On Liberty & Utilitarianism

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Contents

On Liberty

Chapter One: Introductory

Chapter Two: On the liberty ofthought and discussion

Chapter Three: Of individuality, as one of the elements of well-being

Chapter Four: Of the limits to the authority of society over the individual

Chapter Five: Applications

Representative Government

Preface

Chapter One: To what extent forms of government are a matter of choice

Chapter Two: The criterion of a good form of government

Chapter Three: That the ideally best form of government is representative government

Chapter Four: Under what social conditions representative government is inapplicable

Chapter Five: Of the proper functions of representative bodies

Chapter Six: Of the infirmities and dangers to whichrepresent­ative government is liable

Chapter Seven: Of true and false democracy; represent­ation of all, and representation of the majority only

Chapter Eight: Of the extension of the suffrage

Chapter Nine: Should there be two stages of election?

Chapter Ten: Of the mode of voting

Chapter Eleven: Of the duration of parliaments

Chapter Twelve: Ought pledges to be required from Members of Parliament?

Chapter Thirteen: Of a second chamber

Chapter Fourteen: Of the executive in a representative government

Chapter Fifteen: Of local representative bodies

Chapter Sixteen: Of nationality, as connected with representative government

Chapter Seventeen: Of federal representative governments

Chapter Eighteen: Of the government of dependencies by a free state

Utilitarianism

Chapter One: General remarks

Chapter Two: What utilitarianism is

Chapter Three: Of the ultimate sanction of the principle of utility

Chapter Four: Of what sort of proof the principle of utility is susceptible

Chapter Five: On the connection between justice and utility

The Subjection of Women

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

The Contest in America

Inaugural Address

[delivered to the University of St Andrews]

Introduction

‘John Stuart Mill, enlightened reformer:

Selected Writings from the 1860s’

J. S. Mill (1806–1873) is widely considered to be the most influential of Britain’s nineteenth-century philosophers. But Mill’s writings and activities were much more diverse and wide-ranging than even that high praise suggests. While he tackled the full spectrum of philosophical inquiries – logic, epistemology, morals, and even some topics in natural philosophy – his writings also spanned the fields of political economy, history, religion, political thought, social theory, literature and education, among others. At the same time, Mill was actively involved in events. From an early age he had a full-time career in the East India Company and, later in life, he was a member of Parliament. While he could – and did – write technical philosophical masterpieces, he also found time and energy to compose popular pieces for the magazines and newspapers and to give public addresses on diverse topics to a variety of audiences.

For all of that diversity, much of what Mill wrote and did was held together by his drive to reform the world in which he lived. That practical goal of real-world enlightened reform often involved Mill in grappling with timeless issues and debates. Therein lies much of his continued appeal today. Central to a great deal of what Mill wrote was the problem of where to draw the proper boundaries between ‘liberty of the individual’ on one hand and ‘security of the state’ on the other. Despite the technological and other significant differences that set our time apart from Mill’s, those boundaries continue to be tested and contested in the Western world of the twenty-first century. In other words, Mill remains relevant.

There is another way in which Mill’s writings evoke a timeless quality. That has to do with the time in the development of the Western world in which he wrote. Mill’s professional life falls squarely within the period that historians refer to as the Victorian Era. Born in 1819, Queen Victoria ruled England from 1837 to 1901 – from the time Mill was 13 until a generation after his death. During those years, nineteenth-century Romanticism flourished while eighteenth-century Enlightenment views, which had also shaped Mill’s thought, waned. The merging of those eras forms the intellectual foundations of our modern world view. Mill’s life and writings – his efforts to work out the domains and overlaps of reason and emotion, of logic and feeling – provide a window on the forging of our own world.

All of the works reprinted in this Wordsworth Classics of World Literature volume were first published during a particularly prolific ten-year span in Mill’s life, from 1859 to 1869. On Liberty (1859), Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Utilitarianism (1863), and The Subjection of Women (1869) are among his most famous works. These four books are central pillars on which Mill’s high reputation rests. Also included here, for the light they shed on Mill’s thought and times, are two of his lesser-known works – ‘The Contest in America’, an essay written during the American Civil War (1861-1865) and first published in Frazer’s Magazine in 1862; and his ‘Inaugural address Delivered to the University of St Andrews’, an erudite but accessible piece, first published in 1867.

While the decade of the 1860s provided us with many of the texts for which Mill is now remembered, it is important to see that those works came out of a much longer period of reading, reflec­ting, writing, and revising. Themes related to On Liberty, to give one example, had been developing in Mill’s mind from as early as the time of his reading as a young boy. Long before it was published, On Liberty existed as a manuscript, one that Mill tink­ered with for years before finally publishing it in 1859. Indeed, with few writers is it as evident as it is with Mill that an author’s entire life helps to shape their ideas and publications. To understand Mill’s thought, it is helpful to understand more of the intellectual contexts in which it developed.

Early Life

The early lives of many celebrated writers are clouded in obscurity. Such is not the case here: we know a good deal about Mill’s earliest years and education, in part because he wrote about them. John Stuart Mill was born on 20 May 1806 in Pentonville, England, now part of London. Mill was the son of Harriet Burrow (1782–1854) and James Mill (1773–1836). Relatively little is known about his mother; Mill mentioned her only infrequently in all that he wrote and she appears not to have been of much influence on him. James Mill, however, had a formidable impact on the development of his son.

Born in Scotland to a shoemaker, James Mill’s origins were humble, but he was bright and exhibited sufficient promise of future success to secure the patronage of Lady Jane Stuart (1776–1829) and Sir John Stuart (1753–1821) of Fettercairn. With support from his patrons, James Mill attended the University of Edinburgh, an institution that was at the centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, although by the 1790s it was not the hotbed of genius it had been earlier in the century. Still, he was particularly inspired by his moral philosophy professor, Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), himself a student of Adam Ferguson (1723–1816). Mill graduated in 1794 and then studied for the ministry. In 1798, he was licensed to preach, but he was never ordained. Instead, he strove to make a living by tutoring and then, following a move to London in 1802, by writing. He would eventually establish a reputation for himself as a philosopher and historian of note, publishing five books, while also holding a job in the East India Company, from 1819 until his death. But his earliest publications were pamphlets and articles for periodicals, written in the midst of pressing editorial work. He wrote scores of short pieces – over a thousand in all – including entries on ‘Education’, ‘Government’, and ‘Liberty of the Press’, for new editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the early years, much of his writing for pay was a way to keep his growing family one step ahead of the bill collectors.

By 1806, the year of John Stuart Mill’s birth, the elder Mill had become a leading voice for the Philosophical Radicals, a group interested in economic and political reform in Britain. Those interests led to friendships with the political economist David Ricardo (1772–1823) and especially with the man who would become James Mill’s closest collaborator, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). Bentham is considered as the father of Utilitarianism, a philosophical theory that defined moral actions based on their utility; virtuous actions were those that provided ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. Together, James Mill and Jeremy Bentham came up with an intensive plan of education for the younger Mill.

The importance of Mill’s early education as the foundation for his later life as an author is clear to any reader of Mill’s Auto­biography, a book that was published posthumously, in 1873, but which he wrote mostly in the 1850s. In fact, one might usefully think of the Autobiography as Mill’s effort to provide his readers with the background to his prolific 1860s. What did that prepar­atory education entail?

Mill recounted how he ‘began to learn Greek’ when he was only three. Aesop’s Fables was the first Greek text he remembered reading, but he later read from all manner of works, including Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Diogenes Laertius’ ‘lives of the philosophers’, Herodotus, Lucian, Demosthenes, and at age seven, Plato’s dialogues. ‘In my eighth year I commenced learning Latin’, Mill noted. His authors in that language included Virgil, Horace, Sallust, Ovid, Lucretius, and Cicero, to list a few of those Mill mentioned by name. Quintilian, one who ‘is little read, and seldom sufficiently appreciated’, made a particular impact on Mill: ‘His book is a kind of encyclopaedia of the thoughts of the ancients on the whole field of education and culture; and I have retained through life many valuable ideas which I can distinctly trace to my reading of him, even at that early age’. Education was always a topic of interest for Mill.

His preferred reading subject as a child, he tells us, was history. It long remained his ‘strongest predilection’. Ancient historians – some of whom are mentioned above – got his attention; but modern ones were not overlooked: ‘[William] Robertson’s hist­ories, [David] Hume, [and Edward] Gibbon . . . [Nathaniel] Hooke’s History of Rome’, Mill read them all. He took the ‘greatest delight’ in Robert Watson’s histories of the Spanish Kings, Philip the Second and Third: ‘The heroic defense of the Knights of Malta against the Turks, and of the revolted Provinces of the Netherlands against Spain, excited in me an intense and lasting interest’. He relished ‘the historical part of the Annual Register’, volumes borrowed from Bentham’s library. Edmund Burke’s (1729–1797) Annual Register was standard reading for many in Mill’s Britain, just as it had been for those in the several decades before then. Mill mentioned many additional historical works in the Autobiography. His reading in his favourite field, as in others, ranged far and wide.

His father also directed him to textbooks in which to learn arithmetic, geometry, algebra and calculus. Mill’s miscellaneous reading included poetry; the ‘metrical romances’ of Walter Scott; Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (another favourite); several modern British philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes; and books in experi­mental science, such as ‘Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues’, which young Mill became ‘wrapt up in’. There was little he did not explore. He also got a practical education in writing because he read and proofread the long and involved text of his father’s The History of British India.

Perhaps you are thinking that this demanding course of reading and instruction was beyond the pale for any child? If so, you are not alone. Mill scholars have long thought the same. In the early twentieth century, A.D. Lindsay (1879–1952) in his introduction to an Everyman’s Library edition of Mill, summarized that ‘Never was such an organized and systematic attempt to fix a young mind unalterably in one mould as that stupendous plan of studies which Bentham and the elder Mill imposed upon their young hopeful.’ More recently, John M. Robson (1927–1995), Mill’s modern biographer and the editor of his Collected Works, put it succinctly: Mill ‘never learned to play’. (Robson often exhibited a penchant for reducing complicated situations to a sentence.) Certainly, the impact of all of this on John Stuart Mill was powerful and profound, but also complicated and certainly not straightforward. Historians continue to speculate about how best to interpret the relationship between James and John Stuart Mill, a topic on which Bruce Mazlish has written an informative book. In the Autobiography, Mill registered his debt to his father’s pedagogic regime in these words: ‘if I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter century over my contemporaries’. Other times he was more ambiguous in his assessment.

When Mill was fourteen, his father and Bentham arranged for him to spend some time in France, under the care of Bentham’s brother, Sir Samuel Bentham (1757–1831), an engineer and naval architect who, before settling in France had also spent time in Russia. Mill would stay for about a year; it was memorable. Not only did Mill’s French improve, but he enjoyed the compan­ionship of Samuel Bentham’s four children with whom he also had the opportunity to travel. Mill later recalled that he accompanied the family ‘in an excursion to the Pyrenees, including a stay of some duration at Bagnères de Bigorre, a journey to Pau, Bayonne, and Bagnères de Luchon, and an ascent of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre. This first introduction to . . . mountain scenery made the deepest impression on me, and gave a colour to my tastes through life’. But even more important to his intellectual development, perhaps, was the impact of ‘having breathed for a whole year, the free and genial atmosphere of Continental life’. Also sparked at this time: Mill’s serious engagement with French philosophical ideas. That, too, lasted throughout his life.

In 1821, and back in England, Mill began to read for the bar under the guidance of John Austin (1790–1859), a friend of the family and a prominent legal theorist. His studies included the standard sources, such as William Blackstone’s (1723–1780) Com­ment­aries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), but also newer material, including Étienne Dumont’s (1759–1829) French trans­lation of Bentham’s work on legal and political thought, La Traité de Législation civile et pénale (1802), which applied his utilitarian principles to law. Rather than going off to university as many young men in his social and economic situation would have done (Cambridge was considered), he continued to live in his childhood home, even devoting significant amounts of time to help with the education of his many younger siblings.

Intellectual Development

In the Autobiography, looking back at his intellectual development, Mill identified in it different phases and turning points. A vital stage was his early devotion to Bentham’s thought that had been sparked by reading Dumont’s translation. Mill came to believe that Bentham had introduced ‘a new era in thought’. His commit-ment at this time was intense:

The ‘principle of utility’ understood as Bentham understood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it through these three volumes [La Traité de Législation civile et pénale], fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my conceptions of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life.

What he meant was that Utilitarianism, for a time, was his guiding light. Mill’s reading and intellectual development, how­ever, did not stop there. He also studied John Locke’s (1632–1704) Essay concern­ing Human Understanding (1690), David Hartley’s (1705–1757) Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), and works by several Scottish Enlightenment authors such as David Hume (1711–1776), Adam Smith (1723–1790), Thomas Reid (1710–1796), and his father’s favorite Edinburgh teacher, Dugald Stewart. They gave him a healthy dose of sensationalist and empirical philosophy.

In 1823, having given up on his study of the law, Mill began full-time employment with the East India Company. That, too, was to impact his life as a writer. Mill’s entry-level position was as a clerk in his father’s office, that of the Examiner of India Corres­pondence. Over the course of his 35-year career he would rise to more important posts, all the way to Head Examiner. He considered his employment, even the first job, as something that contributed to his abilities as a persuasive writer and political reformer. Mill explained that,

as a Secretary conducting political correspondence, I could not issue an order or express an opinion, without satisfying various persons very unlike myself, that the thing was fit to be done. I was thus in a good position for finding out by practice the mode of putting a thought which give it easiest admittance into minds not prepared for it by habit; while I became practically conversant with the difficulties of moving bodies of men, the necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the non-essential to preserve the essential.

There may be some self-styling in his description, but readers of Mill will find ample evidence of his polished ability to persuade.

Increasingly, Mill was becoming an activist: indeed, he described himself at this point in his life as ‘a reformer of the world’. He took part in several debating societies, including one that he helped to found in 1822, the Utilitarian Society. He participated in meetings of the London Debating Society which had eighteenth-century origins. He was even arrested for distributing copies of Francis Place’s To Married Working People, a tract on birth control. Mill’s circle of acquaintances was expanding to include others whose interests were political in an environment of change that would eventually lead to the Reform Act of 1832 and further parlia­mentary and legal reforms thereafter. As Mill put it, ‘The French philosophes of the eighteenth century were the examples we sought to imitate, and we hoped to accomplish no less results’. He also began to write for the newspapers. His first pieces appeared in The Traveller and The Morning Chronicle and then in the Westminster Review, an ‘organ of philosophic radicalism’ Bentham had founded in 1823 and which John Stuart Mill would later edit and then own.

In these earliest writings he put to use his utilitarian principles. That was the case, for instance, in his 1824 review for the West­minster of George Brodie’s History of the British Empire (1822). This review provided the forum for a critical account of David Hume’s History of England (1754–62). Against Hume, Mill leveled charges of plagiarism, misrepresentation of sources, and logical incon­sist­ency, and he offered a utilitarian critique of Hume’s defence of Stuart monarch, Charles I:

When events come to be looked at, not as they affect the great interests of mankind, but as they bear upon the pleasures and pains of an individual; a habit is engendered of considering the pleasures and pains of an individual as of more importance than the great interests of mankind. . . . The pleasures and pains most interesting to an ill-cultivated mind, are those of the one and of the few; of the men in exalted stations, whose lot is most conspicuous, whose felicity, to the ignorant, appears something almost divine, and whose misfortunes, from their previous elev­ation, most powerfully affect the imagination.

Hume’s History is a much better book than Mill’s youthful assessment suggested. And things Mill later wrote about the import­ance of historical context suggest he absorbed more from Hume the historian than he ever admitted. Had Mill written the history of the French Revolution that he contemplated, we might have a clearer sense of his historiographical debts. Nevertheless, his review quoted above offers a telling measure of the hold on him at age eighteenth of the Utilitarianism of his father and Bentham.

Also about this time, however, Mill was beginning to think not as a boy who simply absorbed the thoughts and books of others, but as a young man who formulated ideas of his own. He began to take note of ways in which Bentham’s ideas may not have been as all-explaining as he had earlier believed. Notably, he was becoming aware of a ‘neglect both in theory and in practice of the cultivation of feeling’. He came to see that his father’s educational plan had undervalued poetry (reading Pope’s Essay on Man drove that point home) and he came to see the importance of ‘Imagination generally, as an element of human nature’. Still, he continued to immerse himself in Bentham’s theories, even editing his Rationale of Judicial Evidence, first published in 1843 in five volumes.

As is often the case – then and now – his transition from boyhood to manhood was not without its troubles. Like the youthful David Hume before him, Mill suffered a mental break­down as a late adolescent. In his Autobiography he describes this period of depression with the image of a cloud hanging over him: ‘I carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and thicker.’ Later, he recorded that Coleridge’s poem ‘Dejection’ captured the ‘dry heavy dejection of the melancholy winter of 1826–7’:

A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,

A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,

Which finds no natural outlet or relief

In word, or sigh, or tear.

Mill recovered from this dark state – partly by reading Jean-François Marmontel’s Mémoires d’un père. This work by a minor philosophe, educator and journalist gave him a new outlook on life in general and the life of a writer in particular. Gradually, he came again to ‘find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for cheer­fulness, in sunshine and sky, in books, in conversation, in public affairs’; to find, he wrote, ‘excitement, though of a moderate kind, in exerting myself for my opinions, and for the public good’. Important to his change was a re-evaluation of how to seek happiness, or rather, where happiness might be found:

I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.

Mill’s emergence from depression involved his recognising and then internalising the shortcomings of the Utilitarianism instilled by his father and Bentham. The ‘greatest happiness principle’ had not included him in its wholly rational schemes. He was throwing off the comfort of what he thought he once knew well: ‘If I am asked, what system of political philosophy I substituted for that which, as a philosophy, I had abandoned, I answer, no system: only a con­vic­tion that the true system was something much more complex and many-sided than I had previously had any idea of.’ Part of Mill’s ‘more complex’ system involved complicating Bentham’s egoistic hedonism. But what the passage quoted above also makes clear is that Mill had become content to live with less certainty in a world that was more contingent than he had previously believed it to be. We have here something akin to an enlightened denial of the dogmatism spawned by the Enlightenment.

Mill continued to read widely, including now in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), the English poet and philo­sopher who, with William Wordsworth (1770–1850), is considered a principal founder of the Romantic movement in Britain. Coleridge was one of Mill’s favorite authors and that may be one of the reasons why Mill is often seen in rather too stark terms as being one who rejected ‘old’ Enlightenment thought in favor of ‘new’ Romanticism. For Robson, Mill’s ‘was not the age of the philosophes and the French Revolution but of Romanticism and Reform’. That is true, in part, but only in part.

Mill’s style of writing shows an unrelenting seriousness that differentiates him from many of the enlightened whose serious messages were often clothed lightly in humor, irony, or sarcasm. But in other respects, Mill shared considerable common ground with the enlightened. To appreciate how that is so, we need to guard against seeing the Enlightenment as the ‘Age of Reason’ that many Romantics depicted it as. It was not. After all, David Hume – a writer at the heart of the British Enlightenment – could remark that reason was always the slave of the passions. Hume’s philosophical, political and historical writings show he meant it. Moreover, we need to resist seeing the Enlighten­ment as a ‘Project’. Some of the best recent work on the Enlight­enment has presented it instead as a ‘process’, or a ‘leaning’. Rather than a project of the philosophes the Enlightenment was a widely-shared tendency toward applying reason and experience to achieve incremental improvements in the world. If so, then Mill was more of the Enlightenment than scholars have hitherto believed. Perhaps he was even closer to the enlightened than he wanted to believe himself.

It is also useful to see that the turn from the ‘era of Enlight­enment’ to the ‘era of Romanticism’ was not a sharp and abrupt change. The early decades of the nineteenth century, in partic­ular, were times of transition. Mill had read many of the historical and philosophical works of the enlightened and he had soaked up their reforming spirit, just as he had absorbed things from Coler­idge. Other thinkers from the period – such as Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Auguste Comte (1798–1857), and Alexis de Tocque­­ville (1805–1859) – also evidence the melding of Enlight­enment and Romantic thought. The three cited here Mill knew well, and read; and they read him. Rather than seeing Mill as an inconsistent thinker waffling between irreconcilable eras, as some of his early twentieth-century critics (e.g. George H. Sabine (1880–1961) and John Plamenatz (1912–1975)) did, we might better see him as striving to bring enlightened reforms to nine­teenth-century prob­lems and issues. Some of Mill’s contem­poraries saw him in just that way. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), for instance, concluded his sketch of Mill’s moral character with these words: ‘Extreme desire to further human welfare was that to which he sacrificed himself’.

Harriet Taylor

We have shown some of the circumstances that lay behind Mill’s publications of the 1860s, but there were others. An important one was Mill’s relationship with, and eventual marriage to, Harriet Hardy Taylor (1807–1858). Mill first met Mrs Taylor in 1830. He introduced her into his Autobiography in no uncertain terms in the opening line of Chapter 6: ‘It was at the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement’. At the time, Mrs Taylor was the wife of John Taylor, a well-off London pharmacist, and mother of two boys (she would soon also give birth to a daughter, Helen). Mill’s love and esteem for Taylor is evident in all that he wrote about her:

Up to the time when I first saw her, her rich and powerful nature had chiefly unfolded itself according to the received type of feminine genius. To her outer circle she was a beauty and a wit, with an air of natural distinction, felt by all who approached her: to the inner, a woman of deep and strong feeling, of penetrating and intuitive intelligence, and of an eminently meditative and poetic nature.

The precise role that Harriet played in the composition of much that was published under Mill’s name is less certain. Historians have debated the details and we may never arrive at a solid determination of what she wrote and what he wrote. Mill himself cautioned his readers that such precise demarcation lines could not be drawn.

The lines defining the earliest years of their personal relationship were also blurred, and often at the time the topic of whispered rumour and even vocal public scandal. Mrs Taylor spent long periods away from her husband, and when she did so she was often with Mill, sometimes for weeks at a time both in Britain and on the Continent. It was a curious relationship. F. A. Hayek was fascinated by it, as have been others. Robson summarized his view of them by saying that ‘Mill became her mentor and her slave’. Mill’s surviving correspondence shows he was guarded about the nature of the relationship even with his closest friends and family. Many of them did not countenance it.

James Mill died in 1836. That, too, is a circumstance that contributed in no small way to the emergence of J. S. Mill as an author. Mill recorded on the death of his father that ‘though acutely sensible of my own inferiority in the qualities by which he acquired his personal ascendancy, I had now to try what it might be possible for me to accomplish without him.’ One of the first such endeavours was the purchase, in 1836, of the Westminster Review (after 1836, the London and Westminster Review, one of the great reviews of the time), which Mill owned through until 1840. (Jeremy Bentham had died in 1832.)

The magazine provided a way for Mill to keep up with current ideas, and also connections to a widening circle of thinkers, including some who became lifelong friends. An example is the philosopher Alexander Bain (1818–1903), who at the time of his first contribution to the Westminster was an undergraduate student at Marischal College, Aberdeen. He and Mill became friends and collaborators. Bain went on to a distinguished career, including as inaugural Regius Chair in Logic and Professor of Logic at Aber­deen and as the founder of Mind, a philosophy journal still in existence today. Bain was always one of Mill’s best informed critics and would also be his first biographer.

In 1843, Mill published his A System of Logic. While its immed­iate reception was muted, it proved a tremendously successful book in the long run. During Mill’s lifetime, it appeared in eight separate editions, spurred in part by its adoption as a school textbook. By the start of the twentieth century, it had largely fallen out of fashion. More recent scholarship, however, has again taken it seriously; exploring everything from its Socratic dimensions to Mill’s place in the tradition of informal logic.

Equally successful when measured by its nineteenth-century reception was Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848). His longest book, Mill tells us, approached its subject matter in the same ‘intertwined’ manner as had Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Mill’s lifetime saw six editions of the Principles; each successive version became longer, and also made Mill look more like a socialist as he gave more powers to governments. But not all socialists liked the work. In Capital, for instance, Karl Marx made several negative comments about it, including his assessment that Mill’s ‘original researches’ there were ‘neither extensive nor profound’. The revisions Mill introduced to his text were spurred, in part, by the changed political conditions brought on by the European Revolutions of 1848. Mill’s personal life was also about to change.

Harriet Taylor’s husband died in 1849. After a decent interval, Mill and Harriet married, in April 1851. Curiously, for most of the 1850s, Mill published little. There were occasional pieces in the newspapers, but nothing akin to what he had published in the 1840s or was about to publish in the 1860s. He was, however, as always, reading, writing, and revising. And also traveling. There was an extensive excursion to Greece and Italy in late 1854 through mid-1855, in part as a means to combat ill health. His letters to Harriet demonstrate that along with taking doses of ‘blue pills’ (mercury) and quinine, he also enjoyed taking in the sites and culture.

Harriet’s health was also often poor and, in 1858, she died while the two were on another trip abroad. Mill had in 1856 retired from his post at the India House; he now devoted himself to writing and to bringing to press works that he and Harriet had worked on jointly for years. He was assisted in this and also in the regular challenges of daily life by his stepdaughter, Helen Taylor (1831–1907), who lived with him.

On Liberty

In the ten-year period from 1859 to 1869, Mill was extraordinarily productive. In 1859 he published the first edition of On Liberty. When Mill makes an appearance in general history textbooks of the nineteenth century, as he often does, it is most often for the defense of individual liberty that is offered in that book. It is the first of his works reprinted below. As he explained in his Autobiography:

During the two years which immediately preceded the cessation of my official life [i.e. 1856–1858], my wife and I were working together at the ‘Liberty’. I had first planned and written it as a short essay in 1854. It was in mounting the steps of the Capitol, in January, 1855, that the thought first arose of converting it into a volume. None of my writings have been either so carefully composed, or so sedulously corrected as this. After it had been written as usual twice over, we kept it by us, bringing it out from time to time, and going through it de novo, reading, weighing, and criticizing every sentence. Its final revision was to have been a work of the winter of 1858–59, the first after my retirement, which we had arranged to pass in the South of Europe. That hope and every other were frustrated by the most unexpected and bitter calamity of her death – at Avignon, on our way to Montpellier, from a sudden attack of pulmonary congestion.

On Liberty comprises five chapters. In Chapter 1, ‘Introductory’, Mill set the stage for the discussion to follow by identifying what he (and earlier Hume) called a constant ‘struggle between liberty and authority’ which raises ‘the practical question where to place the limit – how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control’. Mill argued that ‘as soon as mankind have attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion (a period long since reached in all nations with whom we need here concern our­selves), compulsion, either in the direct form or in that of pains and penalties for non-compliance, is no longer admissible as a means to their own good, and justifiable only for the security of others.’ In a passage that is frequently quoted (including in The Oxford Diction­ary of Quotations) , Mill wrote: ‘The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-preservation.’ He established it as a principle that ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized com­mun­ity, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.’ But, unfort­un­ately, ‘the disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power.’

Chapter 2, ‘Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion’, is the longest section of the book and contains some of the most memor­able lines that Mill wrote. ‘If all mankind minus one were of one opinion,’ he wrote, ‘and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.’ A central theme of the chapter is that only with the free discussion of ideas will truth emerge. Mill argued that ‘the dictum that truth always triumphs over per­secution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persec­ution.’ There is, however, a rather optimistic assessment of truth’s triumph in the end: ‘The real advantage which truth has consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappear­ances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.’ For Mill, it is only when truth is ‘openly canvassed’ that we can expect it to triumph in a meaningful way. However true any opinion may be, ‘if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.’ It is not enough to rely on what others have said to be true; we must work out truths ourselves. ‘Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.’ Moreover, since opinions most often have some of what is true and some of what is untrue, free discussion is needed ‘to supply the remainder of the truth of which the received doctrine embodies only a part’.

Mill offers his most famous defences of individuality and divers­ity of opinion in Chapter 3: ‘Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being’. ‘Human nature,’ he argued, ‘is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.’ Only by cultivating individuality might we ‘strengthen the tie that binds every individual to the race’. Mill feared that in the Europe of his day, ‘individuals are lost in the crowd.’ The problem was that most people were only ‘moderate in inclinations’ and have ‘no tastes or wishes strong enough to incline them to do anything unusual.’ What was imperative was that ‘the intelligent part of the public can be made to feel its value – to see that it is good there should be differences.’ ‘Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.’

Chapter 4 explores the ‘Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual’. Mill asks, ‘What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where does the auth­ority of society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?’ His answer, in short, is that ‘Whenever . . . there is a definite damage, or a definite risk of damage, either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty and placed in that of morality or law.’ Mill saw that policies depending on the truths supporting them are bound to change over time. Politics is always in flux.

Always keen in all that he wrote to balance theory with practice, in the concluding section of On Liberty Mill was concerned with ‘Applications’. Offering both a partial summary of what had been argued and a discussion of some of the implications of those arguments, Mill attempted to flesh out his account with real examples. Where are the limits of government intervention on the sale of poisons? What is the proper level, if any, for taxation on alcohol? What role is there for the state in education? Where are the limits to be set for governments’ interfering with individuals’ lives, even when liberty is not at stake? Those and other questions are pursued. As Nicholas Capaldi has convincingly demonstrated, Mill relied on Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) for more than the epigram to On Liberty. Much of what MIll wrote in this chapter might be seen as a restatement of Humboldt’s The Limits of State Action (written in the 1790s, but not published until 1850), including Humboldt’s warning ‘that a paternalistic state threatens to create a multitude of well-cared-for slaves, rather than a nation of free and independent men.’ Humboldt’s thought was a defence of Immanuel Kant’s notion of the Enlightenment as ‘daring to know’; Mill was a kindred spirit.

Considerations on Representative Government

In 1861, Mill published Considerations on Representative Government. Here, we have an extension of Mill’s discussion of ‘Applications’ in On Liberty. It is largely a practical work, and also one that shows Mill, like most of the enlightened of the eighteenth century, was not quite a democrat. In the ‘Preface’ to Representative Government, Mill claimed that it followed from his previous publications and contained little that was novel. Although contemporary English politics are referred to frequently, it was not written to bolster either the Liberal or Conservative parties of Mill’s day, partly because the parties were less ideological then than now.

The book has eighteen chapters. It begins with several related to the forms of government in general and representative govern­ment in particular. Mill defined representative government as govern­ment in which ‘the whole people, or some numerous portion of them, exercise through deputies periodically elected by themselves the ultimate controlling power, which, in very constit­ution, must reside somewhere.’ He defended representative govern­ment as ‘the ideally best form of government’, but cautioned that it was not a form appropriate for all situations and all societies. For instance, if ‘the people want either the will or the capacity to fulfil the part which belongs to them in a representative constitution’, then other forms of government, as a monarchy or even enlight­ened despotism, are more appropriate.

Controversially, Mill considered that representative assemblies were ‘radically unfit’ for governing. In England, many a fine piece of legislation was ruined, he wrote, ‘because the House of Com­mons will not forgo the precious privilege of tinkering it with their clumsy hands’. Laws ought to be made by a special ‘legislative commission’, not by a body such as the House of Commons. For Mill, the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control the government: to throw the light of publicity on its acts: to compel a full exposition and justification of all of them which any one considers questionable; to censure them if found condemnable, and, if the men who compose the government abuse their trust, or fulfill it in a manner which conflicts with the deliberate sense of the nation, to expel them from office.