Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Frederick Rosen
On Liberty, Utilitarianism and other works. If it lacked the decisiveness and
even the philosophical coherence and grandeur that he recognised earlier
in Bentham’s philosophical radicalism, its challenge to that form of radical
philosophy led utilitarianism to explore aspects of life and thought that were
never on Bentham’s original agenda.
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John Stuart Mill, mid-Victorian
ro ss harrison
Looking back on John Stuart Mill, we see him as the most important English
philosopher of his century. For us, he fits naturally into what we think of
as a British empiricist tradition between Hume in the previous century and
Russell in the next. Yet this is not how Mill himself would have thought
of his work. ‘Empiricism’ was something he criticised and wished to avoid.
Nor did he look back to Hume. Instead, he looked back to his father, James
Mill. His father, he thought, provided the most advanced analysis of the
human mind, which for Mill was the central key to all philosophy. And,
again following his father, he looked back before him to the account of the
mind in David Hartley, building on Locke.
A common ambition in all these thinkers (including Hume) is to construct
a science of the human mind. ‘Science’ in Mill is specifically contrasted with
‘empiricism’; so, in his own eyes, Mill was not an empiricist but, to use a
word newly coined by his rival Whewell, a scientist. More precisely, he was
not so much an active scientist as a profound analyst of how science ought
to operate. His most significant early work, the Logic of 1843, is primarily
a philosophy of science. Its culminating Book vi is entitled ‘The Logic of
the Moral Sciences’. This crown, towards which the whole work drives, is
a study of the proper method of investigation in the ‘moral’ (that is, the
human) sciences. Among these sciences is political science. Study of the
correct way to know should produce correct knowledge about politics; and
such knowledge in turn should guide us in the best political behaviour. By
knowing how to know, we should end up knowing how to do; or, in Mill’s
terms, the ‘art’ of politics should be based on the ‘science’ of politics. The
art, the practice, the real action, is for Mill always the final test. All his life he
References to Mill in the form (CWM,A.b)aretoThe Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto,
London and Indianapolis, 1963–1991), cited by volume and page number. In the case of On Liberty this
is preceded by an alternative citation giving chapter and paragraph number.
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kept in close touch with it. For him, it is the point of thought. Otherwise
we have mere metaphysical dreams.
This chapter will discuss Mill’s attempt to create a logical framework for
the science of politics, and so a foundation for the emerging mid-Victorian
liberalism. It starts with further consideration of Mill’s development of
previous thought. Then, after discussion of the logical framework and the
problems of a science of human nature, it concludes with consideration of
Mill’s mature and most significant political philosophy. This is presented
in On Liberty,theConsiderations of Representative Government, and the long,
last, chapter on justice in Utilitarianism. These three works were published
close together between 1859 and 1861 (when Mill, born in 1806,wasin
his mid-fifties), after he had been writing significant work for thirty-five
years.
One curiosity about Mill is that these works that are most significant
for us, the late political and moral writings, are not the largest or most
serious works that he wrote. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive is
what initially gave him his reputation as a thinker. The Logic of 1843 and
the Principles of Political Economy of 1848 have a toughness of argument, an
exhaustiveness of range, and an academic approach unlike any of the later,
better known, political and moral works. Nor is this merely a function of
Mill’s age. For after the well-known trio of the early 1860s, Mill wrote
in 1865 another enormous work, the Examination of William Hamilton’s
Philosophy; this time its length and seriousness was devoted to metaphysics.
(Both the Mills ended their careers with a highly critical account in which
a Scotsman is torn into excessively many shreds; his father, James Mill, died
the year after he published his Fragment on Mackintosh but Mill survived until
1873 after examining Hamilton.)
1 Intellectual and biographical context
Mill started as a disciple of his father and Jeremy Bentham, fully on song
as a utilitarian. Then, as he describes captivatingly in his Autobiography,he
departed to some extent from the faith of his fathers and constructed a
theory and practice of his own. This was still, like them, utilitarian. He
was still, like them, an advocate of representative democracy. However, it
was done with a difference, and both the differences and continuities are
important in understanding his thought.
Growing up the son of Bentham’s secretary, living next door to Ben-
tham, and going on extended visits to Bentham’s country house, Mill’s
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education was designed to make him the perfect Benthamite (or utilitarian).
And, indeed, that is how he started his adult activities: editing Bentham’s
monumental Rationale of Evidence; founding a discussion group to discuss
utilitarian principles (which initially met in Bentham’s house); mistakenly
thinking that he had invented the word ‘utilitarian’; going to public debat-
ing societies to propound the Benthamite cause against the Owenites; and
so on. His early journalistic writings are exactly from the school, in tone,
vocabulary and content. His first was one he wrote jointly with his father,
an extended analysis and criticism of the Whig periodical, The Edinburgh
Review.
After this early period of active enthusiasm, Mill became a more
semi-detached Benthamite, as he met up with the young, Cambridge-
educated followers of Coleridge and became a friend and temporary
admirer of Carlyle (even attempting to copy the style until he realised
that no one but Carlyle should write like Carlyle). Even in this period he
remained identifiable with the cause and later, particularly in his Utilitarian-
ism of 1861, he became the most conspicuous expounder and defender
of the utilitarian position. However, as will be seen, this was a new,
richer, more complex utilitarianism, benefiting from Mill’s contact with its
critics.
Ever since he described it in his Autobiography, Mill’s education has been
notorious. Started on Greek at three, he was educated by his father on the
newly fashionable monitor system, by which James Mill educated John as the
oldest child, and then John in turn educated his siblings (and was responsible
for their defects). Designed, as seen, to produce a perfect Benthamite, it was
not in fact an education of cram; and the method survives better than the
content. This was to argue for positions in dialogue, and probe matters by
discussion. The classical authors, and particularly Plato, were important; and
Mill was getting more of this (and a more philosophical grip on it) than if
he had been conventionally educated at public school and Cambridge.
He translated Plato early, but again it is the method that is important. The
emphasis is on dialogue, dialectics and discussion. The Socratic method is
the perfect educational tool. Mill walked with his father, discussing political
economy, in much the way Socrates is represented by Plato in dialectical
discussion with young Athenians. He later published translations of several
Platonic dialogues and the dialectical method remains important through-
out. As he puts it in On Liberty, ‘mankind can hardly be too often reminded,
that there was once a man named Socrates’ (2.12; CWM, xviii,p.235). A
different strand from the ancient world (here quoting his Coleridgean friend,
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John Sterling) is the remark in On Liberty that ‘Pagan self-assertion’ is one of
the elements of human worth, as well as ‘Christian self-denial’ (3.8; CWM,
xviii,p.266).
There are several aspects of this early work which remain typical of Mill
and help to understand the later, major, work and his contribution to the
political thought of the mid-Victorian generation. Firstly, there is an interest
in balance, synthesis and eclecticism; of learning from the other side. Always
his temperament and practice, it became erected into a principle in On Lib-
erty. Earlier, in his period of semi-detachment from Benthamism, he wrote
a balanced pair of essays on Bentham and Coleridge (published in 1838 and
1840, respectively). For Mill, both of these thinkers are partially right; they
are correct in their affirmations but wrong in their denials. Benthamism,
therefore (the doctrine of his father), is only a partial truth. In chapter 2
of On Liberty, Mill identifies three conditions an opinion can be in with
respect to truth and proves that in each case there is a benefit in liberty of
thought about, and discussion of, the view. The two obvious cases are when
the opinion is true and when it is false. However, Mill spends more time on
(and is more interested in) the case where an opinion is partially true. This
is the case, he thinks, with most political theories. This seems for Mill even
to apply to liberty itself; it is a partial truth. At all times, Mill gives the sense
of pushing an opinion to redress the balance because its rival has too much
sway. But, at other times, the rival would be supported. Yes, he declares; yes
to liberty and democracy. But, in Mill, ‘yes’ tends to be followed by ‘but’.
This balancing is one standing characteristic. Another is a constant interest
in practice. For Mill, the test of principles is how important they are in the
actual business of living. This is true of his thought, but it is also true of his
life. Mill was never an academic, dispassionate or otherwise. He had to earn
his living elsewhere. This was in the India Office in the City of London,
which was in control of the government of India. Mill, who ended up as
the chief of this office, accumulated a lifetime of experience in practical
administration (of the actual workings of government by bureaucracy).
Outside the office, he did not only discuss economics, philosophy of mind
and politics, but attempted practical promotion on the ground. When a
young utilitarian he promoted birth control by leafleting, an activity for
which he was briefly arrested. The theory behind it is neo-Malthusiasm:
population is a primary problem in preventing the maximisation of welfare.
However, unlike Malthus, Mill and his friends went for physical rather than
moral restraint.
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Also, and very importantly, there was the journalism. In the later 1830s
Mill was a sort of leader from outside Parliament of the philosophic radicals,
attempting to push their work forward by journalistic prompting. Here he
was not just a mere commentator on politics or political theory. He also
attempted to drive the actual, messy, process forward. The journalism was
directed at particular political projects. It should be remembered that this
is still the context of the mature works of political philosophy, which are
today read for their own sake and independent of context. On Liberty tries
to persuade a contemporary public of a particular position. It aims at a
particular political and social effect in a particular context. Utilitarianism is
also designed as a popular work, intended to influence contemporary public
opinion, and thereby political practice. It first appeared in a sequence of
issues of a general periodical; exactly like, indeed as a part of, the higher
journalism.
2 The logic of the moral sciences
The ‘philosophic radicals’ (Mill coined the term) formed a third party
after the 1832 Reform Bill. But the seeds of this late 1830s journalism lie
earlier. The extensive criticism of the Edinburgh Review that Mill wrote
with his father was produced in 1824. It is in the first year of the new
utilitarian journal, The Westminster Review, which had been founded by the
Benthamites to provide a third journalistic force to rival the Whig Edinburgh
Review and the Tory Quarterly Review. A third journal gave the intellectual
shell of a third party and, whatever its varying fortunes on the practical
political ground, a third form of political theory.
Attacked, the Edinburgh became an enemy. In 1829, a series of influential
and crushing articles in it by Macaulay specifically took as its target James
Mill’s most conspicuous work of political theory, his Essay on Government
of 1821. Mill had already been through his ‘mental crisis’ (a crisis of the
kind that was not noticeable to family and friends); he had already felt that
if he devoted his life to Benthamism, it would not make him happy; he had
already been subject to the seductions of the bright young Coleridgeans;
and so he was ready for new, or any diverse, intellectual experiences. Nev-
ertheless, the effect on Mill of this effective attack on the citadel of his old
faith was severe. His reflection on it leads to his enquiry into the correct
manner of proceeding in political science incorporated in the 1843 Logic.
Mill’s mature political thought can be tracked by seeing how he both agrees
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and disagrees with the political thought of his father, which was well known
at the time.
James Mill’s Essay on Government is a rigorously deductive argument,
deriving the desirability of representative democracy as a perfect system from
two premises, one descriptive and one evaluative. The evaluative premise
is the utilitarian one; that the proper end of government (and, indeed,
anything else) is to promote the general happiness. The descriptive premise
is that people are activated by their self-interest. Given these, it is easy to
prove that the only people who will promote the interests of the people as
a whole are the group that have an interest in the people as a whole, that is
the people themselves. The conclusion is deductive, certain; and since the
premises are taken to be universally true, the conclusion is also true for all
times and places.
This is the argument that Macaulay brilliantly and effectively ridiculed,
principally attacking on the basis of history and experience James Mill’s
assumption of universal self-interest. Mill’s later account has less surface
brilliance, but it responds to the real problems in his father’s account that
Macaulay led him to see. Indeed the two methods discussed in chapters 7
and 8 of Book vi of the Logic may be taken to be accounts, respectively, of
Macaulay and James Mill. They are both taken to be wrong, or, at least,
only partially right, leading to Mill’s preferred method.
The chapter that is effectively a criticism of Macaulay is entitled ‘The
Chemical, or Experimental, Method’. What is wrong with this is the
attempt to derive conclusions in political science from mere accumulation
of experience. For Mill, this is an incorrect invocation of Bacon (a much-
revered figure at the time, particularly among the Whigs) and is mere,
mistaken, empiricism. The chapter that is effectively a criticism of his father
is more interesting. It is entitled ‘The Geometrical, or Abstract, Method’.
Mill does not mention his father here, preferring, so far as any particular
individuals are mentioned at all, to let eighteenth-century French thinkers
take the oppositional strain. What is wrong, he thinks, with the method of
his actual or spiritual fathers was that it aimed to be rigorously deductive;
it was what he calls a ‘geometrical’ method because it derived theorems
deductively from axioms. Instead, Mill thinks, claims and conclusions have
to be sensitive to circumstances.
This relativity to context is something that typifies all Mill’s later work,
including his most important mature thought. Mill is a well-known defender
of liber ty. But, as will be seen, liberty is not for him a universal prescrip-
tion, true for all circumstances. Mill is also a well-known defender of
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John Stuart Mill, mid-Victorian
representative democracy. But, again, this is only for people in certain cir-
cumstances. His father’s supposed axiom of universal self-interest is not, he
says, always (or axiomatically) true. Rulers, he says in the Logic, are influ-
enced ‘by the habitual sentiments and feelings . . . which prevail throughout
the community of which they are members’ (vi.viii.3 CWM, viii,p.891).
This may, or may not, be what is in their own interest. Hence the impor-
tance for Mill of the ‘historical’ method, and of Coleridge, who showed
him the importance of history and of variability of circumstance. He repeats
passages from his 1840 essay on Coleridge in his chapter on the ‘historical’
method in the Logic.
3 Harriet
Coleridge was one influence but, on Mill’s own account, the chief influence
on the central part of his life was a woman, Harriet Taylor. On Liberty opens
with a fulsome declaration that the work is dedicated ‘to the beloved and
deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part author, of all that
is best in my writings’ (CWM, xviii,p.216). Mill first met his inspiration
in 1830. Unfortunately for them both, Harriet was married to someone
else. Mill wished to dedicate his Political Economy to her, but her husband
naturally resisted and prevented such a public declaration of association.
However, after Mr Taylor died, they were free to marry and did so, some
two years after his death, in 1851. The marriage lasted seven years until
Harriet’s sudden death in 1858.
Throughout this time, Mill published very little, although he continued
to work at the India Office, governing India by correspondence and then
fighting to preserve the Company against take-over by the British state
after the Indian Mutiny. Mill was defending his patch, as his job required.
However, the argument rings true to his general thought. This was that gov-
ernment by educated, supposedly impartial bureaucrats in Platonic fashion
was superior to government of a foreign country by English MPs responsive
to their domestic democratic pressures.
Although Mill published little in the 1850s, he worked with Harriet
planning a series of essays in which they would condense their thoughts.
(They constantly feared death and wanted to get it down as ‘mental pem-
mican’ for posterity.) Chief among these was an essay on liberty and the
essay with this title was indeed published in 1859, after Harriet’s death with
the dedication just cited. It was explicitly Mill’s monument to his wife.
(Because he declared it as a monument to Harriet that he would not alter,
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unlike his other works it did not change in other than minor grammatical
alterations in the editions brought out through his lifetime.) Both then and
since, it has indeed been regarded as Mill’s main work in political theory.
It has been regarded as one of the founding texts of the Western world,
the world that is framed by an ideological attachment to liberty. It has also
been argued over ever since its appearance, both as to what it means and its
possibility of application. A deceptively simple work, On Liberty has been
much misunderstood.
4 On what On Liberty is about
The difficulty in understanding On Liberty is not immediately obvious on
first acquaintance. Instead, it seems to be one of those useful works in which
the author clearly states the central point at the outset. In the first chapter
Mill says that ‘the object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle’
which he immediately specifies. This is helpful, even though the principle
has not seemed simple from Mill’s day to the present; interpretation has
always been required. It should also be noted that when Mill describes On
Liberty in his Autobiography he again says that it has a single aim. It is, he
says there, ‘a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth’. The trouble
is that the ‘one very simple principle’ of chapter 1 is quite different from
the ‘single truth’ of the Autobiography. So, again, the story is more complex
than it initially seems, or than Mill says it is.
The ‘ver y simple principle’ of chapter 1 is that ‘the sole end for which
mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the
liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection’ (1.9; CWM, xviii,
p. 223). This does sound simple enough, particularly since Mill immediately
proceeds to clarify it by continuing, ‘The only purpose for which power can
be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against
his will, is to prevent harm to others.’ ‘Harm’ has become the key word in
interpretation, so that Mill’s ‘very simple principle’ has come to be called
the ‘harm principle’. This is that only prevention of harm to others justifies
interference.
So what is the ‘single truth’ of the Autobiography? It is ‘the importance, to
man and society, of a large variety in types of character, and of giving full
freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting
directions’ (CWM, i,p.259). It is a plea for liberty as a plea for individuality,
as a means of producing diversity. Nor is this a mere autobiographical
reflection; it is in line with the epigraph of On Liberty, a quotation from
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Von Humboldt saying that the ‘grand, leading principle . . . is the absolute
and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity’
(CWM, xviii,p.215).
These hints at a final goal, or leading principle, of the work have here to be
put together to see how the prevention of harm, individuality, development
and diversity are blended in Mill’s mind and what they have to do with
liberty. Mill supports his ‘simple’ principle with argument; he illustrates
it with applications; and he explicitly outlines its goal, or point. So the
material is there to resolve the question.
5 More misconceptions
On Liberty has been understood as an extreme promotion of individualism,
of the rights of the individual against the state. But this is to understand it
in too limited a way. It does claim that there is some part of an individual’s
thoughts and actions that should remain private in that it is entitled to
remain exempt from state interference. However, to think of the work as
only about this would be too negative. Mill in On Liberty says that ‘liberty
is often granted where it should be withheld, as well as withheld where
it should be granted’ (5.12; CWM, xviii,p.301). So he thinks that there
is often too much liberty and therefore wishes at times to reduce liberty
as well as protect it in other circumstances. His self-appointed task, about
which he is quite explicit, is to draw the line in the right place.
The state, which by threatening punishment restricts people’s liberty, is
therefore as important for Mill as it was for Bentham. In both cases, it is
only by its great punishing power that people can be made to do what they
should to achieve the common aim of maximising utility. Liberty has to be
restricted to increase utility, and neither theorist is in any sense an anarchist,
or concerned to maximise the liberties of individuals against the state.
Indeed Mill goes further than Bentham (in, for example, Political Economy)
in recommending how the state may also work positively to promote utility.
As well as punishing, it can work by encouragement and example, as a co-
ordinator of activity, and as a provider of public goods that would not be
supplied by the market.
In chapter 4 of On Liberty, Mill explains how someone should be treated
when we think that he has done something imprudent or distasteful. He
then immediately goes on to say, ‘It is far otherwise if he has infringed the
rules necessary for the protection of his fellow-creatures.’ In such a case
‘society...mustinflictpainonhimfortheexpresspurposeofpunishment,
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