In referring to "the ancient commonwealths", Mill was thinking of ancient Greece. Sparta had been the foremost exemplar of a nanny state, its people turning to their rulers to tell them whom to marry, what careers to choose and how much javelin-throwing to do. The Republic imagined by Plato was similarly directive in tone: just as there are experts in shipbuilding and carpentry, so - Plato suggested - there are experts in wisdom and government, and it is to these that we should defer for guidance on how to conduct our lives.

On the surface, the liberal argument has won a resounding victory. All Western democracies nominally subscribe to the ideals laid down in On Liberty. Governments are expected to create "neutral" public spaces, where a multiplicity of competing (but not overly-dominant) voices can be heard. Schools and universities are advised to stick to facts rather than advice. No publicly funded educationalist would dare to impart wisdom, for who could possibly say what this was? (Post-modern relativism and liberalism are handmaidens.) Meanwhile, religion should be kept well out of political office - not a contentious issue with modest Anglicans; trickier with jihadists.

Yet is modern liberal society as neutral as it suggests? The Marxists show particular insight here, for Marx consistently ridiculed liberalism for its claim that a state could be neutral. Every state will, in Marx's eyes, be a nanny of some sort, whether she admits to this directive control or not. Or, as he put it, every state will feature relationships of power guided by an ideological sense of what is good: "The ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class." We should therefore be vigilant when politicians start to speak of their desire to create a world with less nannying in it. At the heart of George W Bush's rhetoric has been a call for government to get out of people's lives in the name of freedom. He has presented his audiences with a choice: would they rather be watched over by a nanny or learn to be free?

Bush's electoral successes are a sign of how appealing it can sound to outgrow nanny, for one of the great myths of contemporary life is that an adult is an entirely independent being. But Bush is not truly intent on creating a neutral or blank public realm. Recent history, both in America and Britain, shows that politicians of the right who speak of hating nannies are almost invariably the ones who end up the most nannying of all. Bush is not devoid of ideas on what a good citizen might be. A decision to cut funding for public broadcasting doesn't mean that there will be no media, but simply that the vacuum will be filled by Fox News. Bush's policies will not avoid promoting certain notions of fulfilment and militating against others. In other words, whatever his rhethoric, he too will end up generating a giant nanny with a particular personality and influence. There is no such thing as government that doesn't restrict choices for citizens in ways that go far beyond what Mill imagined.