Son of philosopher and reformer James Mill, John Stuart Mill began his career as a philosopher at a young age. He helped edit many of his father's and Jeremy Bentham's works and helped educate his sisters. The oldest of nine children, Mill was born in North London in 1806. Educated at home by his father and Bentham, Mill learned Greek, French, and Latin at a young age and was encouraged by his father to argue every idea presented to him. He did just that when he began to argue against the Utilitarian ideas his father promoted.
In 1823, Mill was hired by his father's employer, the East India Company, as a junior clerk. He worked there for thirty-five years, working his way up into management. Meanwhile, he wrote essays for The Examiner and The Westminster Review. These early essays reflected the ideas held by James Mill and Jeremy Bentham and were radical, reformist, and Utilitarian. From 1865 to 1868, Mill was a Member of Parliament, where he argued for women's legal and social equality, for Irish independence, and a national security system. Mill died of consumption in 1873 having gained respect as an important intellectual.
In 1831, Mill met Harriet Taylor, a married woman, an intellectual, and the person Mill said was the inspiration for his work. Their twenty-year friendship and, after Taylor was widowed in 1849, their consequent marriage in 1851 was one of the great love relationships of the nineteenth century. Inexperienced himself in sexual matters, Mill later credited Taylor with having helped him to see how oppressed women were in Victorian society and in marriage.
In 1826 after a serious mental breakdown, Mill reevaluated his Utilitarian education. He turned to William Wordsworth's poetry, and its emphasis on feeling redirected Mill's thinking toward issues of oppression and social injustice. While James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and Robert Owen believed that character could be shaped by outside forces, they did not address the possibility that a persons could change by their own desire or initiative. Mill believed individuals deserve absolute freedom to develop as they choose. Mill explored the idea of custom and by pointing out evidence that customs are culturally and temporally defined, he made the case that custom is not innate but rather consists of those behaviors which a society is conditioned toward and individuals are led to expect. The customs of a certain place and time shape individuals from birth, artificially encouraging certain traits while discouraging others. Thus, as people mature, they are forced into certain roles and patterns of behavior which over time are assumed to be natural. While it is understandable that within a certain society prevalent patterns would seem "natural," it is nonetheless the case that normative behavior is acquired and not inborn. Without using the word, Mill was explaining social conditioning. As a young man, Mill participated in disseminating information about birth control, and as a member of the House of Commons, he was the first man to speak in Parliament on behalf of women's rights.
In his essay On Liberty (1859), Mill explained the tyranny of the majority and how important men of genius and idiosyncrasy are for guiding less enlightened and more conforming others. The rule of the majority, Mill believed, threatened individual liberty. Similarly, conformity works against the development of natural, inborn talents. Since individuals cannot know what they are suited for unless they are free to experiment, absolute freedom ought to be available for every person. In a society in which perfect equality of opportunity and rights is the case for all, individuals will develop as they are so inclined and the society will benefit from their contributions. Any oppression of a group denies the whole society of the contributions from that group's members. On the Subjection of Women (1869) explores specifically gender-linked oppressive social patterns. Here Mill made the startling analogy of marriage to slavery, continuing the argument begun by Mary Wollstonecraft, in her The Rights of Woman, that the goal of marriage ought to be complete equality and friendship and yet as long as husbands have absolute control of wives, friendship is not possible.
A gentleman and a scholar, Mill was first and foremost a moral thinker. He envisioned a world of equality and freedom in which individuals could choose their paths of development and the rest of society would be enriched by their contributions. Living in accord with his precepts, he signed a prenuptial agreement with Harriet Taylor, pledging never to exercise his legal rights as her husband. Though married to Mill, Taylor retained possession and control of her estate, an act on Mill's part of conspicuous fairness and equality in a time when custom and law defined all a bride's property as the possession upon marriage of her husband.
In later life, Mill moved from a laissez-faire economic theory toward socialism as he realized that government must take a more active role in guaranteeing the interests of all of its citizens. The greatest sadness of Mill's later years was the unexpected death of his wife in 1858. He took a house in Avignon, France, in order to be near her grave and divided his time between there and London. He won election to the house of Commons in 1865, although he refused to campaign. He died on May 8, 1873.
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