As I explained in my previous post, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein’s critique of “tribalism” in his new essay “Why I am a liberal” shows us why public intellectuals like Sunstein are faux liberals, not true ones like Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill. Speaking of John Stuart, here I will explore Sunstein’s discussion of Mill, which I quote in full below to get us started:

4. Rejecting despotism, liberals prize the idea of personal agency. For that reason, they see John Stuart Mill’s great work “The Subjection of Women” as helping to define the essence of liberalism. Like Lincoln, Mill insists on a link between a commitment to liberty and a particular conception of equality, which can be seen as a kind of anticaste principle: If some people are subjected to the will of others, we have a violation of liberal ideals. Many liberals have invoked an anticaste principle to combat entrenched forms of inequality on the basis of race, sex, and disability. Liberals are committed to individual dignity

Ha! I love it when a tenured law professor like Cass Sunstein — a card-carrying member of the most feudal and caste-like system in North America, i.e. academia — complains about inequality and castes! Or to quote an anonymous colleague of mine, it’s worth noting how invocations of Mill’s anticaste principle are “never addressed self-referentially by high-income individuals [like Sunstein] with relative job security in legal academia, with respect to the relation of their own relative positions in society with those they employ in ‘lesser’ roles, e.g. VAPs, Fellows, Adjuncts, Lecturers, [legal writing] instructors, Clinical Instructors, Professors of Practice, and so on.” In short, I call bullshit.

Worse yet, Sunstein’s purported defense of liberalism makes no mention of what has to be the greatest classical liberal manifesto of all time: John Stuart Mill’s extended essay “On liberty”. Despite this curious omission, there appears — on the surface, at least — to be a powerful common thread running through Mill’s “On liberty” (1859) and Sunstein’s “Why I am a liberal” (2023): both works purport to defend freedom of thought and expression. Of the 34 claims in Sunstein’s essay, for example, arguments in favor of free speech and against censorship appear in no less than seven of those claims: Claims #6, 10, 11, 23, 24, 26, and 28.

Again, I have to call bullshit. The reason why Professor Sunstein fails to mention Mill’s “On liberty” even once in his new essay is because he (Sunstein) actually rejects Mill’s original defense of free speech. Specifically, in his book “Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech” (Simon & Schuster, 1995), the cover of which is pictured below, Sunstein shows us his true colors, for he not only criticizes Mill’s “absolutist” position on free speech; he also argues that “nonpolitical speech” should be less fully protected when it conflicts with other interests and rights such as that of privacy! So, don’t be fooled by Sunstein’s faux liberalism or his pro-free speech rhetoric. Sunstein is no John Stuart Mill; he is not committed to freedom of speech when push comes to shove.

Postscript: I will conclude my review of Cass Sunstein’s “Why I am a liberal” in my next post.