John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British political philosopher, ethicist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, most noted for his defense of libertarianism in On Liberty.

John Stuart was born in London, son of James Mill, and worked at the East India Company with a brief spell as an Member of Parliament, particularly interested in women's rights, constitutional reform and economics. He met Harriet Taylor , of whom he says in his Autobiography, that he owes none of his 'technical doctrines' but all of the liberal ideas, in 1830. Mill holds that allowing people to decide for themselves as much as possible increases the general happiness, thereby arriving at a philosophy arguing in favour of liberty of thought, speech and association. And it these ideas, on the roles of individuals and society, set out in On Liberty (1859) and The Principles of Political Economy (with Some of the Applications to Social Philosophy) (1848) that are indeed the where his legacy lies, as a great political thinker.

A British Liberal

The Principles of Political Economy (with Some of the Applications to Social Philosophy) was written in 1848, around the same time as Marx and Engels were (attempting to ) foment proletarian revolution. It is essentially an attempt to emulate Mill's illustrious Scottish predecessor, Adam Smith, in setting out the workings of the modern state. Unlike Smith, however, Mill is a poor writer and lacks both the insight and subtlety of the Scot. Despite, or perhaps because of, his famous education at the hands of James Mill (see below), where Smith has pace and acuity, Mill has leaden prose and plodding mathematics.

Mill's strength is less in the analysis, particularly not the economic one, than in the ethical system building, and the idealism, where he places economic and social claims in a new framework or political rights. For example, he writes, following Smith, that only labour creates wealth, but capital is stored up labour, and may be accumulated - or even inherited - quite legitimately. Then he goes on, inheritance is acceptable, even when initially based on an injustice, once a few human generations have passed, as to remedy the injustice would create worse problems than leaving the situation alone. On the other hand, the inheritance of wealth, beyond the point of achieving 'comfortable independence' should be prevented by the state intervening and confiscating assets. People who want to live more than 'comfortably' should work for it.

Mill thought that this 'Benthamite' part of his book would cause more than a little stir, and indeed hoped to become notorious for it. However, tucked away in nearly half a million other words, it attracted little interest. Still, as he himself wrote in a letter to a friend, "The purely abstract investigations of political economy as of very minor importance compared with great practical tensions that the progress of democracy and the spread of socialist opinions are pressing on'.

It is these elements, largely confined to the end portion of Book V, which make for the most original parts of the whole work. Mill is one of the first writers to consider themselves a 'social scientist', and was firm in his conviction that the social sciences were justly related alongside to the natural sciences, and could be pursued using similar methods. Mill distinguished between the study of individuals, which would be largely psychology, and the study of collective behaviour, which would be largely economics and politics. He tried out various terms for summing up his study, such as 'social economy', 'political economy' (which he thought might belong on its own somewhere) , even 'speculative politics' but eventually returned to what he called Comte's' 'convenient barbarism' - sociology.

And his finding, really drawn from Smith, it that is this element of 'co-operation' that is the key to modern societies. From it characteristically follows a great 'flowering of co-operatives' and joint-stock companies. But Mill adds to it this distinctive rider, that:

Whatever theory we may adopt respecting the foundation of the social union, and under whatever political institutions we live, there is a circle around every individual human being which no government, be it that of one, of a few, or of the many, ought to be permitted to overstep... That there is, or ought to be, some space in human existence thus entrenched around, and 'sacred from authoritative intrusion, no one who professes the smallest regard to human freedom or dignity will call into question: the point to be determined is, where the limit should be placed; how large a province of human life this reserved territory should include.

Mill's liberalism is grounded in the utilitarian ethic adopted from Jeremy Bentham, rather than on the appeal to fundamental rights of that other great liberal Englishman, John Locke. Yet despite different starting points, both arrive at the characteristic set of individual rights and freedoms.

Upbringing

Mill was born in Pentonville to Harriet Barrow and James Mill, a Scotsman and disciple of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. James Mill gave John Stuart an unconventional, rigorous education in Greek, mathematics and many other subjects, from an early age, of which Mill wrote:

my father, in all his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done

From the age of eight, Mill started on Latin, and also started teaching his younger siblings, as well as encountering Homer's Illiad both in Greek and in Pope's translation. Between the age of eight and twelve, Mill writes of having read the Aeneid of Virgil, Horace, the Fables of Phaedrus, Livy, Sallust, the Metamorphoses by Ovid, Lucretius, Terence and Cicero, as well as Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Thucydides and many, many other writers. Mill writes of his education:

My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it. Anything which could be found out by thinking I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself... One of the evils most liable to attend on any sort of early proficiency, and which often fatally blights its promise, my father most anxiously guarded against. This was self-conceit. He kept me, with extreme vigilance, out of the way of hearing myself praised, or of being led to make self-flattering comparisons between myself and others. From his own intercourse with me I could derive none but a very humble opinion of myself; and the standard of comparison he always held up to me, was not what other people did, but what a man could and ought to do. He completely succeeded in preserving me from the sort of influences he so much dreaded. I was not at all aware that my attainments were anything unusual at my age.

Citations

A significant part of an early version of this article (other than that on the upbringing of Mill) was taken from the entry on Mill in 'Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics', edited by Martin Cohen, (Hodder Arnold 2006) and donated to the Citizendium by the author.