J.S. Mill (Routledge Revivals)

Alan Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134834006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 1974. As logician, economist, political theorist, practical politician and active champion of social freedom, John Stuart Mill is a figure of continuing importance. In this book the author does full justice to the range of Mill's achievements, providing an introductory guide to his most important and best known writings including Autobiography, A System of Logic, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and The Subjugation of Women. In their treatment of his works, the author seeks to emphasise Mill's approach to those issues — education, the conflict between social order and individual freedom, the unresolved state of the social sciences, rights and duties of citizens in a democratic state — which remain most alive to us today. At the same time Mill is seen as part of his own age, responding to the anxieties that beset his contemporaries. This book will be of interest to students of politics and philosophy.

I
The Autobiography 1806–1826

An educative autobiography

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an account of the origins and aims of Mill’s Autobiography, and to bring out some aspects of the story he tells in the first four chapters of that work. What I want to stress is the extent to which the Autobiography is itself a theoretical work, and the extent to which it is written in the light of Mill’s adult beliefs about the topics it deals with. This means that it is not a work to be relied on as evidence about Mill’s education and the effect of that education upon him; it tells us what he thought about his education looking back on it, not what his educational experiences actually were.

The point is worth making because Mill’s Autobiography has featured in a good many twentieth-century arguments about the merits and demerits of utilitarianism as a moral and political creed; it ought to be more firmly borne in mind that it sometimes is that what it gives us is Mill’s conclusions rather than the premises by which we ought to guide our own conclusions. The other purpose of this chapter is to explain something about the importance of education as a subject of concern to utilitarian thinkers. I do this at the least possible length – perhaps even more briefly – simply to provide some background to make sense of the enormous importance which not only the two Mills but also every other Utilitarian attached to education. Every Utopia offered at a time of many competing Utopias had its educational scheme attached and though James Mill was no Utopian he had every reason to be equally concerned with the subject.

Mill’s Autobiography is, with the possible exception of On Liberty, the most widely read of his works. The fact is surprising, for it is a book which eschews all the usual attractions of the genre: so much so that Carlyle called it the ‘autobiography of a steam engine’.¹ There is none of the self-revelation that makes a book like Rousseau’s Confessions so fascinating, and there are no revelations about anyone else. What Mill provides is ‘a record of an education which was unusual and remarkable’.² Although Mill’s final revisions brought the story up to the last years of his life, the weight of the book falls on his earlier years. The last chapter is simply entitled ‘The Remainder of My Life’, and it covers as many years as the previous six chapters. Mill is clear that the interesting record is the record of how he came to his mature convictions; once he had reached them, the public might find out what they were by reading his work. ‘I have no further mental changes to tell of,’ he says, and regards the fact as a complete justification for disposing so summarily of the rest of his life.³

This means that the Autobiography is an extremely public document; it was written to instruct its readers. Its object was to record the course of Mill’s progress towards his mature opinions, and to record his obligations to his instructors and to the lady who was to become his wife. Any reader who has no interest in this austerely intellectual chronicle is warned off at the very beginning; he ‘has only himself to blame if he reads farther’, and Mill does not ‘desire any other indulgence from him than that of bearing in mind that for him these pages were not written’.⁴ The long discussion of his relationship with Harriet Taylor is similarly instructive. He says little about her personal, emotional impact upon him, but records his debts to her for his social, religious and political opinions. Her role in the Autobiography is as an influence upon a public figure.

None the less, the story has a striking personal appeal. The drama of the conflict between the generations, as Mill became his own man rather than his father’s creation, has an obvious appeal to our own Freudian age. Mill’s ‘mental crisis’ and its subsequent resolution through his reading of Marmontel’s Memoirs bears such a ready interpretation in terms of a repressed death-wish against an oppressive father that we are inclined to wonder at the Victorian innocence of such connections.⁵ Then, too, Mill’s discovery of the therapeutic power of Wordsworth’s poetry reflects twentieth-century experience in a striking way. Many of Mill’s readers feel only too strongly that their own education has limited their vision and has trained them into a business-like adult competence at the expense of the ready imagination of their childhood. Mill’s conviction that he was lacking in ‘Fancy’ is one which a twentieth-century education is likely to inculcate, too. Readers of Dickens Hard Times will be sensitive to anything in the Autobiography that smacks of Gradgrind’s educational enthusiasms and their emphasis on the cramming of facts and the acquisition of the skills of survival in a selfish, grasping world. Indeed, Mill’s recollection of his educational experience, however calm on the surface, can easily become a stereotype for everything the reader likes or dislikes about Victorian England. But before we turn to large issues, we should set the writing of the Autobiography in a sober perspective.

This is not easy, since the immediate cause which lent some urgency to the task of writing the Autobiography was Mill’s discovery that he had consumption; although he lived for another twenty years, it seemed to him in the winter of 1853–4 that he must set down what he could as quickly as possible. The night ‘wherein no man can work’ seemed to be drawing in rapidly, and in that winter he composed what has recently been published as The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography,⁶ a draft which amounts to rather more than three-quarters of the final version. In 1861, Mill made further revisions of this draft, and the final version, in which the story was brought up to date, was created in the winter of 1869–70. The fact that in this last revision Mill was concerned to add a final chapter rather than to revise the earlier portions of the narrative is worth bearing in mind, for it means that it is unwise to take the Autobiography as a final authority on Mill’s opinions during the last years of his life. I doubt whether he would have allowed any view which he later thought seriously misleading to remain, but the evidence is that he did not try to revise the text to make it an exact account of how he regarded his life from a point very near its close.⁷ The Autobiography was published soon after his death, from a copyist’s text of which literary scholars have a low opinion, but there is little reason to suppose its shortcomings are of philosophical moment.⁸

The circumstances of its writing bear importantly on the question of how to interpret the book. It is crucial to remember that it is the work of a man who was forty-seven years old when he began work on it; he was a public figure after the success of the Logic and Political Economy. There is thus good reason to doubt the accuracy of its details; it is essentially a story of progress through childhood and manhood, recollected much later in something approaching tranquillity. Com- mentators have pointed out that Mill’s chronology for his ‘mental crisis’ is internally inconsistent – and since no-one else knew it was occurring we have no other chronology – and there is no reason to suppose he is a better guide to the exact dating of earlier events.⁹ As to Mill’s intentions, I have already begun to make out a case for regarding the Autobiography as part of Mill’s output as a thinker on social and political issues. Further support for this case comes from looking into the circumstances of its writing, and relating these to some of the differences between the Early Draft and the final version.

The Early Draft

After their marriage in 1851, Mill and Harriet lived a very retired life at Blackheath and, as their health worsened, abroad. His acquaintances had hoped that, after the anxious and unsociable years which Mill and Harriet had endured while her first husband was still alive, they might come out into society rather more. These hopes were not so much unfulfilled as dashed. Mill contrived to quarrel with all the surviving members of his family over what he – absurdly – fancied were slights to his new wife.¹⁰ He was so completely in the wrong that it is painful to read the correspondence a hundred and twenty-five years after. His mother, who had had little from life but the nine children and cold contempt of James Mill, was distressed and bewildered by the violence with which her favourite son how turned on her and her daughter. He pursued the quarrel to her deathbed, but before that, his hostility finally had its effect in cutting his family links.

In their solitude he and Harriet wove elaborate plans for leaving the world a record of their joint opinion on important subjects. These plans eventually bore fruit in Mill’s most accessible and readable essays – Representative Government, Liberty, Comte and Positivism, Utilitarianism, and the posthumously published essays on socialism and on religion. But all this was after Harriet’s death; during her lifetime not much more than sketches for most of these ever reached paper. The joint egoism they displayed in their letters about these projects is in strange contrast to Mill’s habitual modesty. They refer to leaving a ‘mental pemmican’ for succeeding generations; they regard the age as barren of real intelligence and talk gloomily of ‘thinkers, when there are any after us’.¹¹ The threat of death, and their isolation, are more plausible explanations of these doubts than any barrenness in the age itself.

The Autobiography was part of the ‘pemmican’. Under the circumstances, it was bound to concentrate on the merits of Mill’s relationship with Harriet; and, under the influence of the recent breach with his family, Mill was sure to go further than he later desired in criticizing them. Then, too, he felt more resentful than ever of those whom he suspected of having gossiped about himself and Harriet, and it is no surprise to find unkind references to Mrs Austin and Mrs Grote in the Early Draft which disappear in the published version.

In particular, the Early Draft is much more explicit about his feelings for his mother – or, rather, about the lack of such feelings – than the later version, in which she scarcely appears at all. The case of Mill’s mother is, sadly, easy to deal with. When James Mill married her, she was beautiful and vivacious; but she was uneducated, uninterested in the issues of the day, and not in the least suited to be the companion of that hard-driving character. What James Mill expected from his wife he never recorded; but it was clear to all his acquaintances that he was disappointed by her. During the first dozen years of marriage he was engaged in writing his History of British India, and the consequent poverty of his family did not help matters; begetting nine children made things worse. As his son said, it was ‘conduct than which nothing could be more opposed, both as a matter of good sense and of duty, to the opinions which, at least at a later period of life...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Autobiography 1806–1826
• 2 The Autobiography 1826–1840
• 3 A System of Logic
• 4 Utilitarianism
• 5 Liberty and The Subjection of Women
• 6 The Principles of Political Economy
• 7 Representative Government
• 8 Hamilton, Comte and Religion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index