POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY interference with personal liberty Most liberals accept parcels of legislation whose purpose is to promote an individual’s own well-being rather than to protect others from harm: laws imposing compulsory insurance, or the wearing of protective headgear, for instance If a modern liberal justifies this as designed to prevent the individual from becoming a charge on society, rather than as aiming at his own health and prosperity, it should be pointed out that the possibility of the poor and sick placing a burden on others assumes the existence of a network of social services provided at the taxpayer’s expense—something for which Mill had a very limited enthusiasm On the other hand, Mill countenanced restrictions on liberty that most modern liberals would reject He thought, for instance, that a government could legitimately limit the size of families, and he reconciled it with his libertarian principle on the following grounds: ‘In a country either overpeopled, or threatened with being so, to produce children, beyond a very small number, with the effect of reducing the reward of labour by their competition, is a serious offence against all who live by the remuneration of their labour’ (L 242) Many liberals share Mill’s lifelong enthusiasm for population control by contraception (a cause for which he was willing to go, briefly, to prison) But when China introduced legislation to limit the size of families to a single child, most Western liberals reacted with horror Marx on Capital and Labour At the same time and in the same city as Mill was writing classical works of liberal thought, Karl Marx was developing the theory of the communism that was to be for more than a century one of liberalism’s greatest enemies The basis of the theory was historical materialism: the thesis that in every epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange determines the political and intellectual history of society ‘The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life-process in general It is not the consciousness of human beings that determines their being; on the contrary it is their social being that determines their consciousness’ (CPE, p x) There were two elements that determined the course of history: the forces and the relations of production By the forces of production Marx meant the raw materials, the technology, and the labour 280