John Stuart Mill, the eldest son of James Mill – the British historian, economist, and philosopher, was born on May 20, 1806, in Pentonville, London. James Mill, a strict disciplinarian, took the initiative in providing John an intellectually stimulating education. John began reading Greek language and literature at three years of age. James Mill planned out John's education from the very early age and followed it strictly. The boy was put through strenuous learning sessions and reading, so much so that his emotional and physical growth was almost ignored against the attention paid to his intellectual growth. His father wanted him to be some prophet and concentrated all his efforts to make him one with his arrangements for his studies. Though he was not raised with any strict religious beliefs.
Not even in his teens, and he had the knowledge almost 25 years ahead of his time. He had read the original Greek Aesop’s Fables, Xenophon’s Anabasis, and Herodotus. He was up-to-date with the satirist Lucian, the historian of philosophy - Diogenes Laërtius, the Athenian writer and educational theorist Isocrates, and six dialogues of Plato. He took up Latin, the geometry of Euclid, and algebra and began teaching younger children of the family. His main reading was still history, but he went through all Latin and Greek authors commonly read in schools and universities. At 10, he was thorough with Plato and the Athenian statesman Demosthenes. He commenced a thorough study of scholastic logic, simultaneously taking lessons on Aristotle’s logical treatises when he reached 12. In the following year he got introduced to political economy and studied the works of Scottish Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
John’s intensive education at a tender age cultivated an intimate relationship with the spirited intellect of his father. From childhood, he spent most of the time in his father’s study and routinely accompanied him on walks. Consequently, he inherited many of his father’s exploratory beliefs and the art of defending them from critics.
John, when 14 years old, stayed for about a year in France with the family of Sir Samuel Bentham, brother of Jeremy Bentham, the English Utilitarian philosopher, economist, and theoretical jurist. He methodically read, wrote and studied chemistry and botany. He tackled advanced mathematical problems, and made notes on the scenery, people and customs of the country. This was also the period when he learnt French. On his return in 1821 he began with the study of psychology and Roman law.
At 17, Mill joined the examiner’s office of the India House. After a short probation, he was promoted in 1828 as an assistant examiner. For 20 years, from 1836 (when his father died) to 1856, Mill retained the charge of British East India Company’s relations with the Indian princely states, and in 1856, became chief of the examiner’s office.
In 1822, Mill read PEL Dumont’s exposition of Bentham’s doctrines in the Traités de Législation, which had an enduring influence upon him. The impression created a greater dent on his personality by the study of two 18th century French philosophers – Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and Claude-Adrien Helvétius.
Recognition
John Mill received recognition from two newspapers for his contributions – The Traveler, edited by a friend of Bentham’s, and The Morning Chronicle, edited by his father’s friend John Black. One of his first efforts was a solid argument for freedom of discussion in a series of letters to the Chronicle on the prosecution of Richard Carlyle, a 19th century English radical and freethinker. Mill was an opportunist to expose deviations from sound principles in Parliament and courts of justice. The opening of Westminster Review in April 1824 as the organ of the philosophical radicals, became yet another platform for Mill to voice his views. In 1825, he set in motion work on an edition of Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence. He gained recognition by participating in discussions. Distinguished gentlemen visiting his father, engaged in discussions at a reading society formed by George Grote in 1825 and in debates at the London Debating Society, formed in the same year.
Mental Crisis
His intense training and non-stop journey towards attainment of status of a scholar had its ill-effects. He suffered mental crisis in 1826 due to the strain he had gone through for years to gather as much knowledge possible. Suddenly, the things for which he was being trained and prepared, lost its charm. He had 'no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything else'. He found himself in a situation where he could neither recognize not respond to any emotions. This was a very bad state of life and he suffered a lot. But he felt that 'the cloud gradually drew off' and he was blessed with a normal life again
Live And Non-stop!
In 1826, a calm, as to the value of ends he had set before him, limited Mill’s passion. London Debating Society provided him an opportunity to gauge his force in community divergence. He was looked upon as a precocious fact, an intellect geared up to change and evolve community life. Away from agreeing to some strict beliefs of his father, Mill scuffled with his suspicions in depressing isolation. He emerged victorious from this skirmish with a more Catholic view of individual delight. This reflects a pragmatic aspiration. Gradually, debates at the London Debating Society engrossed men in an invigorating and inspiring deliberations. Mill discontinued his engagements with the society in 1829. However, he was convinced for the rest of his life that a genuine structure of political philosophy was complex and multi-dimensional than he had previously thought of.
At Paris
Mill made his visit to Paris in 1830 loaded with inputs from young liberals and was convinced of a return to hopeful activity. His letters in The Examiner in 1830, and a series of articles on The Spirit of the Age in the same paper in 1831 reflect this confidence. During 1832 and 1833 he contributed many essays to Tait’s Magazine, The Jurist, and The Monthly Repository. In 1835 Sir William Molesworth founded The London Review, with Mill as its editor. It was amalgamated with The Westminster (as The London and Westminster Review) in 1836, and Mill continued as the editor and later as a proprietor until 1840. In and after 1840, he published several important articles in The Edinburgh Review. Some of the essays written for these journals were reprinted in the first two volumes (1859) of Mill’s Dissertations and Discussions and provide evidence of the widening spectrum of his interests. Among the more important are Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties (1833), Writings of Alfred de Vigny (1838), Bentham (1838), Coleridge (1840), M De Tocqueville on Democracy in America (1840), Michelet’s History of France (1844), and Guizot’s Essays and Lectures on History (1845). The twin essays on Bentham and Coleridge exhibit Mill’s supremacy at its magnificence, undoubtedly suggesting the new spirit that he puffed into English radicalism.
Genius At His Work
During these years, Mill also wrote his great systematic works on logic and political economy. His rekindled gusto for humankind assumed character as an objective to equip a perfect system of corroboration for deductions in moral and social science. Sir Isaac Newton was a vital source of inspiration.He was determined that the new logic should not simply oppose the old logic. In his Westminster Review (of 1828) of Richard Whately’s Elements of Logic, he shielded the syllogism against superceding it by a system of inductive logic. He required his inductive logic to "supplement and not supercede." For several years he searched in vain for the means of concatenation. Finally, in 1837, on reading William Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences and rereading John F W Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, Mill found a solution to formulating the methods of scientific investigation and joining the new logic onto the old as a supplement. A System of Logic, in two volumes, was published in 1843.
Supporting Peasant Proprietorship
Mill distinguished three stages in his development as a political economist. In 1844, he published the Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, which he had written several years earlier, and four out of five of these essays are solutions of perplexing technical problems – the distribution of the gains of international trade, the influence of consumption on production, the definition of productive and unproductive labor, and the precise relations between profits and wages.Here for the most part, Mill performed as the disciple of David Ricardo, striving for precise statements and reaching forward to further consequences. In his second stage, originality and independence became obvious as he struggled toward the standpoint from which he wrote his Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848.
At about the same time, Mill advocated the creation of peasant proprietorships as a solution to disorder in Ireland’s peasant community. Then, he went ahead with a comprehensive study of socialism and its supporters. He found that social question deserved its share of importance and pondering by experts. He bifurcated issues of production and distribution, and questioned any distribution system that damned laborers to a wrecked lifestyle, starvation being extreme. Though he did not contribute a socialistically appealing solution, he gathered merit for his endeavors towards building a strong society.
Labeled at third stage as a political economist, Mrs Taylor (Harriet Hardy), who became his wife in 1851, has made significant contributions to the developments on this front.
Personal Life
Though critic have opined, Mill tends not to owe any of his technical doctrine to Harriet. However, she definitely had influenced his ideals of life as an individual and for the society. Enfranchisement of Women is a production inspired by her. Nevertheless, Mill’s relations with her have always been enigmatic in nature.
During the seven years of his marriage Mill became increasingly absorbed in the work of the British East India Company and in consequence, published less than at any other period of his life. In 1856 he became head of the examiner’s office in the India House, and for two years, till the dissolution of the company in 1858, his official work kept him fully occupied. It fell to him, as head of the office, to write the defense of the company’s government of India when the transfer of its powers was proposed. Mill opposed the transfer, and the documents in which he defended the company’s administration are models of trenchant and dignified pleading.
On the dissolution of the company, Mill was offered a seat in the new council but he declined it and retired with a pension of £1,500. His retirement from official life was followed almost immediately by his wife’s death at Avignon, France. He spent most of the rest of his life at a villa at Saint-Véran, near Avignon, returning to his house at Blackheath only for a short period each year.
Going Strong
Mill published a series of books on ethics and politics that he had pondered upon and partly written in collaboration with his wife. The essay On Liberty and the Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform were published in 1859. Considerations on Representative Government (1861) is a collection of his casual articles and essays that he delivered over the years. It has been remarked how Mill combined enthusiasm for democratic government with pessimism as to what democracy was likely to do; practically every discussion in these books exemplifies this. His Utilitarianism (in Fraser’s Magazine, 1861, separate publication, 1863) was a closely reasoned attempt to answer objections to his ethical theory and to remove misconceptions about it. He was especially anxious to make it clear that he included in "utility" the pleasures of the imagination and the gratification of the higher emotions; and to make a place in his system for settled rules of conduct.
Mill started writing on a host of philosophical questions from which emerged Logic. In 1865 he published both his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, and his Auguste Comte and Positivism, wherein lay deep political motives. It was because he regarded the writings and sayings of Sir William Hamilton as the great fortress of intuitional philosophy in Great Britain that Mill embarked on to contradict his pretensions. In dealing with Comte, Mill distinguished sharply between Comte’s earlier philosophical doctrine of Positivism and his later religion of humanity. He regarded the doctrine as a natural development of the outlook of George Berkeley and Hume; he attacked the religion because he saw in it another attempt to foist a priestly hierarchy upon afflicted humanity. It is noticeable that Mill’s language in these books is much closer to the language of Bentham and James Mill than it had been since his boyhood, and it was as an act of piety that in 1869 he republished his father’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind with additional illustrations and explanatory notes.
In Political Arena
While engaged in these years mainly with theoretical studies, Mill did not remit his interest in current politics. He intensely supported the North in the US civil war, to explain that the real problem in the struggle was the abolition of slavery. In 1865 he stood as parliamentary candidate for Westminster, on conditions, strictly in accordance with his principles. He would not canvass or pay agents to canvass for him, nor would he engage to attend to the local business of the constituency. He was with difficulty persuaded even to address a meeting of the electors. He emerged victorious amidst all this. He was actively involved in debates preceding the passage of the 1867 Reform Bill, and helped to extort from the government several useful modifications of the bill, for prevention of corrupt practices. Reform of land tenure in Ireland, representation of women, reduction of national debt, reform of London government, and abrogation of the Declaration of Paris (1856) – concerning the carriage of property at sea during the Crimean War – were among the topics on which he spoke. He took occasion more than once to enforce what he had often advocated - England’s duty to intervene in foreign politics in support of freedom. As a speaker, Mill was somewhat hesitant, but showed great readiness in extemporaneous debate. Elected rector of St Andrews University, he published his Inaugural Address in 1867.
Mill’s subscription to the election expenses of the freethinker and radical politician Charles Bradlaugh and his attack on the conduct of Governor E J Eyre in Jamaica, were perhaps the main causes of his defeat in the general parliamentary election of 1868
Beginning of the End
Mill retired with a sigh of relief to Avignon, away from the controversies that his acts created during his days in the Parliament. The villa he stayed in was stacked with books and newspapers. Reading, writing, discussing, strolling, and gardening kept him occupied far away from the complexities of the political commune. He was extremely fond of music and was himself a fair pianist. Helen Taylor, his stepdaughter, accompanied him after his wife’s death. Mill was an enthusiastic botanist all his life and a frequent contributor of notes and short papers to the Phytologist. During his last trip to Avignon he was looking forward to seeing the spring flowers and completing a record on study of flora of the vicinity.
Mill did not make any attempt to resign from his painstaking way of life or his fervent stance on human affairs. The essays in the fourth volume of his Dissertations – on endowments, on land, on labor, and on metaphysical and psychological questions – were written for Fortnightly Review periodically after his short stint as a parliamentarian. In 1867 he founded National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, along with Mrs P A Taylor, Emily Davies, and others. In 1869 he published The Subjection of Women, the classical theoretical statement of the case for woman suffrage. His last public activity was concerned with the starting of the Land Tenure Reform Association, for which he wrote in The Examiner and made a public speech a few months before his death; the interception by the state of the unearned increment on land and the promotion of cooperative agriculture were the most striking features in his program, which he regarded as a timely compromise in view of the impending struggle between capital and labor in Europe. He died in 1873, and his Autobiography and Three Essays on Religion (1874) were published posthumously.
A bronze statue of Mill stands on the Thames embankment in London, and G F Watt’s copy of Mill’s original portrait is displayed in the National Gallery there
John Stuart Mill, has had a profound influence on 19th century British thought in philosophy, economics, political science, logic, and ethics. His father James Mill – a renowned British historian, economist, and philosopher, embarked on and monitored John’s high intensity education beginning with Greek, to prepare him intellectually for eventual leadership of the Benthamites. John was only three years old then. At the age of 17, he had mastered advanced and comprehensive courses of Greek literature, philosophy, psychology, chemistry, botany, and law.
In his early 20s, John was lost to chronic depression and was haunted primarily by Benthamite philosophy of which he emerged as a leading spokesman. He realized that his education had been unjustifiably constricted and that the value he attached to experience emotional excitement was inadequate. He survived this depression and corrected his former viewpoint.
Mill stands to fill the vacuum between the 18th century concern for emancipation, rationale, and science, and the 19th century trepidation enroute to empiricism and collectivism. His foremost philosophical composition, the System of Logic (1843), provides a valuable discussion on the epistemological principles underlying empiricism. Five years later, he wrote the Principles of Political Economy (1848). His political observations are succinctly echoed in On Liberty (1859), wherein he maintains that freedom is being endangered by the muscle of public opinion. Society has a right to frame laws for that part of one’s conduct, which may hurt the interests of others. He makes a case that suppression could not be expedient in any civilized society. He worked towards a government found on working classes and constitutional safeguards for the rights of women and minorities. Mill is mainly remembered today for his contributions to ethical and social theory.
May 20,1806
Birth in Pentonville, London, as the eldest son of James Mill.
1809
Began learning Greek and the classics.
1810 Introduced to the Benthamites who called for social and political reforms along utilitarian lines laid down by Jeremy Bentham.
1813 Read the first six dialogues of Plato.
1814 Began reading Latin.
1817 Composed a Roman History, an Abridgement of the Ancient Universal History; a History of Holland and a History of Roman Government.
1818 Publication of James Mill’s History of India, which would greatly influence his son. Began studying logic. Met his father’s friends, David Ricardo, the political economist, Joseph Hume, Jeremy Bentham.
1819 Underwent a complete course of political economy, supervised by his father. Spent a year in France, at General Samuel Bentham’s. Met the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say.
1820 Was one of the most learned children in history; knew several languages, mastered the classics, and began to explore own philosophy.
1821 Read Roman Law with John Austin.
1822 Two letters published in the Traveler, which, under the editorship of Walter Coulson had become one of the most important organs of liberal politics. Founded the Utilitarian Society, with William Tooke, William Ellis, George Graham, and John Arthur Roebuck.
1823 Appointment in the East India Company obtained for him by his father, in the office of the Examiner of India Correspondence. Three letters published in the Morning Chronicle, under the name of Wickliffe, wherein he argued the question of free publication of all religious opinions. Became a frequent contributor to both The Traveler and The Morning Chronicle.
1826 Acute mental crisis forced him to reconsider and adjust his strict Benthamite philosophy. Began to read poetry and took interest in arts and the life of imagination.
1828 Friendship with John Sterling and Frederick Maurice, new Coleridgian members of the society. Their views, strongly opposed to that of the Benthamites, enabled Mill to develop his powers of effective debating.
1830 Supported revolution in France, and visited Lafayette. Wrote five essays on ‘Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy’.
1832 Wrote several papers for the first series of Tait’s Magazine and for the Jurist dealing with duties of the state respecting church property and the provision of state education.
1833 Wrote for Examiner, contributing nearly all the articles on French politics. Election of first reformed Parliament, which included many of his radical friends. His hopes that they would form an effective party are lost as they lack the necessary leadership. Mill’s critical account of Bentham’s philosophy incorporated in Bulwer’s ‘England and the English’.
1834 Wrote articles for Monthly Repository. Became editor of London Review. Defended the new Poor Law against criticism from those opposed to centralization.
1835 Studied De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and was influenced by the advantages and disadvantages of democracy discussed therein.
June 31, 1836 Death of his father James Mill.
1837 Resumed the Logic, begun in 1832. Published a manifesto in The Review in support of Durham’s liberal policy in Canada.
1838 Bentham, an essay, published in the London and Westminster.
1840 Coleridge, an essay, published in the Review.
1843 Published System of Logic.
1845 Wrote The Principles of Political Economy.
1846 During Irish famine, he wrote articles for the Morning Chronicle, proposing the establishment of peasant properties on wasteland in Ireland.
1848 Publication of Principles of Political Economy, which was an immediate success, an edition of 1000 copies sold in first year. Vindicated the French provisional government against attacks by Lord Bourgham and others.
1849 Principles of Political Economy reprinted.
1851 Married Harriet Taylor. Continued to keep a tab on public events with interest but is no longer optimistic about social improvement in Europe during the post revolution period.
1853 Worked on the first draft of his Autobiography.
1854 Planned and wrote On Liberty as an essay.
1856 Promoted to Examiner of India Correspondence in the East India Company home service, held the office for two years until the company was dissolved.
1857 Worked on expanded version of On Liberty.
1858 Retired with a pension from East India Company. Death of Harriet Taylor due to pulmonary congestion.
1859 Published On Liberty and two volumes of Dissertations and Discussions.
1860 Worked on Considerations on Representative Government and The Subjection of Women.
1861 Published Considerations on Representative Government.
1862 Reviewed Cairns’ Slave Power to abhor slavery as the central issue in war.
1863 Published Utilitarianism.
1865 Publishes Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and Auguste Comte and Positivism. Stood for Parliament as member for Westminster and got elected. Spoke on controversial issues such as suspension of Habeas Corpus in Ireland
1866 Spoke in favor of abolition of capital punishment, women’s suffrage, and the reform of the government of London
1867 Wrote pamphlet England and Ireland.
1868 Lost his seat in General Election.
1869 Published The Subjection of Women.
1873 Died in Avignon. His Autobiography is published.
1874 Three Essays on Religion published.
1876 Third volume of Dissertations and Discussions published.
John Stuart Mill was the greatest of the Victorian liberal thinkers. He left an enduring indentation on philosophy through his restatements of the principles underlying philosophical empiricism and utilitarianism. As a defender of individual liberty against the interference of both society and state, and as an early advocate of women’s equality, Mill continues to be of major significance.
His major works
On Liberty (1859), which contained Mill’s statement of the principle that only self-protection can justify either the state’s tampering with the liberty of the individual or any personal interference with another’s freedom – particularly with respect to freedom of thought and discussion. "The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part, which merely concerns him, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
Utilitarianism (1863) was Mill’s effort to state and defend the view that 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' should be the aim of personal and legislative conduct. He revised Jeremy Bentham’s earlier version of utilitarianism by arguing for the superiority of the 'higher' pleasures of the mind over mere physical pleasure.
The Subjection of Women (1869) is a classic essay on all aspects of female emancipation.
Other Major Works
A) Politics and Economics Essays on Some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy (1844); Principles of Political Economy, 2 vol. (1848; 2nd and 3rd eds. with important differences, 1849, 1852); Considerations on Representative Government (1861)
B) Philosophy and Religion A System of Logic (1843); Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865); Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865); Three Essays on Religion (1874)
C) Other Works
Essays on Bentham (1838) and Coleridge (1840) in Dissertations and Discussions, 4 vol. (1859–75), also reprinted together with an introduction by FR Leavis (1950); Autobiography, ed. by Helen Taylor (1873).
D) Editions The definitive edition of the Collected Works is that edited by John M Robson et al., in 17 vol. (begun in 1963); each volume has a full introduction, notes, and indexes.
• The price paid for intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.
• Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage, which it continued.
• The only freedom, which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
• Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
• In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to him...the fallacy of what was fallacious.
• One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interest.
• Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, no matter what name it is called.
• He, who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.
• We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
• To understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman.
• That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
• The disposition of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.
• Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.
• A man who has nothing, which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the existing of better men than him.
• The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.
• A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.
