring that you, say, entertain offers to buy your house from Black people. The passage from Mill I like comes from his _Principles of Political Economy_, talking about the poverty of the world circa 1870: "Hitherto, it is questionable if all the mechanical 2/

@ebruenig inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the 3/

@ebruenig middle classes..."

The word that stands out to me is "imprisonment": The world Mill saw as of 1870 was not just a world of drudgery—a world in which humans had to work long and tiring hours at crafts and tasks that came nowhere near to being sufficiently interesting to engage 4/

@ebruenig the full brainpower of an East African Plains Ape. The world Mill saw was not just a world in which most people were close to the edge of being desperately hungry, and were justifiably anxious about where their 2000 calories a day were going to come from next year—or next 5/

@ebruenig week. The world Mill saw was not just a world of low literacy—where most could only access the collective human store of knowledge, ideas, and entertainments partially and slowly. The world Mill saw was a world in which humanity was _imprisoned_: not free, in a dungeon, 6/

@ebruenig chained and fettered by their poverty—and the resulting absence of _positive liberty_. And all the _negative liberty_ of "On Liberty" in the world did not help relieve that _imprisonment_ of the overwhelming majority of us East African Plains Apes back then.

Now today's 7/

@ebruenig "libertarians" pretend that J.S. Mill was as profoundly stupid as they were—that negative liberty is it and only it. But this is an ahistorical and profoundly faulty reading of at least the smart nineteenth-century liberals, unless you are going to say that John Stuart Mill 8/

@ebruenig was No True <strike>Scotsman</strike> **19th Century Liberal**.

Thus I think you are feeding the bad guys (or at least the highly confused guys) here in using "liberal" to mean something other than "somebody not-stupid who believes that both positive and negative liberty 9/

@ebruenig are very important things". You can do that—say that John Stuart Mill was really not a liberal but a socialist, and that the only true liberals are people like Friedrich von Hayek with his love of Augusto Pinochet and Chile's Lykourgan Moment, and Ludwig von Mises with his 10/

@ebruenig praise of the Eternal Glory won by Mussolini via his murder-by-imprisonment of people like Antonio Gramsci. But I'm gonna line up with Mill here. & I think you should rectify your meanings and join us... 11/END