Mills, using the key word, power, sketches out the relation between the individual and small groupings of people and their often problematic relation to those exercising power within The State. It is the terms abuse of power and exercising power which are most intriguing. What do they actually mean? I believe they are derived not from abstracted political relationships, but rather actualized movements of energy — deflected through socially-constructed pathways of relation — that may be read as the substance of the social system itself.
Power is yielded to some and stripped from others in a social system. It is apparently concentrated in the hands of some, and depleted from the reach of others. The State is one operational field or framework for the circulation or movement of power: the social system actually is the cumulative expression of re-configured energy flows. The State can only be the sum of energy expressed by the individual participants in it. When the participant in a social system is measured, the next reasonable step is that the results of that applied metric are used to place that individual within a scalar array of productive potential within the equation of state. All of this is predicated on the actual framework of what a social system is — a way of establishing a set of relations of power between individuals. (Back to the architecture of the continuum of relation — where the minimum granular unit, the individual, is in array with a certain number of other individuals in immediate relation. These minimum units of relations are replete with complex flows of individual life-time/life-energy: body energy expressed to maintain viability, needs filled by necessity.) Abuse of power is the routine deflection of flows of those energies in the service of maintaining some minimum order beneficial to a subset of individuals in a social system and conversely detrimental to the viability of others.
A democratic state should not be about anything else but the active facilitation of the viability of all participants, without exception. All concentrations of power should be directed in the service of this ideal, and great effort should be made to minimize the degree of concentrations of power with subsets of individuals of the system. That is, individuals must not surrender their autonomy to wider-scale State-sponsored reorganizations of power flows. [hehe, this sounds like an anarchists credo or at least a libertarian view of State — with the qualification that it should be undertaken with deep thought and consequent action in the field of human obligations as opposed to human rights.]
All of this is not to say that there is a simplistic mathematical formula by which the State might be circumscribed, although this is often done. As with any abstracted model of complex systems, the State can be re-presented to varying degrees of accuracy. (The current obsession with The Market, as a hyper-simplistic model of the abstracted relations going on between nine billion people globally is a good example of the usefulness and the uselessness of such models — how well does this model circumscribe what is actually going on between peoples in the world? The unquestioned belief that the activities of the Market accurately indicate the status of relation and suggest ways to alter the character of those relations is both true but also very, very false.)
… the practical question, where to place the limit — how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control — is a subject on which nearly everything remains to be done. All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. What these rules should be, is the principal question in human affairs; but if we except a few of the most obvious cases, it is one of those which least progress has been made in resolving. No two ages, and scarcely any two countries, have decided it alike; and the decision of one age or country is a wonder to another. Yet the people of any given age and country no more suspect any difficulty in it, than if it were a subject on which mankind had always been agreed. The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. This all but universal illusion is one of the examples of the magical influence of custom, which is not only, as the proverb says a second nature, but is continually mistaken for the first. The effect of custom, in preventing any misgiving respecting the rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to others, or by each to himself. — John Mills, “On Liberty”
The confusion of the two nature’s and the consequent operation of the social system based on the results of this confusion is probably a chief factor in the inhumanity displayed within and at the edges (of power) of social systems predicated on such mistaken conceptions.
Mills does not examine the actualizations of energy that are the instruments or carriers of inter-personal exchanges of power. In order for his ideas (the liberties of thought) to be properly mapped back onto reality, they need to be connected to or mapped across the activated and dynamic matrix of flow, imho. This, combined with an exploration of the dynamic of human expressive activities where collective discourse and exchange takes place and where one becomes “capable of rectifying his mistakes by discussion and experience.” This process of change arrives “not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted.” Enter the widened definition of dialogue, where the sharing of life-energies/life-times becomes the matrix for change.