British History in Perspective General Editor: Jeremy Black PUBLISHED TITLES Rodney Barker Politics, Peoples and Government C. J. Bartlett British Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century Jeremy Black Robert Walpole and the Nature q[Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain D. G. Boyce The Irish Question and British Politics, 1868-1996 (2nd edn) Keith M. Brown Kingdom or Province? Scotland and the Regal Union, 1603-1715 A. D. Carr Medieval Wales Anne Curry The Hundred Years War John W. Derry British Politics in the Age q[Fox, Pitt and Liverpool Susan Doran England and Europe in the Sixteenth Century Sean Duffy Ireland in the Middle Ages William Gibson Church, State and Society, 1760-1850 Brian Golding Conquest and Colonisation: the Normans in Britain, 1066-1100 S.J. Gunn Early Tudor Government, 1485-1558 J. 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Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd Houndmills, Basingstokc, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England jOHN STUART MILL William Stafford Prqfessor ifP olitics University ifHuddersfield Published in Great Britain by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-333-62852-2 ISBN 978-1-349-26964-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-26964-8 Published in the United States of America by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-21632-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stafford, William. John Stuart Mill/ William Stafford. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-312-21632-0 I. Mill, John Stuart, 1806-1873. I. Title. B 1607 .S73 1998 192--dc21 98-6884 CIP ©William Stafford 1998 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WJP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I 07 06 05 04 03 02 OJ 00 99 98 For Pauline CONTENTS Introduction 1 1 Life and Reputation 3 The Life 3 The Reputation 12 2 Autobiography and Narratives 26 Mill's Narrative of his Life 27 Is Mill's Narrative True? 44 3 Logic and Political Economy 55 The Logic 55 The Principles of Political Economy 68 4 Utilitarianism and Liberty 79 The Essays and their Reputation 79 Mill's Theory of Right and Wrong Actions 83 Mill's Theory of the Good 87 Is the Argument of On Liberty Logical? 91 Is On Liberty Extreme, or Covertly Illiberal? 95 Moral Motivation and Proof 100 5 Politics 104 Political Activism 104 Fundamental Ideas 105 Imperialism 109 Ireland 110 Jamaica 112 Democracy 113 Vlll Contents Socialism 122 Feminism 130 6 Conclusion 141 Select Bibliography 143 Index 149 INTRODUCTION How can another book on John Stuart Mill be justified? In spite of the mountain of commentary, there are several reasons justifYing a new look. First, all too often, and especially in the first century after Mill's death, interpretations have been based on a mere selection of his writ ings. This runs the risk of getting him wrong in all decades of his life, and is fatal for his last. Mill drafted and published no new books between 1865, when he entered parliament, and 1873 when he died; therefore any study of his big publications in isolation fails to do justice to the final evolution of his thought. For that and for the whole of his career we must turn to his letters, speeches and occasional articles. There is no excuse for ignoring these, for the Mill scholar today is blessed with a superb complete edition of thirty-three volumes: there is so much meat in it that only a dullard would be unable to find fresh perspectives. Second, all too often Mill has been assessed anachronistically, ripped out of the context of his time. Historians of ideas are rarely guilty of this, but some philosophers and economists are. This study attempts to be fair to Mill, judging him within the parameters of what it was rea sonable to think and do in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. But it does not regard him as of historical interest only: it frankly proposes that Mill is still exciting and relevant. It offers a survey of Mill's reputation and of interpretations of him from his lifetime to the present, and it discusses the major areas of his thought. It differs from many interpretations in approaching not only Mill's life but also his thought as a whole as the expression of a man who was always politically engaged. It will be argued that Mill was a political animal from the crown of his hat to the sole of his boots and, in spite of what he occasionally said and of what some commentators have said about him, he was always radical. Because of his continuous political engagement, this study starts from the assumption that there 1 2 Introduction is a more than usual need to have a sense of the purpose of each text, and its rhetorical strategy. Serious mistakes can be made if we assume that particular texts are full, straightforward expressions of what Mill thought. They are always tailored to an audience, an occasion, and a goal: this is true even of so 'abstract' a book as the Logic, as others have pointed out. Scholars are aware of this in relation to Utilitarianism and On Liberty; it is time it was recognized more fully in the case of The Subjection of Women. Because of the depth of his political engagement, Mill's thought can not be understood in a purely intellectual context, in relation to other books and authors. Mill was passionately involved in economic, social and political events, and not merely British ones: by virtue of his occu pation, India (and the wider empire) was a context; he regarded him self as an expert on France and he was fascinated by America. Nor were his intellectual contexts merely British; he was immersed in French thought, aware of some German and Italian, and imaginatively absorbed in the literature of classical Greece and Rome. This study takes it for granted that any 'tunnel vision' contextualizing of Mill, relating him to a single tradition of thought, or discourse, will fail to catch him. Since about 1970, there has been a spate of important work on Mill: general books by Robson and Ryan; collections of essays by Schneewind, Laine, and Robson & Laine; books on his philosophy by Ryan and Skorupski; on his economics by O'Brien, Hollander and Kurer; on his moral philosophy and defence of liberty by Rees, Ten, Berger, Gray and Donner; on his feminism by Tulloch and on his period in parlia ment by Kinzer, Robson & Robson. I write in the shadow of and in debt to this work. In what follows, quotations from Mill have been kept to a minimum, because of constraints of length, and because of a sense that no com mentary, however good, is a substitute for reading the books them selves. Mill's writings are so absorbing and eloquent that none should deny themselves the pleasures of the text.