John Stuart Mill

Life

John Stuart Mill was born in London in 1806, the eldest son of the Scottish philosopher and historian James Mill, a close associate of Jeremy Bentham. His father educated him at home according to a deliberate plan: Greek at three, Latin at eight, logic and political economy in his early teens. He was being trained to carry on the utilitarian program, and he did, joining his father at the East India Company in 1823 and working there for thirty-five years, eventually as head of its correspondence department.

At twenty Mill suffered what he later called a mental crisis, a depression that he attributed to an education that had developed his analytic powers and neglected his feelings. Reading Wordsworth helped him out of it, and from then on he tried to combine Benthamite rigor with a broader view of human well-being. In 1830 he met Harriet Taylor, a married woman, and the two formed an intense intellectual friendship that lasted until her husband’s death allowed them to marry in 1851. Mill credited her with a major share in his later books. She died in Avignon in 1858, and he spent much of the rest of his life there.

Mill’s System of Logic (1843) and Principles of Political Economy (1848) made him the leading British philosopher of his generation. On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1861) and The Subjection of Women (1869) followed. He sat in Parliament as member for Westminster from 1865 to 1868, where he proposed, unsuccessfully, that women be given the vote. He died in Avignon in 1873 and was buried beside his wife. His Autobiography, published after his death, is the main source for his early life.

Literary significance

Mill is the central figure of nineteenth-century British liberalism and the most readable of the classical utilitarians. On Liberty remains the standard statement of the case for individual freedom against both state and public opinion, and its harm principle is still the starting point for arguments about what the law may forbid. Utilitarianism is the most widely taught short defense of that ethical theory, and The Subjection of Women was one of the first systematic arguments for sexual equality by a major male philosopher. His economics shaped the subject until the 1870s, and his Logic was the leading text on scientific method in Britain for decades. Mill wrote clearly, argued in the open and admitted difficulties, which is why his books are still assigned rather than only summarized.

Where to start

On Liberty is short and self-contained. Utilitarianism, also in our catalog, is shorter still and pairs with it; The Subjection of Women shows the same principles applied to a concrete injustice. The Autobiography is the place to go for the man himself.