John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was born in London on May 20, 1806. His father, James Mill, was a journalist and an official of the East India Company. Two years after John Stuart Mill’s birth, his father met the philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham; for the remainder of his life he was Bentham’s devoted friend, disciple, and spokesman. His commitment to the utilitarian creed involved his son, whom James Mill chose to educate at home in order to cultivate the perfect utilitarian individual.
Mill tells the story of his remarkable education in his Autobiography, published after his death by his stepdaughter Helen Taylor in 1873. By age three, Mill had studied Greek and, by eight, Latin. He began philosophy and logic at twelve, spent a year in France, and returned to England at fifteen to study law with the famous legal thinker John Austin. Throughout this process Mill conversed with his father’s Benthamite friends on philosophical, political, and economic issues and engaged in drills, recitations, and debates under his father’s severe direction.
In 1823 Mill completed his education and was employed by the East India Company, where he remained until his retirement in 1858. In 1856 he was appointed to the office of Chief Examiner, the company’s second highest post, and two years later refused government employment when the company was dissolved by Act of Parliament.
In 1826, at the age of twenty, Mill was the victim of an intellectual crisis. Later he would recall the event as the beginning of his intellectual independence from Bentham. He had once been so totally committed to Bentham’s utilitarianism that it served for him as a virtual religion; he was student, disciple, and even evangelist of this rational, humanistic faith, founding the Utilitarian Society, editing the Benthamite journal, the Westminster Review, and leading the “Philosophical Radicals,” the young Benthamite organization. But at twenty he came to recognize his lack of emotion and feeling; he had become a pawn of reason, without tenderness or sensitivity. He turned to Wordsworth and Coleridge, the great romantic poets, for guidance in those feelings without which life could not be whole and fulfilled.
In 1831 Mill met Mrs. Harriet Taylor, the young wife of a wealthy merchant; she became his closest friend and confidant. As the years passed, the Platonic relationship deepened, and eventually, shortly after her husband’s death in 1849, the two married. Mill’s praise for Harriet Taylor’s intelligence, imagination, and tenderness of soul was boundless; he was devoted to her and acknowledged her profound influence on his thinking and his life. To her, Mill would say, should be ascribed the human element in his writings and the sensitive application of principle to the issues of the day. In 1858 she died in Avignon, while on a vacation.
Perhaps the outstanding result of their collaboration—and Mill’s most famous political work—is On Liberty, published in 1859. At least from 1854 they had worked on this account of the significance of individual self-development, enriched by Mill’s study of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the limitations of social and governmental control over the individual. In it Mill famously argues that creative self-development is central to personal character and that only self-protection justifies limitations on individual freedom. As one modern commentator has put it, On Liberty “is such a deeply felt defence of the right of individuals to be left alone unless they are causing real damage to other people that hardly anyone puts it down without reading it straight through.” When Harriet died, the book had not received its final revisions, but Mill sent it to the publisher, without further alteration and dedicated to her.
After Harriet’s death and his retirement, Mill wrote extensively, bringing to fruition many projects that he had begun during the eight years of their marriage. Among these were the Considerations on Representative Government, published in 1861, and The Subjection of Women, his revolutionary defense of women’s capacity for self-development, which was written in 1861 but appeared only in 1869.
In October, November, and December of 1861 Mill published three essays in a prominent intellectual monthly, Fraser’s Magazine. It was his attempt to appeal to an educated lay audience about some fundamental matters concerning morality, religion, reason, pleasure, and duty. These essays, reworked into five chapters and published in book form as Utilitarianism in 1863, are an act of radical reform, an effort to defend the integrity of a benevolent, rational moral view that was humane and that would encourage positive change. The book was also an attack—on Kant and intuitionist moral theorists and on Bentham, whose conception of the goal of utility was too narrow and intellectualist for Mill. It remains to this day a classic formulation of instrumentalist moral theory.
Two years later Mill was elected to Parliament from Westminster, serving three years, until 1868. From then until his death on May 8, 1873, he wrote and avoided those who sought him. Tended in these last years by his stepdaughter Helen, Mill died quietly and was buried in Avignon, alongside his beloved Harriet.
Recommended Readings
Berger, Fred. Happiness, Justice and Freedom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Gorowitz, S. (ed.). Utilitarianism and Critical Essays. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.
Gray, John. Mill on Liberty: A Defence. London: Routledge, 1983.
Okin, Susan Moller. Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
Ryan, Alan. Mill. London: Routledge, 1974.
Thomas, William. J. S. Mill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.