(1806-73) Born in Pentonville, London, the first of six children by James Mill and Harriet Burrows, educated at home by his father in a gloomy and humourless environment, with occasional extramural assistance from Bentham and Francis Place, John Stuart began Greek at the age of 3, Latin at the age of 8—reading six of Plato's Dialogues before the age of 10—and chemistry and logic before the age of 12. He also acquired European languages, apparently quite easily, notably French and German. His domestic education was designed, above all else, to further the utilitarian creed and to make John Stuart the instrument of those reforms which Bentham and James Mill would not live to make themselves. The ‘poor boy’, as his dour father so patiently explained, was to be made ‘a successor worthy of both of us’. In fact, although he studied Roman law with John Austin, an important and much neglected utilitarian thinker, John Stuart did not read Bentham systematically until he was 15. And he was not finally converted to Benthamism until he became familiar with Dumont's French edition of Bentham's writings in 1821-2. After this, apart from full-time employment at India House, there followed four years of confident political activism, including the advocacy of birth control, parliamentary reform, and universal male suffrage. In 1826-7, John Stuart suffered a severe and seemingly endless nervous breakdown. After this experience, nothing was ever quite the same again. And three important shifts away from his earlier philosophic radicalism can easily be identified. (1) The first of these led to a fervent belief in self-culture and self-improvement and a corresponding move away from the typical Benthamite indifference to personal character. John Stuart's new or revised utilitarianism was now squarely based on an ethic of self-culture and not at all on hedonism, and it derived its inspiration, in part at least, from Coleridge and the European romantics. The famous essay On Liberty of 1859 argues that a concern for personal character also meant the scrutiny of self-regarding conduct. The liberty principle itself required a disinterested concern to improve individual conduct and character. Like Wordsworth, Mill had come to the view that progress would only take place once the ‘inward passions’ and not merely ‘outward arrangements’ had been cultivated and developed. (2) The second shift is a little more elusive perhaps, but equally important. After the breakdown, John Stuart became increasingly concerned to promote agreement by avoiding an appeal to first or final principles. Now he preferred instead to recommend secondary or intermediate maxims capable of inspiring broad agreement. Even the System of Logic (1843) was conceived and written to avoid provoking philosophical controversy. And while the Logic could hardly be described as neutral, since it was an uncompromising defence of the inductive school in science, Mill thought that logic was an area upon which the most diverse of philosophic partisans could meet and join hands. In short, after the breakdown John Stuart counted very much on consensus, not just in philosophical discourse, but also in political practice. His view now was that the instructed or educated few had the crucial task of maintaining and developing a considered agreement amongst themselves. Without that agreement, political stability was less likely and clear, intellectual authority would either be diminished or lost entirely. (3) The third and final shift of ideas and belief was towards a quiet and contemplative ‘toryism’. After the breakdown, John Stuart acquired an enduring concern for national character, as well as a strong distaste for those cultures, like the English and American, which were dominated by money-grubbing and by competition for material gain. What mattered more and more to him, was strong authority and noble ideals and this occasionally issued as an irritable and aristocratic disdain for the prosaic nature of the ordinary man. But no one ought to doubt his contempt for the usual English conservative. As a Liberal MP for the Westminster constituency, he was charged in the House of Commons with having said that all conservatives were stupid. He denied this, replying that what he had said was that all stupid people were conservative.
Mill was the leading liberal feminist of his day. He wrote The Subjection of Women (1869)—the only one of his books that was not a commercial success—and proposed an amendment to the Reform Bill of 1867 to substitute ‘person’ for ‘man’. It failed, but got 73 votes. As with On Liberty, Mill stated that his views on the emancipation of women were deeply influenced by his wife, Harriet Taylor. His intellectual relationship with his wife was very similar to Condorcet's with Sophie de Grouchy. It enabled those who disagreed with the two books to put them down to his wife's meddling.
— John Halliday
