John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

Major Works: "Bentham" (1838), "Coleridge" (1840), System of Logic (1843), Principles of Political Economy (1848), On Liberty (1859), Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Utilitarianism (1863), The Subjection of Women (1869).

Biographical Notes: Rigorously educated by his father, James, himself a writer and close friend of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill was a precocious child who grew up steeped in the traditions of British empiricism and Utilitarianism.  Before he was 20, Mill had edited Bentham's Treatise upon Evidence and formed the Utilitarian Society, a group of intellectuals who read and discussed various essays relating to Utilitarian thought.  Among other occupations, Mill was editor of the Westminster Review, worked in business for the East India Company, wrote extensively in advocacy of social and parliamentary reform, and served in Parliament from 1865-1868.  Mill has been called "the last great figure in the history of British empiricism," and he is considered today one of the most influential liberal philosophers of the Victorian Era.

Mill vs. Carlyle
As a writer and a thinker, Mill was almost a polar opposite to Carlyle: Mill's prose style is calm, straightforward, and driven by clear logic; his politics were decidedly liberal, democratic and egalitarian; and he was a firm believer in the power of rational inquiry and conscious thought—he was called in his day a "saint of rationalism."  Mill's System of Logic denied Carlyle's theory of intuitive knowledge and theorized on the pursuit of scientific knowledge and exact inquiry through "induction, ratiocination, and verification."  Despite their differences Mill and Carlyle liked and respected one another, though heated disagreement over black slavery effectively ended their friendship of many years.

Between Bentham and Coleridge
Following a "spiritual crisis" at age 20, Mill moved slightly away from the strict Utilitarianism of Bentham: the poetry of Wordsworth and the thinking of Coleridge opened his appreciation for poetry and other art, which the stricter Utilitarians typically thought a waste of time.  Mill valued different types of "pleasure" that were not all a matter of purely practical and functional utility.

On liberty: society vs. the individual
Mill believed that "the despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance of human advancement."  He argued strongly in favor of liberal freedom and against the oppression of a system dependent upon societal custom, conventional religious morality, aristocratic privilege, and a powerful government that restricted personal freedoms.  In parliament Mill was instrumental in passing the Second Reform Bill (1867) (universal male suffrage), and he introduced legislation that would have extended the vote to women.   Mill thought that "society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess but the deficiency of personal impulses and preferences."
 
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