John Stuart Mill

Childhood and a rigorous education

John Stuart Mill was born on 20 May 1806 in Pentonville, then on the edge of London, the eldest son of the Scottish philosopher, historian and economist James Mill. His father, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham and a believer in associationist psychology, set out to produce an exceptional intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism after he and Bentham had died. The boy was educated by his father, with advice and help from Bentham and Francis Place, in a regime of extreme rigour that kept him apart from children his own age. In his Autobiography Mill later recalled that this upbringing had been built more on fear than on affection.

His precocity was remarkable. At three he was learning Greek; by about eight he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis and the whole of Herodotus in the original, and knew several dialogues of Plato. He began Latin and algebra at that age and was made schoolmaster to his younger siblings. His chief reading remained history, though he worked through the Latin and Greek authors commonly taught in schools and universities. This learning was instrumental: he was never taught to write in either language and never became a scholar in the full sense.

Logic, economics and a youthful crisis

At twelve, after his father's History of British India appeared in 1818, Mill began a systematic study of scholastic logic and Aristotle's logical treatises. The following year he took up political economy, studying Adam Smith and David Ricardo, a close friend of the family with whom he walked and talked. Mill's notes on his lessons helped his father write Elements of Political Economy (1821), a textbook promoting Ricardian economics.

At fourteen he spent a year in France with the family of Samuel Bentham. He attended courses in chemistry, zoology and logic at Montpellier and absorbed the sociable life of the French, which left a lasting impression. In Paris he visited Jean-Baptiste Say and met leading liberals and Henri de Saint-Simon.

In 1826, at twenty, he suffered a severe mental crisis that he describes in his Autobiography. He had asked himself whether the just society that was his life's aim would make him happy, and his answer was no. Relief came first from a passage in Marmontel's memoirs and then from the poetry of William Wordsworth, which showed him that beauty awakens compassion and joy. This experience led him to temper the utilitarianism he had inherited and to give greater weight to inner life, culture and feeling. From then on he opened himself to currents such as Romanticism and socialism.

Public service and political life

From the age of seventeen Mill worked for the East India Company, rising to Examiner of Indian Correspondence in 1856. He defended a benevolent despotism as a suitable form of government for colonial territories, believing their peoples were at a different stage of development. When the Crown took direct control of India in 1858, he declined a seat on the new council that would administer it.

In politics he sat in the Liberal Party and was Member of Parliament for Westminster from 1865 to 1868. There he argued for easing the burdens on Ireland and, in 1866, became only the second Member, after Henry Hunt, to call for votes for women, speaking vigorously for it in debate. He also championed proportional representation, the single transferable vote and wider suffrage. From 1865 to 1868 he was Lord Rector of the University of St Andrews, where his inaugural address defended a liberal education.

A System of Logic and the philosophy of science

His most substantial work on logic and method was A System of Logic, published in 1843 after thirteen years of labour. Mill entered the debate on scientific method opened by John Herschel and William Whewell. Against Whewell, who held that some laws were self-evident truths needing no empirical test, he argued that all knowledge comes from experience and that induction is the procedure by which particular cases lead to general laws. He also proposed five inductive methods, known as Mill's canons, for establishing causal relations.

His empiricism led him to hold that even mathematics rests on observation, though with a very general validity. Gottlob Frege criticised this view, but it influenced later thinkers. In metaphysics he was a nominalist and sceptical of abstract entities. His relationship with Auguste Comte was intense: he maintained a correspondence with the founder of positivism from 1841, from which he took his interest in a science of society, though he later distanced himself from Comte's religion of humanity.

Liberalism and individual liberty

In On Liberty (1859) he set out the question of the legitimate limits of society's power over the individual. His harm principle holds that the only legitimate reason for restricting someone's liberty is to prevent harm to others, not to secure his own physical or moral good. Mill warned of the "tyranny of the majority" and of social pressure that can stifle individuality as thoroughly as an authoritarian government. He therefore defended freedom of expression with passion, arguing that even false opinions are valuable, because they force their holders to understand the grounds of their beliefs and keep truths from hardening into empty dogma.

In The Subjection of Women (1869), written with Harriet Taylor, he applied these principles to the inequality between men and women. He denounced an education for women that aimed only at marriage and a legal position in which married women had few rights. His case for educating women rested on the benefits it would bring to children, to society and to husbands themselves.

Utilitarianism and economics

In Utilitarianism (1863) he developed Bentham's doctrine of the greatest happiness for the greatest number but introduced a decisive distinction: not all pleasures are equal. Intellectual and moral pleasures are superior to merely physical ones, and so he wrote that it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. This refinement set him apart from the more quantitative utilitarianism of his mentor.

In economics his Principles of Political Economy (1848) was for decades one of the most widely read textbooks, eventually displacing The Wealth of Nations as the standard reference. Initially a supporter of free markets, he moved over the years towards a liberal socialism. In later editions he accepted the possibility of a co-operative economy in which workers ran their own enterprises, and he allowed for taxation that distinguished between earned and unearned income. He regarded a stationary state of the economy, without unlimited growth, as desirable for preserving the quality of life and the natural environment. Karl Marx criticised his thought in the Grundrisse, charging that it treated the categories of capital in an ahistorical way.

Reception and legacy

Mill died on 8 May 1873 in Avignon, where he was buried beside his wife, Harriet Taylor, whom he had married in 1851 after twenty-one years of friendship. His influence reached political philosophy, economics, logic and feminism. On Liberty remains a central text of liberalism, and he is regarded as the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century.