An interview with Professor Hongtu Li
By Ross Carroll, Dario Castiglione, Junqing Wu
Hongtu Li is a Professor of intellectual history at Fudan University and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Intellectual Research at East China Normal University. His publications include in particular: De la Liberté John. Stuart Mill et la naissance du libéralisme (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2021), Vision of Ideas (Commercial Press,2020) in Chinese; as co-editor, The Study of Global Intellectual History. Volume 1 (Social Science Academic Press, 2019) in Chinese, Chine France – Europe Asie, Itinéraires de concepts (Rued’Ulm, 2018).
Ross Carroll: In the introduction to your book, you say that you will explore Mill’s “intellectual trajectory” [trajectoire intellectuel]. Could you tell us something about your own intellectual trajectory? How did you come to work on Mill? And how did you come to adopt the methodology of Cambridge School contextualism?
Hongtu Li: My study on Mill’s liberal thoughts has undergone two periods. The first lasted from 1993 to 2005, and I turned to the study of European liberalism after having finished my book on European nationalism. I began to read some works such as Tocqueville and Mill. During the meantime, I was also lecturing undergraduates in a course on classics of European thoughts and guiding the students in intensive reading of Mill’s On Liberty. In 2007, I published a book entitled From Power to Right: A Study on Modern European Liberalism. Two years late, I published another book, An Intensive Reading of Mill’s On Liberty, which is an introductory work to Mill’s text. It includes my thoughts and understanding during my teaching. After the publication, however, I felt much was left untouched for future exploration.
Since 2015, my research has entered a new stage. In that year, I won financial assistance from the Fudan Guanghua Fund, which sponsored a scholar trip to Cambridge for three months. My plan was to take this chance to read some books. On my reading list were William MacCall’s Elements of individualism and Josiah Warren’s works on individual sovereignty, Mill mentioned these books. After my reading these works, I am raising more questions to be answered. One question is: why did Mill write On Liberty? I try to provide a possible explanation, and I think that I should adopt the contextualist method of the Cambridge School to study.
During this period, I had published some articles, and now, the research is still on. My goal is to publish a book on the text of Mill’s On Liberty.
Ross Carroll: You offer a very interesting and novel interpretation of Mill’s canonical text On Liberty, one that takes Mill’s personal life seriously as a backdrop to his intellectual life. Central to this interpretation is the concept of “social stigma” [le stigmate social]. You even make the intriguing suggestion that Mill wrote this book partly to counter the social stigma that he and Harriet Taylor Mill encountered as a result of their relationship. How important was the influence of Harriet Taylor Mill to the formulation of Mill’s argument in On Liberty? Should we consider her as a kind of co-author of the work?
Hongtu Li: The available literature on Mill’s On Liberty deals mostly with the analysis of its content, which I think is of great value in understanding the themes of the book. After an extensive reading of related materials, however, I realised that the text can also be seen as his own self-defence. The text is highly logical and articulate. Considering his life experience, I discovered that his arguments are based on Mill’s relationship with Harriet. For instance, Mill mentioned concepts such as “private life”, “social stigma”, “enemy of society”, and “moral police”, and pointed out that one who lives a life in his or her own way in defiance of social norms will be treated as an enemy of society and his life will be made uncomfortable by society so as to bring him or her into line. In my textual analysis, beneath the visible text of On Liberty is hidden Mill’s own life experience, which prompted him to reflect on the tension between individual liberty and social authority, and to criticise the collective social norms of the Victorian era.
It is from these considerations that I decided to understand the themes that one finds in On Liberty as reflecting Mill’s and Harriet’s life experiences. This leads naturally to a claim that the work was written jointly by Mill and Harriet. Mill himself made reference to this in his Autobiography, and this is made even more explicit in the flyleaf of On Liberty, where Mill says that he and Harriet wrote to book together.
Ross Carroll: The book also emphasises the importance of other philosophers in Mill’s various networks. One of these is Alexis de Tocqueville, with whom Mill developed a close intellectual affinity. How, in your view, did Mill’s encounter with Tocqueville’s work shape his outlook on the perils of mass democracy? Would On Liberty have been a very different book if Mill and Tocqueville had never corresponded?
Hongtu Li: The question concerns the intellectual resources available to Mill when he wrote On Liberty. I hold that Tocqueville plays an important role in the formation of Mill’s thoughts, but we should not overstate that role. It should be noticed that Mill absorbed many thoughts from varied sources, and even if Tocqueville hadn’t appeared in his intellectual life, he would still have written On Liberty. For example, Alexander Von Humboldt’s thoughts also influenced Mill, which could be seen in his quotation of Humboldt on the flyleaf of On liberty.
Ross Carroll: A real strength of the book is that you bring Mill’s views on human and social development into your interpretation of On Liberty. As you point out, this is not just a text on the topic of individual freedom. It also touches on the themes of civilisation and barbarism, and progress and stagnation. I was stuck in this part of the book by Mill’s view that China was an empire stuck in a state of stagnation [un empire de stagnation]? Was this view of China typical among Victorian thinkers in Britain, or did Mill develop a distinct position in relation to China’s development and potential?
Hongtu Li: This question is very thought-provoking. Was Mill’s comment on China his own original understanding, or merely an expression of a common opinion of that age. I think it belongs to the latter. It is a collective utterance by many thinkers of that time, a “common discourse”, that China was viewed as barbarous and stagnant. The discourse put China within the dualist framework of civilization-barbarism and progress-stagnation. My research attempts to analyze Mill’s utterance on that and concludes that Mill divided the discourse into two, putting India within the dualism of civilization and barbarism while putting China in progress-stagnation. So Mill made a distinction between the two.
Dario Castiglione: You are the Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Intellectual Research. Recently, you have written two articles, one in English on the genealogy of human rights from a global perspective, and one published in French on the translation of Mill’s idea of well-being. In different ways, they are interesting examples of a kind of global intellectual history. Can you tell us why you think this line of research is important or distinctive?
Hongtu Li: Yes, we have established jointly with East China Normal University the “Centre for Global Intellectual History Studies” in the hope of convening academic resources to build up this emerging research field. We have published several research papers within the past two years and the two you’ve mentioned are among them.
These two articles were written within China’s actual context and with China’s present concerns in mind. With reference to China’s integration into the global system, an urgent issue to settle is human rights. It is on this issue that China and the West are engaged in a debate, each holding a different view. I regard it as an academic issue which requires us to go back to its historical root and the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” in particular to see how it was drawn up as a set of international common Standard. It is of great value for us to explore the debate in 1948 on the issue of human rights to see how different countries including China understood the issue. What I’ve done constitutes only rudimentary research on that.
The article on happiness is also based on China’s reality and closely related to my study on Mill’s thoughts on Well-being or happiness. How do people achieve Well-being or happiness? Is it something granted by others or the result of our own’s pursuits? Does it involve the social system as well as individual independence and freedom? This is a question to which Mill devoted his thoughts. Though this question may no longer seem that important in the Western world, it is relevant to our choice of future path in China.
So I agree with you that the research on global thought is of importance and perhaps very unique. It is even very urgent now in China.
Junqing Wu: What do you think of English and French models of achieving political right? One is to introduce it gradually over a long period of time, the other is to achieve it by revolution.
Hongtu Li: In general, I agree with your statement that Britain and France have offered two distinct models when entering the modern era. But one point that needs to be made is that we shouldn’t forget the British Revolution in the 17th century. To some extent, the British also obtained their political rights through revolution. In consequence, a more exact conclusion should be that the British model is a combination of revolution and conservatism while the French one is more radical indeed.