John Stuart Mill

Lore & Background

John Stuart Mill was born at 13 Rodney Street in Pentonville, then on the edge of the capital and now in central London, the eldest son of Harriet Barrow and the Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist James Mill. John Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham for whom he had worked as a ghostwriter and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died. Mill was a notably precocious child. He describes his education in his autobiography. At the age of three he was taught Greek. By the age of eight, he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the whole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Laërtius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato. He had also read a great deal of history in English and had been taught arithmetic, physics and astronomy. At the age of eight, Mill began studying Latin, the works of Euclid, and algebra, and was appointed schoolmaster to the younger children of the family. His main reading was still history, but he went through all the commonly taught Latin and Greek authors and by the age of ten could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease. His father also thought that it was important for Mill to study and compose poetry. One of his earliest poetic compositions was a continuation of the Iliad. In his spare time, he also enjoyed reading about natural sciences and popular novels, such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe. His father's work, The History of British India, was published in 1818; immediately thereafter, at about the age of twelve, Mill began a thorough study of the scholastic logic, at the same time reading Aristotle's logical treatises in the original language. In the following year, he was introduced to political economy and studied Adam Smith and David Ricardo with his father, ultimately completing their classical economic view of factors of production. Mill's comptes rendus of his daily economy lessons helped his father in writing Elements of Political Economy in 1821, a textbook to promote the ideas of Ricardian economics; howev

Reader's Guide

Mill's career as a colonial administrator at the East India Company spanned from when he was 17 years old in 1823 until 1858, when the company's territories in India were directly annexed by the Crown, establishing direct Crown control over India. In 1836, he was promoted to the company's political department, where he was responsible for correspondence pertaining to the company's relations with the princely states, and, in 1856, was finally promoted to the position of Examiner of Indian Correspondence. In On Liberty, A Few Words on Non-Intervention, and other works, he opined that "To characterize any conduct whatever towards a barbarous people as a violation of the law of nations, only shows that he who so speaks has never considered the subject." (However, Mill immediately added that "A violation of the great principles of morality it may easily be.") Mill viewed places such as India as having once been progressive in their outlook, but had now become stagnant in their development; he opined that this meant these regions had to be ruled via a form of "benevolent despotism...provided the end is improvement." When the Crown proposed to take direct control over the territories of the East India Company, Mill was tasked with defending Company rule and penned Memorandum on the Improvements in the Administration of India during the Last Thirty Years, among other petitions. He was offered a seat on the Council of India, the body created to advise the new Secretary of State for India, but declined, citing disapproval of the new system of administration in India.

Did You Know?

• Mill's housemaid accidentally used the manuscript of Carlyle's French Revolution as tinder, destroying all but a few leaves.
• Mill was not eligible to study at Oxford or Cambridge because he refused to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873), also known as J. S. Mill, was an English political philosopher and economist who was an advocate of utilitarianism." — John Stuart Mill "It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak." — John Stuart Mill "An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865) as quoted in 5th ed. (1878) p. 617." — John Stuart Mill "Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews, Feb. 1st 1867 (1867) p. 36." — John Stuart Mill