John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill was an English philosopher, economist and politician, the most influential British thinker of the nineteenth century. He refined the utilitarian ethics of Jeremy Bentham, wrote the classic defence of individual freedom in On Liberty, and was one of the first members of Parliament to call for votes for women. His books on logic and political economy were standard texts for generations, and his ideas remain central to modern liberalism.

Mill was born on 20 May 1806 in Pentonville, then on the northern edge of London. His father, James Mill, was a Scottish writer and historian of British India and a close ally of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism. James Mill decided to educate his son himself, as an experiment in what a carefully trained mind could achieve. John began Greek at three and Latin at eight, had read several dialogues of Plato in the original by the age of seven, and studied logic, mathematics and political economy, including the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, before his teens. He had almost no contact with other children.

In 1823, at seventeen, he joined his father at the East India Company's headquarters in London, where he worked for thirty-five years, rising to a senior post handling correspondence with the princely states of India. He retired in 1858, when the British government took direct control of India and the company's rule ended, the beginning of the British Raj.

In 1826, aged twenty, Mill suffered what he later described in his Autobiography as a mental crisis, a deep depression in which he realised that achieving all the reforms he had been raised to work for would not make him happy. He found relief in poetry, especially Wordsworth's, and in the cultivation of feeling, which his education had neglected. The experience led him to broaden the narrow utilitarianism of his father and Bentham and to take seriously the ideas of Romantic and conservative critics such as Coleridge and Carlyle, as well as the French social thinkers Auguste Comte and Alexis de Tocqueville.

In 1830 he met Harriet Taylor, a married woman with whom he formed an intense intellectual friendship. After her husband died in 1849 they married in 1851. Mill credited her with a large share in his later work, especially On Liberty. She died in Avignon, in southern France, in 1858, and he spent much of the rest of his life in a house near her grave.

Mill's first major book, A System of Logic (1843), was a thorough defence of empiricism, the view, associated with David Hume and earlier British philosophers, that all knowledge comes from experience. He argued that even the truths of mathematics are generalisations from experience, and set out methods for discovering causes by comparing cases, still taught as Mill's methods. Principles of Political Economy (1848) became the leading economics textbook of the age. It defended free markets in most areas while arguing that the distribution of wealth was a matter of human choice, open to reform, and showed sympathy for co-operatives and some socialist ideas.

On Liberty (1859) argued that society may restrict a person's freedom only to prevent harm to others, a principle now known as the harm principle. A person's own good, physical or moral, is not sufficient reason for interference. Mill was concerned not only with government power but with the pressure of public opinion and custom, which he called, following Tocqueville, the tyranny of the majority. He defended almost unlimited freedom of thought and discussion, arguing that even false opinions are useful because challenging them keeps true beliefs alive, and that individuality and experiments in living are essential to human progress.

In Utilitarianism (1861, published as a book in 1863) Mill defended the principle that actions are right as they tend to promote happiness and wrong as they tend to produce its opposite. Against critics who called this a philosophy fit only for pigs, he argued that some pleasures, those of the intellect, feeling and imagination, are higher in quality than mere bodily pleasures. In his best-known phrase, it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. Considerations on Representative Government (1861) discussed how democracy could be combined with competent government and the protection of minorities.

From 1865 to 1868 Mill sat in the House of Commons as a Liberal member for Westminster. He supported reform in Ireland and the prosecution of Governor Edward Eyre for the brutal suppression of a rebellion in Jamaica. During the debate on the Reform Bill of 1867, he proposed replacing the word "man" with "person" so that women could vote. The amendment was defeated, but it gave women's suffrage its first serious hearing in the Commons and helped launch the organised campaign for the vote. In The Subjection of Women (1869), building on earlier thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, he argued that the legal subordination of women was a relic of the past and a barrier to human progress.

Mill died at Avignon on 7 May 1873 and was buried beside his wife. His Autobiography appeared later that year. He was the secular godfather of Bertrand Russell, born the year before his death. Mill's harm principle continues to frame debates over free speech, drug laws and personal liberty, his version of utilitarianism remains a starting point in ethics, and his writings on women helped shape modern feminism. Critics have noted that he regarded colonial rule as justified for societies he considered backward, a view tied to his long career in the East India Company. His place among his contemporaries is traced on the nineteenth-century philosophy page, and his country in the history of the United Kingdom.