John Stuart Mill, the classic exponent of liberalism, was brought up in utilitarian principles by his father, James Mill, a close friend and associate of Bentham. His rigorous childhood education, described in his Autobiography (1873), involved a brilliant and precocious mastery of classical languages by the age of 7. For most of his working life he was a clerk at India House in London, though briefly a Member of Parliament. After a long association, he married Harriet Taylor whom he always claimed as his inspiration and intellectual partner. On their marriage, in protest against the legal situation of women at the time, he wrote a formal renunciation of the property and similar rights bestowed on him as a husband.
Mill was a many-sided thinker and writer—a philosopher, social scientist and humanist. Among the subjects he treated were politics, ethics, logic and scientific method. He also wrote on the position of women (The Subjection of Women, 1859), constitutional reform (Considerations on Representative Government, 1861) and economics (Principles of Political Economy, 1848).
In Utilitarianism (1861) Mill expounded and defended the principle that the tendency of actions to promote happiness or its reverse is the standard of right and wrong. His version of utilitarianism was from a logical point of view possibly flawed, but from a moral point of view enhanced, by the notion that some forms of happiness are more worthwhile than others. On Liberty (1859) is the classic argument for the claims of the individual against the state, and in it Mill makes an impassioned defence of the principles of liberty and toleration. Isaiah Berlin writes of Mill that ‘the highest values for him…were individual liberty, variety, and justice’. This is sometimes seen as inconsistent with his basic utilitarianism, but Mill believed that principles like liberty and justice were themselves important social instruments for utility. This follows from his view of human nature, and in particular from his belief that self-determination and the exercise of choice are themselves part of a higher concept of happiness, and that ‘collective mediocrity’ is a recipe for social stagnation and permanent cultural and economic arrest. Writing on toleration, Mill argued in favour of liberty of thought, speech and association, as well as for freedom to cultivate whatever lifestyle one chooses, subject only to the constraint of not harming others. It is often disputed whether there are any actions which do not affect other people in some way, but the distinction between other-regarding and self-regarding actions—the postulation of a public realm and a private realm—is an essential element of liberalism.
Mill applied these principles to education, defending a liberal and secular education. He considered compulsory education not an invasion of liberty but essential to it. However, he believed strongly that there should not be a ‘state monopoly of education’ but that state education should be one amongst a number of competing systems.
In A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Deductive (1843), Mill defended a classical view of induction as empirical generalization, and held that this can supply a model for both logical deduction and scientific method. In some respects this may be seen as a classic version of British empiricism, and indeed Mill was an empiricist in the sense that he believed truth, including mathematical truth, was to be established by observation rather than intuition; however, because he was prepared to accept the uniformity of nature as a basic postulate, his account does not have the sceptical consequences that this position might otherwise seem to involve. Mill extended his discussion of methodology to cover the application of experimental method to social science and set out to provide ‘a general science of man in society’. His argument is to be found in Book VI of A System of Logic, which has been called the most important contribution to the making of modern sociology until Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method.
While some of his immediate successors saw Mill as the unfortunate propounder of views that are inherently irreconcilable, a number of modern commentators have offered a revisionist interpretation of Mill as a consistent thinker. This position was taken at one time by John Gray (1983), who argued that Mill’s active rather than passive conception of happiness necessarily involves a social setting in which liberty and toleration are the norm. Later, however, Gray attacked his own revisionist interpretation—an interpretation shared also by, for example, Ryan (1987) and Berger—arguing that Mill’s Victorian faith in progress obscured from him the truth that the empirical assumption that liberty will contribute to happiness is either unsupported or false. This breaking of the link between happiness and liberty, Gray suggests, together with the collapse of classical utilitarianism that results from recognising the ultimate incommensurability of pleasures of various kinds, is fatal to any form of liberalism. The revision of revisionism should not be taken, however, as anything more than a sign of the perennial interest of Mill’s ideas; and Mill, more than any of his critics, would no doubt see this as another opportunity to insist that no truth should ever be allowed to become a dead dogma, even the truth of liberalism itself.
Brenda Almond
University of Hull
References
Berger, F. (1984) Happiness, Justice and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Berkeley, CA.
Berlin, I. (1969) ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’ in Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford.
Durkheim, E. (1950) The Rules of Sociological Method, trans. S.A.Solovay and J.H.Mueller, and ed. E.G.Catlin. Gray, J. (1983) Mill on Liberty: A Defence, London.
Ryan, A. (1987) The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, 2nd edn, London.
