John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873) was a British philosopher, political economist and Member of Parliament, and one of the most influential liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century. He refined the utilitarian ethics he had inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his father James Mill, and argued in On Liberty that individual freedom of thought and action should be limited only to prevent harm to others. [1] He was also an early parliamentary advocate of votes for women. [2]
Early life and education
Mill was born on 20 May 1806 in Pentonville, in what is now the London Borough of Islington. He was the eldest son of the Scottish philosopher and historian James Mill, a close associate of Jeremy Bentham, and was educated entirely at home under an exceptionally demanding programme designed to make him an intellectual heir to the utilitarian school. He began Greek as a small child and moved on to Latin, logic and political economy while still a boy. [1]
He never took a university degree, though he attended lectures at University College London and spent a formative year in France as a teenager. In his early twenties he suffered a prolonged depression, described later in his Autobiography, which led him to question the narrowly analytical education he had received and to give greater weight to poetry, emotion and the cultivation of character. [3]
Career and major works
From 1823 Mill worked for the East India Company at India House in London, where he remained for some thirty-five years, eventually becoming chief examiner of correspondence before the Company was wound up in 1858. The post gave him a secure income and the time to write. [2]
His major books include A System of Logic (1843), which set out an empiricist account of reasoning and scientific method, and Principles of Political Economy (1848), for decades the standard English-language textbook in the subject. On Liberty (1859) advanced what became known as the harm principle: that the only legitimate ground for coercing an adult against their will is to prevent harm to others. Utilitarianism (1863) restated Bentham's greatest-happiness principle while distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures, and The Subjection of Women (1869) argued that the legal subordination of women was both unjust and a waste of human capacity. [1]
Political life
Mill's long intellectual partnership with Harriet Taylor, whom he married in 1851, shaped much of his later writing, particularly on liberty and on the position of women. He sat in the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for the City of Westminster from 1865 to 1868, where he supported proportional representation, land reform in Ireland and the rights of working people. In 1867 he proposed an amendment to the Reform Bill that would have replaced the word "man" with "person", the first such motion for women's suffrage in Parliament; it was defeated. [2] He also served as rector of the University of St Andrews. [3]
Later life and legacy
After Harriet Taylor's death in 1858 Mill spent much of each year at Avignon in southern France, where he died on 8 May 1873. He was a keen botanical collector, and his honours included an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna, an honorary fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [1]
Mill's arguments remain central to debates about free expression, the limits of state power, representative democracy and the equality of the sexes, and On Liberty is among the most widely read works of political philosophy in English. [3]
