John Stuart Mill

9 Key excerpts on "John Stuart Mill"

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  John Stuart Mill - Thought and Influence

  • Georgios Varouxakis, Paul Kelly(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 John Stuart Mill’s thought and legacy A timely reappraisal Georgios Varouxakis and Paul Kelly

  John Stuart Mill was born more than two centuries ago, in 1806. He distinguished himself in many overlapping roles as a philosopher, political thinker, political economist, journalist, intellectual and politician. It is difficult to exaggerate Mill’s significance and influence. He was not merely an astonishingly versatile thinker who made major contributions to many areas of philosophy. He was also a ‘public moralist’ par excellence , a committed thinker who, by the last two to three decades of his life, obtained a rare ascendancy over his contemporaries as well as over thinkers and students of subsequent generations. As befits this fundamentally cosmopolitan thinker, his reputation and influence reached far beyond his native country. His major works (as well as some less well known) found translators in several languages very soon after their publication in English. With a moral earnestness that is bound to surprise people in our more cynical times, Mill made strenuous efforts, on behalf of a variety of causes, ‘either as theorist or as practical man, to effect the greatest amount of good compatible with his opportunities’.1

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  Magisterial Imagination

  Six Masters of the Human Science

  • Max Lerner(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 John Stuart Mill

  There are two kinds of successes in intellectual history—that of the thinker whose originality revives each time we read him, and that of the thinker whose influence spreads imperceptibly over the generations, so that his originality has become part of the intellectual air we breathe. John Stuart Mill belongs with the second kind of thinker. No figure in the history of Western liberal thought can match his impact and achievement, yet none has been more taken-for-granted as a good grey liberal, a slightly stuffy eminent Victorian, a man who had the right sentiments on the right occasions, a writer who seems to have written in classical quotations because we have warmed ourselves for generations on his glowing sentences and their luminousness has made them cosily familiar.

  The fact is that Mill is a towering intellectual who is as fresh as tomorrow morning's newspaper and as relevant as the latest publicized crisis of our time. But it will take an effort of the imagination to think ourselves back into the issues and conditions of his time, out of which his thought grew. More than most great political and social theorists he was in the center of every melee of his age, as reformer and social radical, as anti-colonial fighter, as libertarian, as shaper and critic of democratic institutions, as a working social theorist. His was a many-faceted mind, any one of whose facets would have made the reputation of a lesser man.

  Not the least interesting of his facets is the story of Mill's education— one of the strangest, most dramatic stories in the history of educational literature, at once exhilarating and tragic. The best source for it is in Mill's own Autobiography.

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  Historical Introduction to Philosophy

  • Albert B. Hakim(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  20 John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) DOI: 10.4324/9781315509853-21 In his timely, sensitive, and clearheaded analyses of moral and political life, John Stuart Mill bridges the contemporary and classical modern periods. He can be seen as a contemporary philosopher inasmuch as he championed personal value in his advocacy of individuality, sought for some way to ground humanity in view of a declining Christianity, and tried to improve the conditions of the working class of England. But perhaps he can be seen more clearly as working in the empirical tradition of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume: His view of man was sympathetic to that tradition; he elaborated its moral implications anew as utilitarianism; and his thoughts on government reach back to Locke. He was born in London in 1806, the oldest child of James and Harriet Mill. His father was a Scotsman who, in pursuing an intellectual career in London, became a respected author and a devoted follower of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In the opening pages of his Autobiography, the younger Mill describes how his father became the principal shaper of his early life by putting him through one of the most exacting programs of home education ever recorded. As a child he learned Greek at age three and read Greek authors in their own language before he was seven (Plato at age eight); he did arithmetic as well and commenced the study of Latin. He read extensively, and each morning he had to give an account of his previous day’s reading to his father. Such an intense intellectual regime, coupled with his father’s inability to show any “signs of feeling,” took its toll on the child’s development, for the normal playfulness, feelings, and friendships of childhood were not his: “I never was a boy,” he wrote. His education was completely areligious, which was surprising only in that his father, who embraced a humanistic religion, had once studied for the ministry

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  Economic Freedom and Human Flourishing

  Perspectives from Political Philosophy

  • Michael R. Strain, Stan Veuger, Michael R. Strain, Stan Veuger(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • AEI Press

    (Publisher)

  John Stuart Mill on Economic Liberty and Human Flourishing

  RICHARD BOYD

  Georgetown University

  T here would seem to be few reasons to dispute John Stuart Mill’s (1806–73) classical liberal credentials. Mill’s celebrated 1859 treatise On Liberty is a paean to virtually unlimited liberty of speech, religious belief, opinion, and expression. There Mill famously makes the case that individuals should enjoy perfect liberty to act so long as their actions do not pose a direct and proximate harm to others. Mill extols individuality and defends a vision of history in which the iconoclastic and eccentric ideas of one age fuel moral development and material progress. Moving beyond his moral philosophy, Mill’s influential work in political economy like-wise conveys a strong sense of his liberalism—if not libertarianism. Although his position drifts through successive editions, the monumental Principles of Political Economy (1848) stands as one of the most influential 19th-century affirmations of laissez-faire, free trade, and economic liberalization.

  Mill’s place in the pantheon of philosophical liberals has been acknowledged, albeit with some hesitation, by many interpreters, but not everyone has found him to be such a dyed-in-the-wool defender of economic liberty.1 No less discerning a student of Mill’s life and corpus than F. A. Hayek intuited a strand of what he called “constructivist rationalism” that threatened to carry Mill’s later political thought in the direction of socialism rather than classical liberalism.2 Some of Mill’s more immediate legatees on the left such as L. T. Hobhouse and Harold Laski regarded Mill as a transitional figure between old and new English liberalisms.3 Mill’s collectivistic affinities have been discernible since the 19th century, but the full-blown case for Mill as an advocate of “social control” reemerged with Joseph Hamburger’s controversial book J. S. Mill on Liberty and Control (2000), which characterized Mill as enamored of efforts to regulate and steer human conduct.4

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  Economic Theory and Globalization

  • Thomas Hoerber, Alain Anquetil, Thomas Hoerber, Alain Anquetil(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  © The Author(s) 2019

  T. Hoerber, A. Anquetil (eds.)

  Economic Theory and Globalization https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23824-7_2

  Begin Abstract

  The Social Liberalism of John Stuart Mill

  Alain Anquetil

  1   

  (1) ESSCA School of Management, Boulogne-Billancourt, France

   

    Alain Anquetil

  Email: [email protected]

  End Abstract

  If a short list of keywords had to be proposed in order to explain why John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was a great liberal thinker, it would

  certainly include utility

  ,

  liberty

  , and equality . These concepts express his view of liberalism, which lies between classical liberalism and a social, if not socialist, vision, calling for a significant intervention of the state. Apart from his insights in many domains of the individual, economic, social, and political life, Mill’s specific position in the history of liberalism justifies to devote particular attention to his work.

  Mill is well known for his defense of the principle of utility , in the wake of the work of James Mill (1773–1836), his father, and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), a friend of his father, who both shaped John Stuart’s education. Mill propounds a more personal version of this principle in Utilitarianism , published in 1863, where he distinguishes between inferior and higher pleasures , defines happiness and connects the principle of utility with the development of higher faculties of mind and self-realization or, as Mill says, “the cultivation of nobleness of character” (CW X: 214).

  1

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  Philosophic Classics, Volume IV

  Nineteenth-Century Philosophy

  • Forrest Baird(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Anschutz, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953); Karl Britton, John Stuart Mill (1953; reprinted New York: Dover, 1969); Alan Ryan, J.S. Mill (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974); and William Thomas, Mill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). F.A. Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951) presents a study of Mill’s relationship with Harriet Taylor. For a critical evaluation of his work, see H.J. McCloskey, John Stuart Mill: A Critical Study (London: Macmillan, 1971). Guides to specific works of Mill include John Gray and G.W. Smith, eds., J.S. Mill’s “On Liberty” in Focus (London: Routledge, 1991); and Roger Crisp, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Mill’s Utilitarianism (London: Routledge, 1997). For more specialized studies, see Dennis F. Thompson, John Stuart Mill and Representative Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976); Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (New York: Knopf, 1974); Andrew Pyle’s pair of books, Liberty: Contemporary Responses to John Stuart Mill and The Subjection of Women: Contemporary Responses to John Stuart Mill (both Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1994 and 1995); and Joseph Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). For collections of essays, see J.B. Schneewind, ed., Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1968), J.M. Smith and E. Sosa, eds., Mill’s Utilitarianism (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1969); John Skorupski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Mill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and G. W

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  Victorian Liberalism

  Nineteenth-century political thought and practice

  • Richard Bellamy(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Through an examination of these elements I hope to explain Mill’s fluctuating allegiances, and his apparently qualified defences of liberalism and democracy. A fundamental part of the education provided by James Mill and Bentham for the young Mill was in history. Throughout his life Mill studied the works of the great historians, and he wrote many critical reviews and commentaries on them. This was not a minor exercise, since Mill regarded history as being the laboratory in which both sociological laws and political practices were to be tested for their validity. The study of contemporary trends and recent history under the microscopes of utility, laws of ethology, and the principles of liberty and progress, were to provide evidence that could lead to the verification, rejection, or modification of laws, empirical generalizations, and principles. 2 In his History of British India, John Mill’s father had produced a philosophical history in which Indian society was to be judged on a ‘scale of civilization’, or a ‘moral ladder’, in Thomas’s words. 3 The graduations of this scale were to be judged entirely by utility; the further a society had progressed towards utility the higher it appeared on the scale of civilization. The criteria of advance towards civilization were a matter of dispute between father and son, but as John Mill developed his thought, so the now familiar criteria of the fully developed moral self emerged: independent not dependent, educated not ignorant, open-minded not dogmatic, rational not prejudiced, virtuous (seeking higher pleasures) not animal, eccentric not respectable, radical not conservative, progressive not reactionary

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  Utilitarianism

  • Geoffrey Scarre(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER IV John Stuart Mill 1 Early years John Stuart Mill (1806–73) is the greatest of all utilitarian writers, and also one of the most enigmatical. 1 More subtle, imaginative and self-critical by far than Bentham, Mill grasped more deeply than he or any previous thinker both the strengths and the weaknesses of the utilitarian philosophy, and explored them with unprecedented intellectual vigour. It may seem at first surprising that Mill never attempted a major treatise on moral philosophy along the lines of his massive works on logic and political economy. But his career is characterised by a persisting ambivalence towards the Benthamite tradition in which he had been raised, and his importance as a moral philosopher rests in large part on his candid and insightful exhibition of the tensions lurking within the utilitarian outlook. As a result of this abiding love-hate relationship with Benthamism, his essays and articles on ethics over three decades display some marked shifts of view which make it hard to speak of a Millian ‘system’. Fortunately we have his own Autobiography (1873), written late in life, to clarify the main movements of his thought – from the unabashed Benthamism of his early years, through the near-rejection of utilitarianism in the 1830s, to the reinvention of a delicately balanced utilitarian theory two decades later. The main product of the last period, the series of popular essays originally published under the title ‘Utilitarianism’ in Frazer’s Magazine in 1861, has become the most famous defence of the utilitarian view ever written, and remains one of the most stimulating. Nevertheless it is not, despite its surface lucidity and confidence, an entirely satisfactory little book; it is marred by occasional over-simplification and shaky argument, and it underemphasises some of the finer insights reached in Mill’s earlier work

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  Mill on Liberty: A Defence

  • John Gray(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  My submission will be that, once these writings of Mill’s have been put together and their various contributions integrated, we find in Mill a powerful defence of liberal principles which has three important features. First, Mill’s doctrine of liberty rests on a form of indirect utilitarianism in which there is room for weighty secondary principles, including moral principles to do with justice and moral rights. Second, Mill’s doctrine of liberty draws upon his conception of happiness and on his theory of individuality; it is almost unintelligible when wrenched out of that context. His defence of liberty is, indeed, so deeply embedded in his conception of man and in his account of the development of character that some of his critics have suspected that the relations he argues for between liberty, self-development and happiness are no more than a series of analytical equivalences. This is a view (depending on a view of necessity as analyticity or equivalence in meaning which Mill could not have endorsed) which I shall show to be mistaken. It is true that Mill’s conception of human nature does not stand in relation to his defence of the value of liberty as might an ordinary body of facts. Mill’s account of man aims to identify features of human life which, though they might conceivably have been otherwise and so are in that respect contingent, at the same time are so much beyond our powers of alteration as to be presupposed by all sensible reflection on the conditions of our moral and political life

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