John Stuart Mill who gave us the idea of the free and sovereign individual had, in the aftermath of a crisis of faith discovered in the poetry of Wordsworth and Goethe, and in the philosophy of Coleridge, Saint Simon and Comte, a fusion of thought and feeling, an appreciation of the ‘many- sidedness’ of human nature and society, that went far to fill the vacuum created by utilitarianism.

(In turn he lost the sense of community provided by the utilitarians,”the assurance of a common purpose shared with others of like mind.”)

Utilitarianism: Greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Mill’s crisis was caused by this fateful question:

‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’

The answer was an irrepressible ‘No!’ The end had ceased to charm! The feeling there is nothing left to live for.

Gertrude Himmelfarb in the introduction to On Liberty says that what depressed Mill even more than the sense of vocation was the absence in him of any natural and spontaneous feeling, any poetic and artistic sensibility. “He was convinced that the exclusive cultivation of the ‘habit of analysis’ had destroyed in him all capacity for emotion.”

Coming to his treatise Mill predicted the crises largest democracies will go through caused by the rise of popular governments, which he saw as the pre-condition of a new and more formidable despotism, for he comprehensively explains that ‘society is itself the tyrant.’  He hits the bull’s- eye when he says that the society imposes a new despotism of custom. “It dictates,”he says,” its will by means of public opinion; it presumes to tell men what to think and read, how to dress and behave; it sets itself up as the judge of right and wrong, propriety and impropriety; it discourages spontaneity and originality, personal impulses and desires, strong character and unconventional ideas; it is fatal, in short, to individuality. And all of this, Mill predicted, was bound to get worse as the public more and more felt its power and acted upon it.”