John Stuart Mill - Thought and Influence

The Saint of Rationalism

Georgios Varouxakis, Paul Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415555180
• eBook ISBN: 9781136998584
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

More than two hundred years after his birth, and 150 years after the publication of his most famous essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill remains one of the towering intellectual figures of the Western tradition. This book combines an up-to-date assessment of the philosophical legacy of Mill's arguments, his complex version of liberalism and his account of the relationship between character and ethical and political commitment. Bringing together key international and interdisciplinary scholars, including Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer, this book combines the latest insights of Mill scholarship with a long-term appraisal of the ways in which Mill's work has been received and interpreted from the time of his death in 1873 to today.

The book offers compelling insights into Mill's posthumous fate and reputation; his youthful political and intellectual activism; his views on the formation of character; the development of his thought on logic; his differences from his father and Bentham; his astonishingly prescient, environmentally sensitive and 'green' thought; his relation to virtue ethics; his conception of higher pleasures and its relation to his understanding of justice; his feminist thought and its place in contemporary debates and feminist discourses; his defence of free speech and its fundamental significance for his liberalism; and his continued contemporary relevance on a number of major issues.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Politics, Political Theory, Philosophy, History, English, Psychology, and also Cultural Studies, Empire studies, nationalism and ethnicity studies.

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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 Two centuries after his birth, and more than thirteen decades after his death, he is still strikingly relevant every time issues of liberty, its concrete meaning and limits, individuality, diversity, freedom of thought and speech, the unequal treatment and social conditioning of women, the best form of democracy, political representation, and a great number of other political and philosophical questions are raised and debated.

Although the bicentennial of John Stuart Mill’s birth in 2006 provided a further opportunity to consider his contributions to ethics and social and political philosophy, his stature and importance to contemporary discussions and debates hardly needs such an invitation as this collection of essays by important philosophers and Mill scholars will amply attest. The essays brought together in this volume, which originated as keynote lectures at a bicentennial conference held in London in the spring of 2006, range over a number of important issues that are often obscured from traditional treatments of Mill’s contribution to moral or political philosophy narrowly conceived.² In particular the essays consider both the development of Mill’s intellectual biography as well as his impact on the ideas of a number of the most prominent authors of essays in this collection, offering a timely opportunity to reflect on Mill’s continuing significance. By way of introduction to these essays we would like to set a context for the broad range of issues discussed by the respective contributors, by examining the reception of Mill’s social and political philosophy since his death in 1873. This introductory essay is divided into three main parts. The first two sections examine the development and fortunes of Millian liberalism in the domestic context of British ethical and political theory and then in relation to international political theory. The third and final part of this introductory essay will provide a brief overview of the individual contributions to this volume. Mill’s work is so wide-ranging that it is difficult to encapsulate in a single volume, yet he remains a crucially important figure and source for how we understand the current intellectual and political climate.

1. Millian political liberalism from 1873 to the present

By the time of his death in 1873, Mill’s reputation had already been partly dented by his resolute support of radical issues and causes such as female emancipation. Though still a towering figure of mid-Victorian intellectual life, it soon seemed as if his time had passed. The immediate circumstances of his death were soon overshadowed by the consequences of a mean-spirited obituary in The Times by Abraham Hayward. Hayward resurrected the story of an incident early in Mill’s life when he had been detained by the authorities for passing on contraceptive advice. The initial allusions in The Times obituary to ‘… the Malthusian principle’, were soon clarified in a brief pamphlet, as involving the spread of contraceptive advice amongst maid-servants.³ This incident and the ensuing controversy was to discourage any more popular acknowledgement of the passing of the ‘Saint of Rationalism’,⁴ but it also reinforced the view that Mill was a marginal figure to the main development of liberal politics in the rest of the century and out of line with the spirit of the age of mid-to late-Victorian England. This event in Mill’s biography is particularly illuminating because the underlying issue of sexual morality, public harm and individual responsibility was an inspiration for the rediscovery of the relevance of Millian Liberalism in the twentieth century, by such figures as H. L. A. Hart.⁵ Yet this was not merely a further indication of Mill’s advanced progressive ideas being ahead of his time; it also coincided with an eclipse of Mill’s social and political theory that was only to be fully recovered in the late twentieth century. The political and moral philosopher of liberalism who cast such a long shadow over contemporary moral and political debate, at least in the English world, was soon overshadowed by developments in moral and political theory that challenged Mill’s contributions.

Mill’s untimely moral and social opinions cut against the grain of conventional Victorian mores as indeed did the outward expression of his private life. The acknowledgement and defence of the need for this kind of non-conformity was at the heart of On Liberty. But his advanced opinions on the place of private non-conformity in public life also alienated him from the subsequent development of later nineteenth-century social and political philosophy. The response of authoritarian utilitarians such as James Fitzjames Stephen illustrated how the radical utilitarian tradition had no necessary connection with radical liberalism, whatever Bentham or John Stuart Mill might have believed.⁶ Stephen’s attack on Mill, which has continued to be rehearsed by subsequent commentators, such as Cowling and Devlin, and in a more modest form by Joseph Hamburger, all reflect an ambiguity in the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberalism, between its ‘moralistic’ and its political manifestations.⁷ Mill’s utilitarian liberalism set an agenda for much contemporary liberal theory with its focus on the legitimate limits of state action. His ethical theory provided an account of the foundation of ethical judgements and a decision procedure for personal and political moral action. Yet for many critics at the time and since, Mill’s political theory appeared to lack any clear sense of the fundamental problem of politics, namely the nature and status of political power and authority. Although Considerations on Representative Government does appear to offer a conception of the state, its underlying approach to the state and government is designed to reinforce the fundamentally ethical perspective of Mill’s liberalism as set out in On Liberty. For Mill, as indeed for the earlier utilitarians such as Bentham, the problem of the state was not a theoretical problem at all, but rather a matter of fact. The identity and nature of political power was given by historical experience and the task for the political philosopher or legislator was to reform and rationalise that existing set of institutions along utilitarian lines. Utilitarianism, therefore, conceived of all political problems as essentially ethical problems about the nature and distribution of individual human welfare. As such it had no necessary connection to any particular state form or set of institutions. Although, Mill’s utilitiarian liberalism was to be continued in a more modest form in the late nineteenth century by Henry Sidgwick, it was precisely this lack of a clear conception of the problem of politics that partly marginalised his political liberalism for the subsequent seven decades. The absence of a distinct conception of the claims of politics had its roots in the conception of the state that utilitarians and their intuitionist and Coleridgean opponents held. For both perspectives, the problem was what to do with the state rather than with challenges to the state as such. Mill was certainly aware of problems of state building and the claims of nationalism, as will be discussed in the next section, but he lacked any sense of the radical pluralism of the British state of the sort that was to preoccupy British politics for the subsequent sixty years and to dominate British political theory in the early twentieth century. The Idealist, realist liberal and pluralist reactions to the inherent pluralism of the British state with the challenges of home rule, nationalist secession and class politics all put the state at issue in a way that seemed far more urgent than concerns over the liberals’ attack on paternalism.⁸ Mill’s moralistic liberalism appeared redundant to the main political debates of British politics and society, or at best highly marginal, a fact that increased in significance in light of the political upheavals of war and depression.

In the intervening period between his death and the subsequent rediscovery of Millian Liberalism in the 1950s, the two main components of his theory, namely his utilitarianism and his liberalism, came apart in the minds of many moral and political philosophers, with the consequence that Mill was considerably underrated as a major philosopher within a short period following his death. The history of utilitarianism following Mill’s death, in the examples of Jevons and Edgeworth, suggested a return to Bentham as opposed to Mill, as the problems of providing a metric for utility shaped debates: their approach was to be replaced in turn by the marginalist revolution in economics which transformed debates about welfare and its role in understanding individual behaviour and regulating the boundaries of government action. Not only was there a turn away from Millian concerns about limiting government action and distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures but, more importantly, there was a professionalisation of the social sciences with the development of modern Economics which started to undermine the unified ethical theory that sustained Mill’s liberalism. Mill’s status as the author of the dominant textbook introduction to economics was lost as he was replaced in that role by Alfred Marshall. This professionalisation was also manifested in the development of philosophy as a discipline in the early twentieth century. As economists settled technical questions about welfare, distribution and exchange, philosophers turned to the question of what was the status of their activity. Meanwhile, sociology and anthropology seemed to provide the substantive materials that Mill had hoped to develop in his naturalistic ‘ethology’. As a consequence, Philosophy responded to these challenges by turning to an analytical and under-labourer conception of itself, where it focused on logic and language, with a view to removing conceptual confusion rather than with developing substantive knowledge. G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, which was to be one of the foundation texts of this new approach to philosophy, was especially critical of Mill’s naturalistic conception of ethics. Although primarily concerned with displacing the dominance of Henry Sidgwick, Moore’s assault on naturalism was to leave a perception of Mill’s utilitarianism as a naïve and simplistic muddle.⁹

In the field of political philosophy, the fortunes of Mill’s liberalism were no better. Spencer’s positivist sociology gave rise to a much more radically libertarian conception of liberalism which reinforced the classical liberals’ concern with limiting the power of the state, rather than Mill’s concern with the threat of democracy and mass opinion. At the same time, Mill’s progressive liberal ideals were taken up and developed by T. H. Green amongst the British Idealists. For Green and his successors, the task was to save liberalism from the threat of utilitarianism, which had no necessary tendency to sustain a liberal ethical order, and to challenge the reductivist positivism of Spencer’s libertarianism. Under the influence of Idealists such as Green, the spirit of the age seemed to be turning more towards the successors of Coleridge than to the successors of Bentham. As Mill’s liberalism had continued to offer a synthesis of both perspectives he was clearly caught in the middle, and as he offered little by way of additional support to either position, his significance waned amongst those who considered themselves as advanced liberals. Throughout the early twentieth century, New Liberalism, with its activist conception of the state, drew far more from the Coleridgean or intuitionist sources of Idealism than from Mill. He remained a figure to honour, amongst the likes of L. T. Hobhouse, but his ideas were characterised as those of a bygone age. Later in the twentieth century, following the liberal reaction to Keynesianism and the rise of the welfare state, Mill seemed to offer an insufficiently robust defence of classical liberalism. For Friedrich Hayek and classical liberals inspired by him, Mill became a figure of deep suspicion. This is perhaps most curious in the case of Hayek who, whilst regarding Mill as a liberal apostate, was also important in encouraging a number of scholarly initiatives that contributed to the subsequent late-twentieth-century reappraisal of Mill’s ideas. Echoing the views of some late-nineteenth-century critics, Mill’s modest defence of socialism, and his distinction between questions of production which were purely a matter for the market mechanism, and questions of distribution which could be an ethical or political matter, was seen as a form of apostasy from true liberalism that was leading to the modern activist welfare state, which for Hayek was but a step on the road to serfdom.

Given this rather pessimistic account of the fortunes of Millian liberalism in the first seventy years following his death, it might seem rather curious that he has the significance that this volume attributes to him. Yet there ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Innovations in Political Theory
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 John Stuart Mill’s thought and legacy
• 2 The primacy of the political and the problem of cultural authority in an age of transition
• 3 Competing theories of character formation
• 4 Wild natural beauty and the religion of humanity
• 5 Parallel lives in logic
• 6 John Stuart Mill and virtue ethics
• 7 Justice as higher pleasure
• 8 Mill’s feminism
• 9 Liberalism as free thought
• 10 Mill’s relevance today
• Index