John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill a British philosopher, political economist and civil servant (1806-1873), the most influential liberal thinker of the nineteenth century, whose writings on liberty, representative government, ethics and the subjection of women gave philosophical form to the ideals of modern liberal democracy.

Education and Early Life

John Stuart Mill was born in London on 20 May 1806, the eldest son of the philosopher and economist James Mill, and he was educated at home under his father's severe direction on a programme of extraordinary intensity, learning Greek at the age of three, Latin at eight, and reading history, logic, political economy and the classics as a boy. He began to study the works of Bentham and was set to master the sciences of philosophy and law before he reached manhood, and he was deliberately kept apart from other children of his own age.

This prodigious training made him a scholar of immense range, but it left him emotionally starved, and at the age of twenty he suffered a nervous crisis, which he described as a season when he seemed to have no feeling for anything and found himself asking whether the achievement of all his political aims would make him truly happy. Reading the poetry of Wordsworth and the writings of the romantic authors helped to restore him and enlarged his sense of the importance of feeling and of the inner life of the individual.

In 1823 he entered the service of the East India Company, where he rose over many years to a senior position, working on the administration and eventual reform of India until the company was wound up in 1858. In 1851 he married Harriet Taylor, whom he had known for two decades and whose influence upon his mature thought he regarded as decisive, and after her death in 1858 he edited and published her writings and devoted himself to the causes of liberty and of the equality of women that they had shared.

On Liberty

Mill's essay On Liberty, published in 1859, is the classic statement of the principle that the only justification for interfering with the freedom of an individual is to prevent harm to others. Over his own person and conscience, he argued, the individual is sovereign, and neither the state nor the majority may coerce him for his own good by appealing to moral or religious disapproval, for in matters that concern himself alone his independence is absolute and his own good is not a sufficient warrant for compulsion.

He defended this principle by an appeal to utility in the widest sense, rooted in the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Liberty of thought, expression and discussion was necessary because opinions that are silenced may be true, or partly true, and because even a true opinion held without challenge degenerates into prejudice and loses its living power over the mind. Freedom of experiment in living was necessary because individuality and variety are the sources of personal development and of social progress.

He insisted that the argument applied only to mature human beings and left open the question of interference with children and with those unable to care for themselves, and he distinguished clearly between the self-regarding and the other-regarding parts of conduct. He sought to draw a limit that would permit the widest scope for human freedom consistent with the security of society, a limit that has framed liberal debate about the scope of law and morality ever since it was first proposed and that continues to guide discussion of the proper boundaries of state power.

Logic, Ethics and Political Economy

Mill was a systematic thinker who worked across logic, epistemology, ethics and economics. His System of Logic sought to provide a comprehensive account of the methods of scientific inquiry, and his analysis of the experimental methods of induction, of the nature of causation and of the logic of the moral sciences became a standard work of reference for the students of his day and for the philosophers who followed them. In it he defended the possibility of a science of human nature and of society, subject to the same canons of evidence as the natural sciences.

In ethics he defended a refined utilitarianism, holding that the greatest happiness principle must take account of the quality as well as the quantity of pleasures, and that it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, and better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. He believed that the cultivation of the higher faculties is itself a principal ingredient of happiness, and he gave to utilitarian doctrine a richer and more humane form than Bentham had done, one that made room for the claims of character and cultivation.

In political economy he wrote the Principles of Political Economy, a comprehensive account of production, distribution and exchange that served for decades as the standard treatise and was widely used in the universities. He argued that the laws of production have the character of physical truths, but that the distribution of wealth depends upon the arrangements of society and is therefore open to deliberate reform, and he anticipated the limitations of unlimited competition and defended cooperation and a fairer sharing of the products of industry.

Representative Government and the Subjection of Women

In Considerations on Representative Government he examined the conditions under which free institutions can flourish, and he argued for a form of government that combines popular participation with the guidance of educated and competent minds. He proposed plural voting for the educated and an elaborate system of proportional representation, with the single transferable vote, to give a voice to minorities and to secure the representation of every substantial part of opinion within the assembly rather than the rule of a bare and temporary majority.

He defended the extension of the franchise to women and to the working classes, and he regarded political participation as a means of education, through which citizens acquire the knowledge and the habits of public life. He also held that the state has a duty to provide education, but he opposed a monopoly of it, preferring a system of competing schools that would not impose a single uniform doctrine upon the young and would leave parents free to choose among them according to their convictions.

In The Subjection of Women he attacked the legal and social subordination of women with an argument of remarkable clarity. He held that the assumed inferiority of women was a product of their subjection rather than a reason for it, that nothing was known of the true differences between the sexes because women had never been given the conditions of freedom, and that the equality of the sexes was required both by justice and by the interest of society and of the marriage relation itself, which could never be truly happy where one party was the master of the other.

Influence and Legacy

Mill spent the last years of his life in Avignon, where he died on 8 May 1873 and where he was buried beside his wife. He had served for a term as a member of Parliament for Westminster, where he argued for the extension of the franchise and for the reform of the government of Ireland, and he gave the first parliamentary speech in favour of the right of women to vote, though the measure was defeated and the cause advanced only long after his death and by other hands and in later generations of reformers.

His writings were read throughout the world and translated into many languages. His defence of individual liberty, of free discussion and of the equality of the sexes has shaped the constitutional and moral thought of liberal societies, and his works on logic and economics influenced both philosophy and the developing social sciences. He provided the intellectual framework for much of modern liberalism and for the arguments of later reformers on both sides of the Atlantic and in lands beyond the seas.

Mill is remembered as a thinker of immense scope and exceptional candour, a man who sought to reconcile the claims of freedom with the claims of community and to place the ideals of social reform upon a rational foundation. His open-mindedness and his willingness to learn from opponents, and even to restate their case in its strongest form before answering it, gave his work a quality of balance that has kept it central to debate about liberty and democracy ever since and has made him a model of fair and honest controversy for all who came after him.

See also

• On Liberty
• Utilitarianism
• Harm principle
• Women's suffrage