Hayek On Mill

The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings

Sandra J. Peart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780367668891
• eBook ISBN: 9781317562337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Best known for reviving the tradition of classical liberalism, F. A. Hayek was also a prominent scholar of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. One of his greatest undertakings was a collection of Mill's extensive correspondence with his longstanding friend and later companion and wife, Harriet Taylor-Mill. Hayek first published the Mill-Taylor correspondence in 1951, and his edition soon became required reading for any study of the nineteenth-century foundations of liberalism.This latest addition to the Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series showcases the fascinating intersections between two of the most prominent thinkers from two successive centuries. Hayek situates Mill within the complex social and intellectual milieu of nineteenth-century Europe—as well as within twentieth-century debates on socialism and planning—and uncovers the influence of Taylor-Mill on Mill's political economy. The volume features the Mill-Taylor correspondence and brings together for the first time Hayek's related writings, which were widely credited with beginning a new era of Mill scholarship.

PART ONE

JOHN STUART MILL AND HARRIET TAYLOR

Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The originals of most of the letters and other documents reproduced in this volume are preserved in the Yale University Library and in the British Library of Political and Economic Science and my greatest obligation is to the Library Committees of these two institutions for their permission to reproduce these documents which has made this volume possible. I am similarly indebted to the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, who have not only allowed me to use some letters bequeathed to them by the late Lord Keynes but have also presented to the British Library of Political and Economic Science a set of letters by Mrs. Mill when it was noticed that at some earlier stage these had become accidentally detached from a larger collection of similar documents now in the latter Library; to the National Library of Scotland and to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. The National Provincial Bank, Ltd. (as representatives of the late Miss Mary Taylor), and Mr. Stuart Mill Colman of Galmpton, Devonshire, have made substantial contributions to this volume by presenting documents in their possession to the British Library of Political and Economic Science; and Mrs. Hugh Gemmel of East London, S.A., and Mrs. Vera Eichelbaum of Wellington, New Zealand, have similarly assisted by their permission to reproduce or use documents in their possession.

Of those who have helped in other ways I must in the first place mention Professor Jacob Viner of Princeton University, who originally drew my attention to the collection at Yale University Library. To Professor Arthur H. Cole, Librarian of Harvard University, I am under a special obligation for his help in procuring in war-time from British Columbia, where it had strayed, the portrait of Harriet Taylor reproduced facing page 127 of this volume. Mrs. Z. J. Powers, Librarian of Historical Manuscripts of Yale University Library, and Mr. W. Park and Mr. J. S. Ritchie of the Department of Manuscripts of the National Library of Scotland have been good enough more than once to supply copies or to check transcriptions when I was not able myself to inspect documents in their care.

Finally I must mention Dr. Ruth Borchardt and Mrs. Dorothy Hahn, who in different stages of the work on the collection of John Stuart Mill’s general correspondence have assisted me for long periods and on the result of whose work I have been able to draw to a large extent in preparing this volume. To all these as well as to the many others who have more indirectly helped in its production I wish to express my most sincere thanks.

ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS USED

J.S.M.: John Stuart Mill.

H.T.: Harriet Taylor (Mrs. John Taylor—until 1851).

H.M.: Harriet Mill (Mrs. John Stuart Mill—from 1851).

MTColl.: Mill-Taylor Collection in the British Library of Political and Economic Science (London School of Economics). The references (e.g. XXVII/233) are to the volume and the number of the item (not the folio), unless they refer expressly to one of the boxes separately numbered in Roman numerals.

Letters (ed. Elliot): The Letters of John Stuart Mill, edited with an Introduction by Hugh S. R. Elliot, two volumes (London: Longman’s Green and Co., 1910).

Letters of T. C. to J. S. M.: Letters of Thomas Carlyle to John Stuart Mill, John Sterling and Robert Browning, edited by Alexander Carlyle (London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1923).

MacMinn, et al., Bibliography: Bibliography of the Published Writings of John Stuart Mill. Edited from his Manuscript with Corrections and Notes by Ney Mac-Minn, J. R. Hainds and James McNab McCrimmon. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1945).

Autobiography: J. S. Mill, Autobiography. The page references are to the ‘World’s Classics’ edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), except where they are expressly to the complete edition published in 1924 by Columbia University Press.¹

D.D.: J. S. Mill, Dissertations and Discussions (London: Longman’s, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1858 and later).

[] Square brackets are used to indicate editorial insertions in the text of documents.

[?] and [??] indicates a gap of one or more words.

(?) and (??) indicates that the reading of the preceding word or words is doubtful.

… indicates omissions or parts missing from the manuscript.

¹ [John Stuart Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, with a preface by John Jacob Coss (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924).—Ed.]

INTRODUCTION

I

The literary portrait which in the Autobiography John Stuart Mill has drawn for us of the woman who ultimately became his wife creates a strong wish to know more about her. If Harriet Taylor, to give her the name which she bore during the greater part of her life, was anything like what Mill wished us to believe, we should have to regard her as one of the most remarkable women who ever lived. Even if merely her influence on Mill was as great as he asserts, we should have to think of her as one of the major figures who shaped opinion during the later Victorian era. Yet until now it has been solely Mill’s account on which we have had to rely in forming an estimate; and the very extravagance of the language he employed in her praise has generally produced more disbelief than conviction. It is natural to dismiss as the product of an extraordinary if not singular delusion a description which represents her as more a poet than Carlyle,¹ more a thinker than Mill himself and as the only equal to his father in ‘the power of influencing by mere force of mind and character, the convictions and purposes of others, and in the strenuous exertion of that power to promote freedom and progress’.² The best known version of Mill’s estimate of his wife’s genius in the Autobiography is too long to be quoted in full, and it would probably be unnecessary to do so. A few sentences will recall the general tone of a description which extends over many pages:³

In general spiritual characteristics, as well as in temperament and organisation, I have often compared her, as she was at this time, to Shelley: but in thought and intellect, Shelley, so far as his powers were developed in his short life, was but a child compared with what she ultimately became. Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same perfect instrument, piercing to the very heart and marrow of the matter; always seizing the essential idea or principle. The same exactness and rapidity of operation, pervading as it did her sensitive as [well as] her mental faculties, would with her gifts of feeling and imagination have fitted her to be a consummate artist, as her fiery and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator, and her profound knowledge of human nature and discernment and sagacity in practical life, would [the] in times when such a carrière was open to women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind. Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life. Her unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties, but of a heart which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of others, and often went to excess in consideration for them, by imaginatively investing their feelings with the intensity of its own.

Though this fullest expression of his feelings did not appear until the post-humous Autobiography, Mill had not hesitated to announce them earlier in similar tones. The prefaces to On Liberty and to the reprint of the article on ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ in Dissertations and Discussions,⁴ both published shortly after her death, are in a similar strain. A few sentences from the latter may also be quoted:⁵

All that excites admiration when found separately in others, seemed brought together in her: a conscience at once healthy and tender; a generosity, bounded only by a sense of justice which often forgot its own claims, but never those of others; a heart so large and loving, that whoever was capable of making the smallest return of sympathy, always received tenfold; and in the intellectual department, a vigour and truth of imagination, a delicacy of perception, an accuracy and nicety of observation, only equalled by her profundity of speculative thought, and by a practical judgment and discernment next to infallible.

But it was not only in the anguish and grief over her loss that Mill expressed himself in such terms. He used similar language to others and, as we shall see, to her before they were married, and in the Dedication of his Principles of Political Economy had expressed his admiration in print, though confined to a limited number of copies, while her first husband was still alive.

Was all this sheer delusion? Some of Mill’s friends evidently thought so and their views, especially Carlyle’s, have largely determined the opinions of later generations. Yet even if it had been nothing more it would not only present us with a curious psychological puzzle, but also leave open the question how far Mill’s ideas, and especially his changes of opinion at a critical juncture of European thought, may have been due to this delusion. Yet it is not altogether easy to accept the view that so eminently sober, balanced and disciplined a mind, and a man who chose his words as deliberately and carefully as Mill, should have had no foundation for what he must have known to be unique claims on behalf of any human being. Before one accepts that view and all that it implies for our judgment of the man and of the Autobiography, one would like some independent evidence. Apart from Mill none of those who expressed views about Harriet Taylor’s qualities have really had much grounds on which to base them, except W. J. Fox, whose is also the only other voice that joins in her praise.⁶

Mill himself, however, on one occasion, has emphatically denied that a proper memoir of his wife could be written. In a letter sent in 1870 to Paulina Wright Davies [Davis], the American champion of women’s rights, he wrote:

Were it possible in a memoir to have the formation and growth of a mind like hers portrayed, to do so would be as valuable a benefit to mankind as was ever conferred by a biography.

But such a psychological history is seldom possible, and in her case the materials for it do not exist. All that could be furnished is her birth-place, parentage, and a few dates! and it seems to me that her memory is more honored by the absence of any attempt at a biographical notice, than by the presence of a most meagre one.

What she was, I have attempted, though most inadequately, to delineate in the remarks prefaced to her Essay, as reprinted with my ‘Dissertations and Discussions’.⁷

We have of course even less information about Mrs. Taylor now than was in Mill’s possession, and if our main aim were to reconstruct a full-scale picture of her person that task would indeed be impossible. It is little that we can do to give life to the improbable picture of a paragon of all excellencies which he has drawn for us. But though we may not be able to do justice to her, and though we may not be able to learn much about her person, we must welcome all independent evidence on the character of their relation and the nature of her influence on his work. Mill has given us his picture of this connexion as it appeared to him and he was perhaps entitled to feel that he had nothing to add to it. This does not mean that there may not be material which is of interest to us because of the light it throws on that picture.

II

Whether the existence of an autobiography always means that we know its author better than we would without it is a question on which different opinions are possible. No doubt almost any autobiography tells us much that without it we should never know. A self-portrait as candid and patently truthful as Mill’s enables us to see some aspects of his person as is possible with few other figures of the past. Yet in s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Editorial Foreword
• Editor’s Acknowledgements
• Editor’s Introduction
• HAYEK ON MILL: THE MILL-TAYLOR FRIENDSHIP AND RELATED WRITINGS
• PART I. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage
• PART II. Related Writings
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects