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ABSTRACT
Current understanding of Mill as a founding father of liberalism is a Cold War creation. Discarding this conception opens the way to a general reassessment of his thought: who was the historical Mill? He did not define himself as liberal and there is no simple template. Most obviously he is a pluralist, defined by a plural heritage received through his father. This framework permitted great creativity in political and social theory, but it was diffuse. The one clear unifying theme is a unique conception of a hierarchy of intellect founded on the inexorable accumulation of positive knowledge. The one important exception to this is political economy. What stands out overall is his individuality, where Mill embodies his own ideal. So apart from political economy, where he could be identified in more conventional terms, his nineteenth-century legacy was personal and incalculably diffusive rather than doctrinaire. This left it ripe for twentieth-century re-invention.
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Notes
1 Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians vol.iii John Stuart Mill (London, 1900). For the received categories of English thought at this date: Elie Halévy, La formation du radicalisme philosophique (Paris, 1901–1904); A.V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation Between Law and Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century (London, 1905); Ernest Barker, Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day (London, 1915). Stephen’s one reference to ‘liberalism’ is a treatment of Mill’s relation to religious liberalism, meaning F.D. Maurice and Carlyle: iii.452–77.
2 Resp. Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal [radio lectures, 1952] ed. Henry Hardy (London, 2002), 52; Berlin, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’ [1959] in Liberty ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford, 2002), 218. Some modern authors acknowledge this context, but without any critical agenda: Joseph Persky, The Political Economy of Progress. John Stuart Mill and Modern Radicalism (Oxford, 2016), xi–xiii.
3 Compare Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself (Yale, 2023).
4 ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’ was an afterthought, the occasional product of an invitation to lecture. But Berlin’s message was consistent: Mill was ‘not original’: Liberty, 244, 250.
5 ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Liberty, 211, 175.
6 ‘Introduction’ (1963), CW XII.xvi.
7 Hayek edited John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Correspondence and Subsequent Marriage (Chicago, 1951) and continued to play a role in the volumes of correspondence of the Collected Works edition: CW XII.vii–xi, xv–xxiv (1963). Note too his support for St. John Packe’s Life of John Stuart Mill (London, 1954), xi–xiv. His first step in Mill scholarship, an edition of the article series, The Spirit of the Age (Chicago, 1942) was a false start. The approach there was critical and historical rather than biographical and canonical, and his view of Mill at this date as ‘eclectic’ rather than ‘representative’ was the opposite of his later one: ‘John Stuart Mill at the Age of Twenty-Five’, ibid., vii.
8 Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism (Cambridge, 1965/1990), xlviii. Cf. Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (New York, 1974).
9 Gregory Claeys, John Stuart Mill (Oxford, 2022), xvii, 117.
10 Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism (Princeton, 2018); William Selinger, Parliamentarism (Cambridge, 2019). Rosenblatt greatly expands the cast of possible liberals, whereas Selinger adheres quite closely to the canon (Constant, Tocqueville, Mill) laid down by Berlin and Hayek. But neither challenges it.
11 On linguistic usage: Le Diplomate, Quintidi 25 Brumaire (15 November 1799) cit. Jörn Leonhard, Liberalismus: zur historischen Semantik eines europäischen Deutungsmusters (Munich, 2001), 132–3 cf. 133–5. (Rosenblatt’s claim to offer ‘a word history of liberalism’ is honoured more in the breach than the observance: Lost History of Liberalism, 3). See previously e.g. François Mignet, Histoire de la Révolution Française [1824] (Paris, 18274), ii.298; Alphonse Aulard, Histoire Politique de la Révolution Française (Paris, 1901), 625, 720, 724, 753, etc. There is an approximation to this view deriving from Elie Halévy: that the term ‘liberal’ originated with the Spanish liberales of 1812. But while this is relevant to the term’s importation into England, it is not the origin of the word ‘liberal’, though the idea remains widespread amongst English scholars: Halévy, Histoire du Peuple Anglais au XIXe Siècle … 1815-1830 (Paris, 1923), 74 cf. David Craig, ‘Origins of “Liberalism” in Britain’, Historical Research 85 (2012): 481; Duncan Bell, ‘What is Liberalism ?’, Political Theory 42 (2014), 693; Selinger, Parliamentarism (2019), 16.
12 Cf. Greg Conti and Cheryl Welch, ‘The Receptions of Elie Halévy’s La Formation du radicalisme philosophique … ’, Modern Intellectual History 12 (2015): 211–16. Isaiah Berlin overrides this point in order to frame a consolidated European liberalism: ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’, Liberty, 218, 225, 235.
13 Robert Saunders, ‘Parliament and People: the British Constitution in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1800-1914’, Journal of Modern European History 6 (2008): 72–87; P. Ghosh, ‘Whig Interpretation of History’ in Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, ed. K. Boyd (London, 1999), 1293–4; Joseph Coohill, Ideas of the Liberal Party … 1832-1852 (Chichester, 2011); Norman Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics (Oxford, 1965) cc.5–6.
14 James Fitzjames Stephen, ‘Liberalism’, Cornhill Magazine 5 (1862): 70–83, is a well-known example. It argued that there must be a new set of liberal ideas – hence ‘liberalism’ – to accompany the democratic franchise reform that (he supposed) the Liberal party would soon pass. This anticipated the discourse of the ‘new liberalism’ of the 1880s, but at the time it was an isolated utterance. Furthermore, Stephen had no clear vision of what the future ‘liberalism’ might be and the essay found no echo.
15 To Alexis de Tocqueville 15 Dec. 1856, CW XV.
16 Eg. ‘Scott’s Life of Napoleon’ (1828), CW XX.109.
17 References in this form are to the drafts of Mill’s Autobiography [1853–4, 1861, 1869–70], CW I.
18 CW I.62–3, 78–9, 100–1, 102–3, 132, 172–3, 276.
19 c.1, CW XVIII.218.
20 CW X.303, 301, 313.
21 Ibid., 302.
22 Stuart Jones, ‘John Stuart Mill: Law, Morality, Liberty’, Modern Intellectual History 15 (2018): 879.
23 System of Logic, CW VIII.911. Compare ‘On the definition of political economy’ [1831/3], CW IV.320.
24 Logic, CW VIII.952.
25 Helen McCabe, John Stuart Mill, Socialist (Montreal, 2021), 12–17. Graeme Duncan is an exception from an earlier epoch: Marx and Mill (Cambridge, 1973), Parts III–IV. Of course titular recognition of Mill’s ‘social’ thought is frequent, e.g. Dale Miller, John Stuart Mill: Moral, Social and Political Thought (Cambridge, 2010), Part III.
26 Cf. ‘Guizot’s Essays and Lectures on History’ [1845], CW XX.259; On Liberty (1859), CW XVIII.252 etc.
27 See Mill to Carlyle 2 Aug. 1833, CW XII; William Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals (Oxford, 1979) c.9; ed. Kyriakos Demetriou, George Grote and the Classical Tradition (Leiden, 2014).
28 Compare Mill to Harriet Taylor 12 Feb. 1855 with Mill to G.J. Holyoake 2 March 1859, to Theodor Gomperz 31 March 1859, CW XIV–XV.
29 Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography (London, 1904), ii.118–22, 132–7, 490–3.
30 Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), CW X.336, 359.
31 Logic (1843), Book III c.xiv.
32 ‘Coleridge’ [1840], CW X.123. Text of 1840.
33 On Liberty (1859), CW XVIII.253–4.
34 ‘Bentham’ [1838], ibid., 94, 91.
35 Among other such testimonies: ‘Civilization’ [1836], including citation of ‘Review of “Austin’s Lectures on Jurisprudence”’ [1832], CW XVIII.133–5. He finds some justification in his father’s essay on ‘Periodical Literature’, Westminster Review 1 (1824): 206–49, here 206–22; but overlooks the fact that James Mill is not criticising all reviews, only the majority, with the Westminster (in which he is writing) as an exception cf. [J.S. Mill] to Morning Chronicle 27 Dec. 1824, CW XXII.101–2, A I.95.
36 Compare ‘Bentham’: ‘all writing which undertakes to make men feel truths as well as see them, does take up one point at a time … to make it sink into and colour the whole mind of the reader or hearer. It is justified in doing so, if the portion of truth which it thus enforces be that which is called for by the occasion’: CW X.114.
37 ‘Introduction’, La formation du radicalisme philosophique I. La jeunesse de Bentham (Paris, 1901), vi–x cf. III. Le radicalisme philosophique (Paris, 1904). Later historians, Joseph Hamburger, Intellectuals in Politics. John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (Yale, 1965) and William Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals (1979), 2, 200–2, were much more correct in associating the term with John Mill. Even so Hamburger supposed that ‘philosophic radicalism’ began in 1820 (cc.1–2) and describes Mill as its ‘last spokesman’ (c.8), which was practically a license to continue Halévy’s usage. As his title suggests, Joseph Persky’s subject is ‘modern radicalism’. Historically he has nothing to add to Halévy: The Political Economy of Progress. John Stuart Mill and Modern Radicalism (Oxford, 2016), 9.
38 The 1832 describes Bentham ‘as the first name among the philosophic radicals’, Examiner, 10 June 1832: CW XXIII.471. This is evidently a salute, yet ‘the first’ may be superseded in future. — Harriet Grote shared Mill’s history and chronology in her essay The Philosophical Radicals of 1832 (London: privately printed, 1866). In its public and ‘masculine’ aspect this focussed on the fortunes of the philosophic(al) radicals in Parliament, specifically Sir William Molesworth and her husband, George Grote, in the decade 1832–41.
39 Compare Macaulay, ‘those philosophers who call themselves Utilitarians, and whom others generally call Benthamites’: ‘Mill’s Essay on Government’, Edinburgh Review 49 (March, 1829), 159. Macaulay encountered the ‘utilitarians’ at a range of debating society venues from 1822 to 1828: A I.79, 131.
40 Because of the consensual and continuous evolution of British institutions, political historians have not registered the seismic impact of 1832, though contemporaries of all persuasions commented upon it. Angus Hawkins has the best modern account: Victorian Political Culture (Oxford, 2015) c.2.
41 ‘Fonblanque’s England under Seven Administrations’ [1837], CW VI.353. Note, too, a related invocation of ‘neoradicalism’ based on ‘a utilitarianism which takes into account the whole of human nature not the ratiocinative faculty only’, that is, of a John Mill variety: to Edward Lytton Bulwer, 22 Nov. 1836, CW XII.
42 9 June 1851, CW XIV.
43 ‘Reorganization of the Reform Party’ [1839], CW VI.468, 467 resp.
44 On the father-and-son relationship see William Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals (1979) cc.3–4; Mill (Oxford, 1985) c.1.
45 For modern support of John Mill’s high estimate of his father’s role in getting Ricardo to write the Principles: Donald Winch, ‘Introduction’, James Mill: Selected Economic Writings (Edinburgh, 1966).
46 He also administers a sharp rebuff to those who dismissed his education as irrelevant: ‘The reader whom these things do not interest, has only himself to blame if he reads farther … ’ A I.5.
47 Resp. On Liberty (1859), CW XVIII.224; Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in Liberty ed. Hardy, 226.
48 Cf. ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.97 where James Mill appears as one of the ‘the able men who … have been regarded as [Bentham’s] disciples’, but who did not follow him in his narrowness; ‘Whewell on Moral Philosophy’ [1852], CW X.175 etc.
49 J.S. Mill, Preface to James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (London, 1869), xiii–xiv. An important supplement to the Autobiography.
50 Historically minded authors notice it, but they too re-shape it: e.g. John M. Robson, The Improvement of Mankind (Toronto, 1968), Preface; Greg Claeys, John Stuart Mill (2022), 21, 51.
51 On Stewart: James Mill to Macvey Napier 11 May 1820, 10 July 1821 in Selections from the Correspondence of the Late Macvey Napier ed. Macvey Napier (London, 1879), 24, 27. John Mill then read Stewart: ‘On the Definition of Political Economy’ [1831/3], CW IV.311 cf. A I.189–91. See also on John Millar below.
52 James Mackintosh was one of the first to settle in London (1788). Mill comes in 1802, Francis Horner in 1802–3, and Brougham in 1803, followed by a continual stream which includes McCulloch (1828) and Carlyle (1831). Literary authors such as David Mallet and James Thomson had done this as far back as the 1720s, but for them, unlike authors in the ‘sciences’ and philosophy, there was an obvious commercial reason to do so.
53 Considerations on Representative Government, CW XIX.549. Despite a politically radical commitment to justice for Ireland, he remains a unionist there too: ibid., 550–1, cf. England and Ireland (1868), VI.519–26.
54 Modern scholarship here begins with Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (London, 1970). This centres on a Newtonian and ‘rational’ interpretation of the Logic and Mill’s ethics but, drawn by inexorable attraction, it concludes with an account of On Liberty standing beyond rules and rationality (c.13).
55 To Macvey Napier 11 Sept. 1823, pr. Alexander Bain, James Mill (London, 1882), 208–9. In fact he decided to treat psychology instead.
56 ‘Bentham’, CW X.83. Compare An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation [1789] (London, 1970), 52n.c and 319 s.v. ‘Fictions … ’.
57 Compare On Liberty (1859), CW XVIII.251; Antis Loizides, ‘Taking their Cue from Plato: James and John Stuart Mill’, History of European Ideas 39 (2013): 121–40.
58 Mill to Sterling 20–22 Oct. 1831, CW XII.
59 On Robertson, ‘The British Constitution’ [1826], CW XXVI.368, 383–4; Millar: ‘Modern French Historical Works’ [1826], CW XX.46, 51–2; Gibbon (eg) ‘Carlyle’s French Revolution’ [1837], XX.134–6; Hume (eg): ‘Brodie’s History of the British Empire’ [1824], VI.3–58, an authentic if juvenile diatribe. — On James Mill compare Callum Barrell, History and Historiography in Classical Utilitarianism (Cambridge, 2021) c.2. However, complexity of presentation tends to submerge readings of individual texts here.
60 Resp. A I.29 cf. 11; Preface to James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1869), xiv.
61 Resp. History of British India (London: Baldwin, 1817), I.648 cf. Preface, ix–x, xix; Logic (1843), CW VIII.929. Compare J.S. Mill, ‘Scott’s Life of Napoleon’ [1828], CW XX.55–6, 58–60 with James Mill, Preface, x–xix.
62 History of British India, Preface, xix.
63 Written for the Supplement to the 5th edition of Britannica (1817–24), it was reprinted in a collection of Mill’s articles, Essays on Government, Jurisprudence, Liberty of the Press … (London, 1825). Hence the familiar reference by readers who did not rely on the Encyclopaedia: the ‘Essay on Government’ (e.g. A I.107).
64 To Macvey Napier 5 Aug. 1818, Selections from the Correspondence of the Late Macvey Napier (1879), 20.
65 A I.81–3. Law was a strand in John Mill’s intellectual activities, but it was secondary, and so is relegated here. He distinguished between ‘Legislation’ (a term deriving from Dumont as well as from Bentham), concerned with the ends which laws should serve (utility or otherwise), and ‘Jurisprudence’, the examination of law as such: ‘Austin’s Lectures on Jurisprudence’ [1832] CW XXI.51–60; repeated A I.69. His interest lay with ‘Legislation’, and after the brief period of Benthamite enthusiasm, he reverted to his father’s position, that this, rather than ethics, was where Bentham’s importance lay: e.g. ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.100–4. Even so, legislation led back to ethics, though now it was a post-Benthamite ethics, since this was the real science of ends: ibid., 94–6 etc. His writings on jurisprudence are more marginal and largely derive from his personal connection to John Austin: cf. Philip Schofield, ‘John Stuart Mill on John Austin (and Jeremy Bentham)’, in The Legacy of John Austin’s Jurisprudence, ed. M. Freeman & P. Mindus (Dordrecht, 2013), 237–54.
66 The intellectual biography of James Mill remains under-researched, and the welcome tendency to liberate him from the shadow of Bentham is of no help to us here: e.g. Antis Loizides, James Mill’s Utilitarian Logic and Politics (London, 2019), which omits law and Bentham as subjects. However, the obvious turning point comes in 1819. Mill took up his East India Company position and thereby became a government official. This set a limit to his life as a writer and thinker, and both of these changes separated him from Bentham. Bentham’s new link to the wider intellectual world was John Bowring, a man with no intellectual credentials outside literature. They met in 1820 and their contacts developed rapidly thereafter cf. A I.93.
67 See most famously the essays on ‘Bentham’ and ‘Coleridge’ (1838, 1840) CW X.77–163.
68 CW XVIII.277
69 ‘Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy’ in Edward Bulwer Lytton, England and the English (London, 1833), ii.321, 320.
70 Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), CW X.300.
71 ‘On the definition of political economy’ [1831/3], CW IV.319; cf. Logic (1843), CW VIII.943.
72 Compare Logic CW VIII.951 n.*, added in 1865.
73 Utilitarianism, CW X.230. On Deontology: ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.90, cf. 95–6 on the ‘Table of the Springs of Action’.
74 See eg. ‘Whewell on Moral Philosophy’ [1852], CW X.167–201.
75 Cf. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (1851), etc.; Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (1874).
76 Compare on Smith, Preface, Principles of Political Economy (1847), CW II.xci–xcii; Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), CW X.305.
77 CW IV.1–192.
78 The Autobiography appears to suggest that his father benefited from ideas related to Essays on Some Unsettled Questions, but chronology makes it clear that the gain came from the essays of 1824–8: CW IV.3–180.
79 CW IV.230–1, 309.
80 Resp. CW IV.312, 313. Compare James Mill, Elements of Political Economy (London, 1821), 1.
81 ‘On the Definition of Political Economy’, CW IV.314, 318–20 resp.
82 Ibid., 321, 321n.1, 334–5.
83 Ibid., 323.
84 Ibid., 335–6.
85 To J.P. Nichol, 17 Jan. 1834, CW XII.
86 After a brief demonstration ‘That consumption is co-extensive with production’ (§.3), it is confined to government taxation as a form of parasitic consumption (§§.4–15).
87 CW III.705.
88 Ricardo, Preface, Principles of Political Economy (London, 1817), iii.
89 Preface, Principles of Political Economy (1847), CW II.xci cf. A I.255–7.
90 ‘Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848’, CW XX.351.
91 ‘Preface’, July 1852, CW II.xciii.
92 Loc. Cit.
93 Cf. Helen McCabe, John Stuart Mill, Socialist (Montreal, 2021), here 103–8.
94 CW XVIII.272. Repeated Representative Government (1861) XIX.421.
95 A I.238, 239. The first half of this declaration comes from 1853–4; the near contradiction that follows was added in 1861.
96 ‘Nachwort’ [1873], Capital I, Marx-Engels Werke 23.21.
97 CW II.3.
98 ‘Civilization’ [1836], CW XVIII.120–47. See too ‘The Negro Question’ [1850], CW XXI.91, 94.
99 CW II.209.
100 ‘Coleridge’ [1840], CW X.121 cf. 125–30.
101 ‘On the definition of political economy’ [1831/3], CW IV.316.
102 Book VI cc.2–3.
103 Stefan Collini was one of the first to raise the subject of Mill and character, yet his interest is not so much in Mill himself, as in using Mill as a focal point for a broader construction of British politics and culture: Public Moralists (Oxford, 1991), cc.2–4, 8 esp. So character is more a datum than an object of analysis.
104 David Hartley, Observations on Man (London, 1749), Part I, c.IV; Part II, c.III. Compare Mill, ‘Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy’ in E. Bulwer Lytton, England and the English (1833), ii.329; ‘Bentham’ [1838] CW X.97. Cf. Richard Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature (New York, 1999).
105 System of Logic (1843), CW 8.905.
106 Cf. On Liberty (1859), c.3. The association of individuality with character, hence ‘individuality of character’ goes back to the 1830s: e.g. ‘Bentham’, CW X.108; ‘Coleridge’, ibid., 123.
107 Logic CW VIII.913 cf. 847.
108 Resp. Logic CW VIII.898, A I.111 cf. I.187 on ‘the “extraordinary pliability of human nature”’; ‘Civilization’ [1836], XVIII.145; Subjection [1869], CW XXI.139 ‘extreme variableness’.
109 Logic CW VIII.843 cf. MS. on Marriage c.1832–3, XXI.39; On Liberty (1859), XVIII.264; Utilitarianism (1861), X.238–9.
110 Observations on Man (London, 1749), Part I, Preface, v.
111 Logic CW VIII.839–40. The only critical opponent mentioned in this chapter is Robert Owen: ibid., 840–1, but this does not mean that Mill’s agenda derives from Owen. He was just an Aunt Sally: cf. Terence Ball, ‘The Formation of Character: Mill’s “Ethology” Reconsidered’, Polity 33 (2000): 25–48, here 30–1.
112 John Mill to Samuel Bentham 30 July 1819, CW XII. On James’ French culture: note his student reading: Bain, James Mill, 19; the French extracts in his commonplace books (https://intellectualhistory.net/mill); his translation from the French of Charles Villers, Essay on the Spirit and Influence of the Reformation of Luther (London, 1805); and the quality of his library holdings reported by J.S. Mill to Carlyle, 17 Sept. 1832, CW XII.
113 ‘Mignet’s French Revolution’ [1826], CW XX.3–14. The Autobiography suggests (imprecisely and obscurely) that Mill first read a history of the French Revolution shortly after his return from France (I.65). This could have been Mignet, whose work appeared in 1824. However, the editors of CW suggest François Toulongeon’s Histoire de France (1801–10) (I.65n.*), presumably on the basis of Mill to Charles Comte 25 Jan. 1828, CW XII, where ‘Mignet, Toulongeon and others’ are grouped together.
114 There is no evidence of such thinking in Mill’s original travel journal and letters: CW XXVI.3–143.
115 Logic CW VIII.870.
116 CW XX.59–60.
117 To D’Eichthal 7 Nov. 1829, CW XII.
118 Logic CW VIII.904–5, 869 resp.
119 ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.105. Compare Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), ibid., 300, 321.
120 On Liberty (1859), CW XVIII.274. See the fundamental statement in ‘Guizot’s Essays and Lectures on History’ [1845], CW XX. 267–9.
121 ‘Coleridge’ [1840], CW X.135. Mill, like most English people down to c.1880, avoids the term ‘nationalism’. The only early and precise usage in OED derives from a translation of a French text: the Memoirs of the emigré Jesuit, Augustin Barruel (1799).
122 Even so, compare the valuable study by Georgios Varouxakis, Mill and Nationality (London, 2002).
123 ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.99.
124 Terence Ball, ‘Mill’s “Ethology” Reconsidered’, Polity 33 (2000): 28–33. Ball goes so far as to consider Mill’s Autobiography – the most individual of formats – as ethology: 33–7. Frederick Rosen, Mill (Oxford, 2013), c.4, is silent as to the possible difference between individual and collective character.
125 Logic (1843), CW VIII.869 cit. Ball, ‘Mill’s “ethology” reconsidered’, 32.
126 ‘En masse’ CW VIII.866, 873, 942; ‘types’, ibid., 864, 867, 873.
127 ‘Coleridge’ [1840], CW X.134–5.
128 CW XIX.546, 417.
129 ‘Coleridge’, ‘Bentham’ [1838–40], CW X.141, 105; The Subjection of Women (1869), CW XXI.309.
130 To Ruge 2 Mar. 1859, CW XV.
131 Representative Government (1861), CW XIX.417n.*, 549 cf. Mill to Pasquale Villari 6 Nov. 1860, CW XV.
132 Logic CW VIII.879.
133 Ibid., 905, 872–3 resp.
134 Ibid., 878.
135 Ibid., 898.
136 Stefan Collini, That Noble Science of Politics (1983), 156. This goes back to Alexander Bain, who much preferred Mill in academic and systematic guise: John Stuart Mill (London, 1882), 78–9, 84.
137 Subjection of Women (1869), CW XXI.277 cf. 312.
138 To Harriet Taylor Mill 7 Feb. 1854, CW XIV.
139 CW VIII.869 cf. 874, 878, 898.
140 See previously Principles of Political Economy (1848), Book I c.vii.
141 CW XVIII.239 cf. 128–9.
142 CW XVIII.215 (epigraph).
143 Ibid., 227 cf. 222–3.
144 Mill learned German in the late 1820s (A I.123); he enjoyed the great literary authors (Goethe and Schiller, A 161) but suffered a linguistic breakdown when confronted by Hegel (to Alexander Bain, 4 Nov. 1867, CW XVI). He took a holiday in the Rhineland in 1835, but regrettably the journal he kept has been lost (to Joseph Blanco White, 1 July, 28 Aug., 1835, CW XII); Germanists such as Carlyle and Sarah Austin (‘Mutterlein’) were prominent correspondence partners in the 1830s; and later on he would keep in touch with Germans whom he met in London, such as Theodor Gomperz. Even so, the fruits of his German reading, ‘philosophy of history, literature and the arts’, were either marginal or inconsequential: to D’Eichthal and Charles Duveyrier 20 May 1832. After 1830 one finds an odd review notice of a German periodical published in London in 1834 (CW XXIII.748–9) but there is no sign of him reading German books. Even in the 1820s he was reading in translation (A I.160) and later citations of works such as Fichte’s Characteristics of the Present Age (1806, trans. 1847) and von Humboldt on the Sphere and Duties of Government (1792 trans. 1853) come from English translations cf. A I.172. In every respect his engagement with France and French culture was more deep-rooted and substantial.
145 CW XVIII.241, 272 resp. For ‘collective’ one could as well read ‘national’.
146 Egg. Mill to Ruge 2 Mar. 1859, cited above at n.130; and the correspondence with Charles Dupont-White, 1 July 1858–28 Feb. 1862, CW XV.
147 CW XVIII.307. Previously there had been a casual mention of Tocqueville, who ‘in his last important work [L’Ancien Régime], remarks how much more the Frenchmen of the present day resemble one another’: 274. Mill cannot decide whether this is a parallel or a contrast to England. Compare The Subjection of Women (1869), where the English/French contrast resurfaces intact: CW XXI.312–3.
148 CW XVIII.262. Elsewhere in the text Humboldt features only as an enlightened individual, not as a German: ibid., 215, 274, 300, 304.
149 R.H. Hutton criticised this, though of course he supposed that ‘national or social character’ was simply absent from the text: ‘Mill on Liberty’ [1859], ed. A. Pyle, Liberty. Contemporary Responses to John Stuart Mill (Bristol, 1994), 97; cf. J.C. Rees, Mill and his early Critics (Leicester, 1956), 32.
150 CW XVIII.219, 223, 230, 232, 236, 236, 283, 286.
151 To Alexander Bain 6 Aug. 1859, CW XV.
152 On Liberty CW XVIII.230 (eg).
153 Ibid., 231–2, 244–5.
154 On Liberty CW XVIII.245, 286, 269.
155 James Fitzjames Stephen throws the ‘middle classes’ overboard and elects himself to the group of those who are ‘serious’: Saturday Review, 12 Feb. 1859 in ed. A. Pyle, Liberty. Contemporary Responses to John Stuart Mill (1994), 6, 8. John Morley quotes from the text as above and opines uncritically that On Liberty is ‘one of the most aristocratic books ever written’: Fortnightly Review [1873], ibid., 285. R.W. Church construes Mill’s elite as the voice of society: ‘those who are responsible for truth in society’, where ‘the mass of the people must depend more or less on society for their opinions’: Bentley’s Quarterly Review [1860], ibid., 252, 242. Cf. Rees, Mill and His Early Critics (1956), 28–32. Compare the PhD thesis by Stephanie Conway, ‘Interpreting Mill’s On Liberty, 1831-1900’ (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2019). She mentions the existence of elite readings of Mill, most obviously Cowling (24–5), but her focus is on the libertarian aspects of the text.
156 Resp. CW XVIII.223; Mill to Harriet Taylor Mill, 17 Feb. 1855, CW XIV.
157 E.g. ‘The Spirit of the Age’ CW XXII.238–45.
158 A I.259. Compare the Dedication, CW XVIII.216; A I.257.
159 Compare the list of possible subjects to write about in Mill to Harriet Taylor Mill 7 Feb. 1854, CW XIV.
160 Below §.V.
161 Compare James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy, aimed at ‘persons of either sex’, Preface (London, 1821), iii, even though this was notoriously not a ‘ladies’ subject’. The idea that, because of a sentence in the essay on ‘Government’, James Mill was not a ‘feminist’ is not uncommon; but it is mistaken even so: e.g. Claeys, John Stuart Mill (2022), 22.
162 Compare Mill, ‘Cooperation: Closing Speech’ [1825], CW XXVI.314–22 on Thompson’s Owenite views and citing the Appeal. A I.107 reproduces the language of the ‘paragraph’ which comes from Thompson, Appeal of One Half the Human Race … in reply to a paragraph of Mr Mill’s celebrated ‘Article on Government’ (London, 1825), cf. James Mill, ‘Government’, Political Writings (Cambridge, 1992), 27.
163 Their views are signalled in the Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition. Première année 1829 (Paris, 18302) but the ‘special development’ of these is postponed for later: 6th Séance, 178. Note also the more detailed context represented by the Unitarian Monthly Repository: Janelle Pötzsch, ‘Marriage, Morals and Progress: J.S. Mill and the Early Feminists’, History of European Ideas 48 (2022): 795–810.
164 Logic CW VIII.868. John Mill’s most important statement prior to the Logic is the untitled manuscript on marriage c.1833: CW XXI.37–49. Here he links consideration of marriage to ‘the condition and character of women in general’ (49 cf. 42), but whether this suggests any developed meaning for ‘character’ is unclear. The text anticipates his and Harriet’s ‘mature’, post-1851 views in some important respects, but not in others. For example, there is no sign of the later conception of marriage as an intellectual symbiosis.
165 CW VIII.868.
166 Subjection (1869) CW XXI.272–3.
167 Ibid., CW XXI.261.
168 Ibid., 333, 302, 305 resp.
169 Ibid., 278 (why a husband should study his wife), 304–7 (intuition); Goldwin Smith, ‘Female suffrage’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 30 (1874): 139–50, here 140. Cf. A I.195–9 etc.
170 Ibid., 313. — On natural difference between nations: see ‘Michelet’s History of France’ [1844]. Here Mill is disposed to allow importance to ‘race’ or innate characteristics and geography in the early stages of society, but over time the homogenising tendencies of social evolution ‘tend more and more to efface the pristine differences’: CW XX.235–8, here 238. Cf. ‘The Negro Question [1850] where, though he does not use the term, Mill denies outright that there is any evidence of what we call ‘race’ in the sense of ‘original differences … among human beings’: CW XXI.93.
171 See the untitled manuscript on marriage c.1833 and the ‘Statement on Marriage’ of 1851: CW XXI.37–49, 181. The former identifies the impossibility of divorce as that which makes a woman ‘to a great extent … [a] slave’ (49), which is a good deal more substantial than the agenda of 1851 or 1869. Indeed he largely avoids this subject in Subjection: ibid., 298. Note, however, that Subjection was not started in Harriet’s lifetime, nor was it on the list of subjects they drew up in 1854, although ‘family’ and ‘sex’ as a category in ‘differences of character’ appear: Mill to Harriet Taylor Mill 7 Feb. 1854, CW XIV.
172 Subjection CW XXI.329–31. For this feminist culture eg. Candida Lacey (ed.), Barbara Leigh Bodichon and the Langham Place Group (London, 1987).
173 E.g. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (London, 1694–7).
174 Subjection CW XXI.314–5.
175 Subjection CW XXI.295. On the promise to obey: 284. He is thinking of the Church of England, but neither here nor elsewhere does he implicitly rely on English singularity as he did in On Liberty.
176 Margaret Oliphant, ‘Mill on the Subjection of Women’, Edinburgh Review (1869) repr. A. Pyle (ed.), The Subjection of Women: Contemporary Responses (Bristol, 1995), 109–40, here 111. A superior piece.
177 Compare Subjection CW XXI.298 with the manuscript on marriage c.1833, ibid., 45–9.
178 33 & 34 Vict. c 93. On settlements: CW XXI.284, 297.
179 CW XXI.270, 324.
180 Ibid., 297.
181 Ibid., 298. This corresponds to his belief in the importance of Malthusian population control as crucial to working-class living standards, though he makes no mention of the subject here.
182 Manuscript on marriage c.1833, ibid., 44 cf. 47 on the insuperable problem posed by children for Mill’s belief in women’s freedom in marriage. This is why in Subjection he opts for separation rather than divorce: ibid., 298.
183 Ibid., 326.
184 For substantial literary reflection by an English male contemporary: Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage (1861), He knew he was right (1869). But as literature this was outside Mill’s field of vision.
185 Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Greeley, 1845), 96–7.
186 Setting aside publication in the 1790s, the only British edition of the Vindication prior to 1891 was an abridged edition in 1841 (London: John Cleave), reissued in 1845 (London: W. Strange), which was in any case a rare book. There were by contrast three New York editions (1833, 1845, 1856), all complete, though still not widely sold. William Thompson sets aside Wollstonecraft’s ‘narrow views’: Appeal of One Half the Human Race (1825), vii. Margaret Fuller refers primarily to Godwin’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft (1798) rather than the Vindication itself: Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 62–3. Compare George Eliot, ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’, Leader, VI, 13 Oct. 1855, 988b: ‘There is in some quarters a vague prejudice against the Rights of Woman as in some way or other a disreputable book’.
187 Compare Discours sur l’esprit positif (Paris, 1844), where there is no mention of women, with Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme (Paris, 1848), Part IV, ‘Influence féminine du positivisme’.
188 Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Zurich, 1879). The title is appropriate since this is a work in two halves: first on the position of women (to p.90), and then a gender-free presentation of socialism and SPD party desiderata, with only the briefest consideration (154–60) of their specific relevance to women.
189 Émile Durkheim, ‘La famille conjugale’ [1892], Revue Philosophique 91 (1921), 1–14.
190 P. Ghosh, Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic (Oxford, 2014), 5–9, 32–3, 69–71.
191 Subjection, CW XXI.326 (quotation) cf. 280–1 on competition.
192 Thompson, ‘Introductory Letter’, Appeal of One Half the Human Race (1825), x.
193 On Liberty, Representative Government, The Subjection of Women: Three Essays (London: Oxford UP, 1912), ed. Millicent Garrett Fawcett. It had been preceded by a centenary reissue of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication (London: Unwin, 1891), also edited by Mrs. Fawcett. However, this did not enjoy the association with ‘mainstream’theory that the Oxford edition of Mill assumed.
194 See above all The Co-operative Movement in Britain (London, 1891).
195 Logic [1843] CW VIII.889 (title).
196 E.g. ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.106. It is unclear whether he had read Bentham’s supplementary writings: the 1822 essays now published as First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code (Oxford, 1989) and the papers collected in Official Aptitude Maximized; Expense Minimized [1830] (Oxford, 1993).
197 ‘Government’ [1820] in James Mill, Political Writings (Cambridge, 1992), [§.1], 4 cf. Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals (Oxford, 1979), 127.
198 See e.g. Schofield, Utility and Democracy: The Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham (2006), 137, cf. James Mill, ‘Leckie on the Foreign Policy of Great Britain’, Edinburgh Review 13 (Oct. 1808): 186–205; ‘Emancipation of Spanish America’, 13 (Jan. 1809): 277–311.
199 ‘Government’, [§.4], Political Writings, 11.
200 ‘Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy’ in England and the English, ed. E. Bulwer Lytton (1833), ii.333–4.
201 Consider the typical recognition that ‘Any succession of persons [such as rulers], or the majority of any body of persons [such as the ruled], will be governed in the bulk of their conduct by their personal interests’. Logic (1843), CW VIII.890.
202 Cf. Donald Winch, That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge, 1983) 111n.69 for a list.
203 ‘Government’ [1820], James Mill, Political Writings, 42. Compare Preface, History of British India (1817), xix ‘laws of human nature’ with ‘Government’, Political Writings, 4, ‘science of human nature’, ‘laws of nature’.
204 Resp. ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.105; Logic CW VIII.887, 889 (titles).
205 ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.99, 105.
206 It was written quite quickly and without occasion for comment in 1860, a product of the sustained national preoccupation with parliamentary reform in the years 1858–1860: Mill to Henry Fawcett 24 Dec. 1860, CW XV.
207 Logic CW VIII.893.
208 ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.109.
209 CW XIX.376.
210 Resp. ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.106, ‘Coleridge’ [1840], ibid., 133–6. Cf. Logic: CW VIII.921–4.
211 CW XIX.399. See similarly A I.265. The engagement of Representative Government with the crisis of parliamentary reform in Britain in 1858–1860 strongly reinforces the text’s modern anchorage.
212 CW XIX.396 cf. A I.265: ‘as much of the general science of government as is necessary’.
213 Constant, ‘De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes’ [1819], Écrits Politiques (Paris, 1997) ed. M. Gauchet, 615: ‘the representative system is nothing but an organization by means of which a nation discharges onto a few individuals what it cannot or does not wish to do herself’. Mill was far too well-informed about French writers not to have heard of Constant, but he may have classified him as a literary author, just as he does Germaine de Staël: Subjection, CW XXI.315.
214 Resp. James Mill, ‘Government’ [1820], Political Writings (1992), 22; Bentham, First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code [1822] ed. Philip Schofield (Oxford, 1989), 212–6. The title of Considerations on Representative Government (1861) speaks for itself. Like his father he calls the form of government that interests him ‘representative democracy’, regardless of any differences from Bentham: CW XIX.394, 439, 448, etc. There is also an occasional reference to ‘the Representative System’: ibid., 398.
215 James Mill, ‘Government’, §§.III–V, §.V on ‘Doctrine of the Constitutional Balance’; Bentham, First Principles (1989), 206–12.
216 Representative Government (1861), CW XIX.374. Note, too, that Bentham thinks that the detail of governmental form is very important. He is obsessed with the invention of political forms in the Constitutional Code, which is an offshoot of his ongoing passion for law reform where so much hangs on forms.
217 James Mill, ‘Government’ [1820], Political Writings, 22. John Mill: Representative Government (1861), CW XIX.422–3 (quotations), cf. c.V; ‘De Tocqueville on Democracy in America’ [1835], CW XVIII.71 on ‘security’.
218 First Principles [1822] (Oxford, 1989), 150–226.
219 Resp. Constitutional Code (1830), c.V; ‘Identification of Interests’ in First Principles [1822] (1989), 123–47.
220 ‘Government’ [1820], [§.1], 5.
221 Constitutional Code volume 1 [1830] (Oxford, 1983), 41–2, cf. Schofield, Utility and Democracy (2006), 246–9.
222 Of course Benthamite ideas continued to make a significant contribution to law reform: James Kirby, ‘A.V. Dicey and English Constitutionalism’, History of European Ideas 49 (2019): 33–46.
223 Constitutional Code, 25, 114n.a resp.
224 Ibid., 25, 35–41.
225 Social Contract (1762), Book III c.xv.
226 ‘Government a Representative Democracy’, First Principles [1822] (Oxford, 1989), 212–13. Cf. Frederick Rosen, Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy (Oxford, 1983), 184–5.
227 Bentham, Plan of Parliamentary Reform (London, 1817), ccci, cf. xc on ‘comprehension of all interests … the universal interest-comprehension principle’.
228 Briefly rehearsed in Representative Government, CW XIX.393–4.
229 See a fine essay by Alan Ryan, ‘Two Concepts of Politics and Democracy: James and John Stuart Mill’, in Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought, ed. M. Fleisher (London, 1973), 76–113.
230 References in this form over the next four paragraphs are to Representative Government, CW XIX.
231 ‘The Negro Question’ [1850], CW XXI.91.
232 See already ‘Remarks on Bentham’s Philosophy’, in England and the English, ed. Edward Bulwer Lytton (1833), ii.335: ‘political institutions … [are] the principal means of the social education of a people’.
233 CW VIII.904–5.
234 ‘Coleridge’ [1840] CW X.156.
235 Book V c.xi. Mill only discusses school education here, not political education: CW III.799–804, 947–50.
236 CW X.303.
237 Compare On Liberty, CW XVIII.223: ‘His own good … is not a sufficient warrant’.
238 ‘Coleridge’ [1840] CW X.156.
239 Utilitarianism, CW X.218.
240 CW XIX. 397, 401, 412, 431, 460, 516–17, etc. Cf. Nadia Urbinati, Mill on Democracy. From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (Chicago, 2002). Curiously there is no Rome here, let alone modern America.
241 ‘De Tocqueville on Democracy in America’ [1835], CW XVIII.79. He also accepts that independent intellectual speculation such as he advocates played little role in politics in classical antiquity: ‘Spirit of the Age’ [1831], CW XXII.294.
242 Hence the dictum ‘Ethology is the science which corresponds to the art of education’: Logic CW VIII.869.
243 To Gustave D’Eichthal 8 Oct. 1829, CW XII. Compare ‘Coleridge’ [1840], CW X.142.
244 Cf. Principles of Political Economy (1848 etc.), Book II c.i.
245 On the executive: CW XIX.520-33; on the Company, 567–77, cf. CW XXX.
246 Note however that Mill makes no reference to France in this context. Presumably he felt that any critical note would come amiss at a time when his sympathies lay with Frenchmen such as Charles Dupont-White who stood apart from the Bonapartist regime, but were supporters of centralisation: CW XIX.579–615.
247 Frederick Rosen, Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy (1983), cc.9–10.
248 CW X.211. Cf. John Grote, An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy (Cambridge, 1870); Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (Oxford, 1874).
249 Compare the complex argument of Greg Claeys, which has a beginning in virtue alone: Mill and Paternalism (Cambridge, 2013), 4–9.
250 On Liberty, CW XVIII.269, 224. Compare Representative Government where ‘Conduciveness to Progress’ broadly conceived, ‘includes the whole excellence of government’; and what propels progress so conceived is ‘mental activity’, with moral supports in enterprise and courage: CW XIX.388, 386.
251 Logic (1843), CW VII.283–4.
252 On Liberty (1859), CW XVIII.267. On the mediocrity of all classes eg. ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.107.
253 Logic (1843) CW VIII.929.
254 Turgot was the author of the Latin address translated as Discours sur les progrès successifs de l’espirt humain (1750); Condorcet of Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795). Mill had read and admired Condorcet’s Vie de Turgot by 1827: ‘The Use of History’, CW XXVI.396–7, cf. A I.115. Condorcet’s Esquisse is cited as the signature epigram to Book VI of the Logic from 1851 onwards in lieu of Comte’s Cours: CW VIII.832.
255 Doctrine de Saint-Simon, 107–8 (2nd Séance).
256 Cours de Philosophie Positive (Paris, 1831–42), Leçons 46, 50–7, 60.
257 CW VIII.919–20.
258 Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), CW X.351, 355.
259 To Alexander Bain, 4 Nov. 1867, CW XVI cf. J.M. Robson, ‘Textual Introduction’, VII.lxv n.39.
260 P. Ghosh ‘Macaulay and the Heritage of the Enlightenment’, English Historical Review 112 (1997): 360–97.
261 Resp. ‘History’ [1828], ‘Dryden’ [1828] in Miscellaneous Writings (London, 1860) i.275, 186.
262 Logic CW VIII.938 cf. On Liberty: ‘The initiation of all wise or noble things, comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual’, CW XVIII.269.
263 To Harriet Taylor, 16–17 Feb. 1855, 27 Jan. 1849, CW XIV. Despite or because of his dislike, Mill took a keen interest in Macaulay’s writings. He read all four completed volumes of the History of England (1848–1855): to Harriet Taylor loc. cit. and to Arthur Hardy 29 Sept. 1856, CW XV. The Logic citation shows him reading Macaulay’s Miscellaneous Writings posthumously published in 1860.
264 ‘Spirit of the Age, II’ [1831], CW XXII.241–2.
265 James Mill, ‘Liberty of the Press’, in Political Writings, 127–8. Cf. W.A. Mackinnon, On the Rise, Progress, and Present State of Public Opinion (London, 1828).
266 Mill, ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.107.
267 R. H. Hutton, ‘Mill on Liberty’ [1859], Liberty. Contemporary Responses to John Stuart Mill, ed. A. Pyle (Bristol, 1994), 81–90. Uncritical admirers placed On Liberty in a tradition back to Milton’s Areopagitica, a defence of the liberty of the press, which mistook the text’s social focus: [J.F. Stephen], Saturday Review, 12 Feb. 1859, ibid., 12; John Morley, Fortnightly Review [1873], ibid., 271.
268 On the SDUK: ‘Spirit of the Age’ [1831], CW XXII.232 (quotation), 241, 243; ‘Civilization’ [1836], CW XVIII.138 cf. Rosemary Ashton, ‘Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/59807.
269 Cowling, Mill and Liberalism (1965) c.6; Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism (1974), 45–7.
270 Subjection of Women (1869), CW XXI.294. Cf. Oxford English Dictionary: ‘elite n.2, A.1.b’.
271 ‘Coleridge’ [1840], CW X.147–51.
272 ‘Civilization’ [1836] CW XVIII.139–140.
273 ‘Corporation and Church Property’ [1833], CW IV.194 cf. 216–17.
274 E.g. Principles of Political Economy (1848), CW III.947–50; On Liberty (1859), CW XVIII.301–4.
275 Hence the platitudinous nature of his Inaugural Address on ‘education in the narrower sense’ as Rector of St. of Andrew’s in 1867: CW XXI.217–58 here 218.
276 To d’Eichthal, 11 March 1829, CW XII.
277 On Liberty, CW XVIII.269.
278 Christophe Charle, Naissance des “intellectuels” 1880-1900 (Paris, 1990). For a truly English misunderstanding of the idea of intellectual – as a clever individual rather than an identifiable social group – Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006).
279 Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), CW X.317.
280 Logic (1843) VIII.926–8, here 927.
281 ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.77 cf. Representative Government, CW XIX.382, Auguste Comte and Positivism, CW X.316, and the subtle discussion in ‘Guizot’s Essays and Lectures’ [1845], CW XX.269–70.
282 On Liberty (1859), CW XVIII.269.
283 The Constitution of Liberty (London, 1960), 113–4.
284 Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ [1958] in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy, 175. The most sustained engagement with this question is Wendy Donner, The Liberal Self (Cornell, 1991). Accepting Mill’s premium on intellect as a good, she supposes that he is calling for an intellectual self-development which is in principle available to all. We should aspire to be ‘competent agents’, as for example expert wine tasters (c.4). But Mill remains a radical egalitarian and there is no place here for a hierarchy of ‘genius’.
285 Compare History of British India (1817), Preface xi–xii: ‘it may be affirmed, as a principle, not susceptible of dispute, that good management of the affairs of any community is almost always proportional to the degree of knowledge respecting it diffused in the community’.
286 Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817), cxxxi (§.8). ‘Swinish multitude’ is of course ironical.
287 Bentham, Constitutional Code vol.1 [1830] (1983), 35. On the ‘intellectual aptitude’ requisite in the administrators: First Principles Preparatory to Constitutional Code [1822] (1989), 77–86. He touches on the question of whether an elector had sufficient intellectual aptitude to make a right choice of MP (144–5), but dismisses this on the grounds that moral aptitude was more important, and that judgement could be formed by relying on well-regarded members of the community or the newspapers. See further Schofield, Utility and Democracy (2006) c.10. Bentham’s only educational text, Chrestomathia (1815) was confined to school education, and even this was largely indebted to the promptings of James Mill for its existence.
288 ‘Government’ [1820], Political Writings (1992), §.10 title, 38 resp.
289 ‘Education’, Political Writings (1992), 193.
290 ‘Government’ [1820], Political Writings, 41.
291 ‘The Ballot’, Westminster Review (July 1830) in Political Writings, 229. John Mill was however against the ballot in 1861, when community rather than individuality of political proceedings seemed to him a superior imperative: Representative Government, CW XIX.488.
292 J. S. Mill, The Spirit of the Age (Chicago, 1942) ed. F.A. Hayek. Gertrude Himmelfarb thought that it was diametrically opposed to On Liberty: On Liberty and Liberalism (1974), 35–56; Alan Ryan hedges his bets: ‘Introduction’, Mill. Texts, Commentaries (New York, 1997), xxiii–xxvi.
293 E.g. McCabe, John Stuart Mill. Socialist (2021), 25–42.
294 Compare Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition. Première année 1829 (Paris, 18302), Séances I-V. The authorship is presented as collective and anonymous, though Bazard and Enfantin were in practice the most important: ‘Preface’, Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition. Première année 1829, ed. C. Bouglé and E. Halévy (Paris, 1924), 8–11. Mill does not specify the text he read and since the Autobiography dates his readings to 1829–30, it is possible that he read the doctrine as it first appeared in periodical form in the Organisateur: ibid., 11. However, his very full correspondence with d’Eichthal from late 1829 shows no sign of this. See further Hayek, ‘John Stuart Mill at the Age of Twenty-Five’, in Spirit of the Age (Chicago, 1942), xxviii n.25.
295 See e.g. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London, 1957), Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft (Frankfurt, 1979) – further instances of Cold War liberal thought.
296 Callum Barrell’s History and Historiography in Classical Utilitarianism (2021) is a grand project. However, there is confusion about the ‘science of history’, as if Mill envisaged ‘an independent science whose laws were uniquely its own’, separate from the science of society (144), and the results are both perplexed and perplexing: ‘Mill’s science of history becomes both less and more of a puzzle’ (182). See (163–72) on ‘Spirits of the Age’.
297 ‘Guizot’s Essays and Lectures on History’ [1845], CW XX.262.
298 ‘The Use of History’, CW XXVI.392.
299 ‘Thoughts on Poetry’ [1833], CW I.365n.a.
300 ‘On the Definition of Political Economy’ [1833], CW IV.333 & n.u; ‘The Spirit of the Age’ [1831], CW XXII.230.
301 Resp. Logic (1843), CW VIII.929; Subjection of Women (1869), XXI.294.
302 To P. Villari, 28 Feb. 1872, CW XVII.
303 Doctrine de Saint-Simon. Exposition (Paris, 18302), 119 (2nd Séance) cf. 145 (4th Séance).
304 Ibid., 79 (1st Séance) cf. 108, 137–9.
305 Ibid., 75–6 (1st Séance).
306 Cf. ibid., 80 on ‘this bastard system of [legal] guarantees’ (1st Séance).
307 Doctrine de Saint-Simon (Paris, 18302), 108 (2nd Séance).
308 References in this form in this paragraph are to ‘The Spirit of the Age’, CW XXII.
309 The Doctrine de Saint-Simon does on one occasion refer to ‘critical epochs’ as ‘epochs of transition’, but here it is a measure of the low but not null estimate the authors have of them: 200 (7th Séance).
310 Resp. Subjection of Women (1869), CW XXI.261; A I.47 cf. 46; Representative Government (1861), CW XIX.461–2 cf. 469. See ‘Coleridge’ [1840], X.134, 157.
311 CW XVIII.224.
312 Note too occasional references to ‘the spirit of the age’ in a historical context: ‘Michelet’s History of France’ [1845], CW XX.233.
313 CW XIX.458, 397.
314 Resp. to Charles Cummings, 23 Feb. 1863, CW XV; ‘Coleridge’ [1840], CW X.146.
315 Vergangene Zukunft (Frankfurt, 1979) trans. Keith Tribe, Futures Past (New York, 2004).
316 CW XXII.252 cf. 304.
317 Principles of Political Economy (1848), CW III.754.
318 CW X.218.
319 Ibid., 231–2.
320 See ‘Theism’ [1868–70], CW X.488 on ‘the Religion of Humanity’ without Comte.
321 On Liberty (1859), CW XVIII.227 cf. Representative Government (1861) XIX.457.
322 General statements in eg. ‘Coleridge’ [1840], X.123; On Liberty, CW XVIII.274–5 (quotation). On the expansion of positive knowledge see generally Logic; for pronouncements, e.g. ‘The Spirit of the Age’ [1831], XXII.234; On Liberty, XVIII.250 etc.
323 Logic (1843), CW VIII.916 cf. ‘Civilization’ [1836], X.119–47; to Charles Cummings 23 Feb. 1863, CW XV.
324 ‘The Church’, 15 Feb. 1828, CW XXVI.424–6, cf. ‘Catiline’s Conspiracy’, 28 Feb. 1826, ibid., 341; On Liberty XVIII.245.
325 ‘The Coalition Ministry’, 29 June 1827, CW XXVI.411.
326 Cf. ‘The Use of History’ [1827], ibid., 396–7 preceded by reading Condorcet’s Vie de Voltaire (1787–9): ‘Catiline’s Conspiracy’, ibid., 341.
327 ‘Perfectibility’, 2 May 1828, CW XXVI.428; ‘The Universities’ [1], 7 April 1826, ibid., 349.
328 The Autobiography appears to suggest that he was: CW I.173. However, the scientific content of Comte’s essay made no impression on him. He read it as a statement of Comte’s views on society and politics – he called it by its Saint-Simonian title, ‘Traité de Politique Positive’ (1822) – which he excoriated: to Gustave D’Eichthal 8 Oct. 1829, CW XII. Comte only became a subject of interest in 1837, when Mill was engaged on the Logic, and this enthusiasm had passed by 1844: Mill to J.P. Nichol 21 Dec. 1837, CW XII; Autobiography, I.217–9.
329 ‘The British Constitution’ [2], 19 May 1826, CW XXVI.381–2.
330 ‘Perfectibility’, 2 May 1828, ibid., 433.
331 ‘The Spirit of the Age’, CW XXII.252, 290 cf. 316.
332 Ibid., 290.
333 Ibid., 314.
334 Ibid., 316.
335 To D’Eichthal 7 Nov. 1829, CW XII.
336 Contra William Thomas, Mill (1985), 29.
337 See e.g. ‘The Quarterly Review on Political Economy’ [1824], CW IV.25–42; ‘The Claims of Labour’ [1844], ibid., 366–9.
338 System of Logic [1843], CW VIII.937–8; On Liberty (1859), CW XVIII.267–8 etc.
339 M. St. John Packe, Life of John Stuart Mill (1954), 410, 429–30.
340 To William Longman 24, 29 Feb., 6 Nov. 1864, CW XV.
341 [James Fitzjames Stephen], Saturday Review, 12 Feb. 1859 in ed. A. Pyle, Liberty. Contemporary Responses to John Stuart Mill (Bristol, 1994), 6.
342 ‘Coleridge’ [1840], CW X.153.
343 Hansard, 3rd Series [175] c.324, 11 May 1864. The idea of ‘the pale of the constitution’ was widespread in debates on the suffrage and Gladstone’s words had already been used by the Tory, Lord Stanley, in 1853: W. Monypenny & G. Buckle, Life of Benjamin Disraeli (London, 1929) i.1317. Cf. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics [1851] (London, 1868), 257.
344 For these ‘invisible’ workings see, alongside the loyalties of the Liberal majority, the election manifestoes of Tory squires in 1865, where an instinctive openness to further, undefined franchise reform is evident.
345 ‘Chapters on Socialism’ [1869–70], CW V.706.
346 Compare Representative Government (1861), CW XIX.417–18.
347 L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (London, 1911) c.5.
348 Spencer, Social Statics (1851); Comte, Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme (Paris, 1848).
349 P. Ghosh, ‘Gibbon’s Timeless Verity: Nature and Neo-Classicism in the late Enlightenment’, in Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays, ed. D. Womersley (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997), 121–63, here 124–7.
350 Resp. ‘Michelet’s History of France’ [1844], CW XX.230; ‘Civilization’ [1836], X.119; Logic [1843], CW VIII.911–12.
351 To Elizabeth Gaskell [July 1859], CW XV.
352 Sandra Den Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation (Oxford, 1996), 52–72.
353 Logic, CW VIII.903. Compare ‘Miss Martineau’s summary of political economy’ [1834], CW IV.226.
354 P. Ghosh, ‘Constructing Marx in the History of Ideas’, Global Intellectual History 2 (2017): 139–40.
355 ‘De Tocqueville on Democracy in America’ [1835], CW XVIII.49–90 passim; ‘Civilization’ [1836], XVIII.121–2; Principles of Political Economy (1848), III.705–9.
356 Cf. Ross McKibbin, ‘Why There was No Marxism in Great Britain ?’, English Historical Review 99 (1984): 297–331.
357 ‘Vindication of the French Revolution of February 1848’ [1849], CW XX.351.
358 Graeme Duncan’s pioneering study of Marx and Mill (Cambridge, 1973) c.6 falls down here. He assumes that because Mill talks about ‘class’, he believes in it as a significant category like Marx. Joseph Persky’s treatment of ‘Marx and Mill’ omits class: The Political Economy of Progress (2016) c.10.
359 ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.110.
360 Representative Government (1861), CW XIX.441–2. Compare a remark from 1826: ‘the House of Commons represents interests … the separate and sinister interests of an immense number of classes’: ‘The British Constitution’ [1826], CW XXVI.365.
361 E.g. Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817) §.3.
362 Cf. Schofield, Utility and Democracy, cc.5–6.
363 Representative Government, XIX.444 cf. 442 on ‘the majority’.
364 Ibid., 446, 447.
365 ‘The Spirit of the Age’ [1831], CW XXII.234.
366 Cf. ‘Bentham’ [1838], CW X.95. Today’s moral philosophers address these issues with kid gloves but they do not deny the difficulty: e.g. David Brink, Mill’s Progressive Principles (Oxford, 2013) c.3.
367 Speech at Liverpool, 24 June 1886, Speeches on the Irish Question (Edinburgh, 1886), 292–3.
368 Gladstone, ‘Why I am a Liberal’ in ed. Andrew Reid, Why I am a Liberal (London, 1885), 13 cf. John Morley, Life of Gladstone ii.547, 550, 597 (London, 1903), iii.342–3. Compare: (1) J. A. Hobson, The Social Problem (London, 1901), 15; Herbert Samuel, Liberalism (London, 1902), 234; L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (London, 1904), 139; J. M. Robertson, The Meaning of Liberalism (London, 1912), 7–8. (2) [Sidney Webb], Facts for Socialists, Fabian Tract no.5 [1887] (London: Fabian Society, 18925), 8; Beatrice Webb, a despiser of Gladstone: Diary of Beatrice Webb (London, 1982–5) N. Mackenzie and J. Mackenzie eds., 15 April 1888; Co-operative Movement in Great Britain (London, 1891), 23. (3) Jean Jaurès, ‘La Démocratie française en Europe’, La Depêche de Toulouse, 9 Jan. 1890, in L’intégrale des articles de 1887 à 1914 publiés dans La Depêche (Toulouse, 2009), R. Pech & R. Cazals eds., 123c.