Intellectual Freedom, Individuality, and Collective Deception. Mill, Tocqueville, Kierkegaard, and the Earliest Cancel Culture

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill offers a series of arguments in defense of intellectual freedom that are still invoked today. This article shows how these arguments arise from a diagnosis of the spirit of the age that can be fruitfully expanded upon with the analogous critiques of the present offered by Tocqueville and Kierkegaard, while also highlighting differences in the type of individuality that each of these intellectual projects place at the center. Finally, we consider Kierkegaard’s attention to the problem of collective illusions and the need for this point to be integrated into our discussion of freedom of discussion.