Abstract
John Stuart Mill is principally remembered as one of the pre-eminent political economists and social scientists of the nineteenth century. Less remembered is that much of his thought, at its core, was heavily utopian. While Mill penned many passages thoroughly in harmony with the orthodox classical tradition, a substantial part of his work in his Principles of Political Economy and elsewhere was lovingly dedicated to dreams and passions for the perfection of society through a total makeover of its institutions and values.
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Notes
- 1.
Principles of Political Economy (Mill 1929 [1871], Mill 1965 [1871]). The former is the famous Ashley edition, the latter the Collected Works edition. Each citation is followed by two page numbers, the first referring to the page of the Ashley edition, the second to the page in the Collected Works edition.
- 2.
Three thinkers who greatly influenced Mill’s intellectual development – Thomas Carlyle, Claude Henri de Rouvroycomte de Saint-Simon, and Augustus Comte – all advanced various forms of “stage theories” under which human society would naturally and inevitably “evolve” into a “higher” stage featuring some version of collectivist thought. For a discussion, see Britton (1953, Ch. 1).
- 3.
Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (Mill 1981 [1873]), henceforth to be referred to as “Autobiography.”
- 4.
The Principles and the Autobiography are peppered with examples of Mill’s faith in the development of a higher man who will replace mere economic man with a new one of altruistic sentiment; for example:
The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour. … We saw clearly that to render any such social transformation either possible or desirable, an equivalent change of character must take place both in the uncultivated herd who now compose the labouring masses, and in the immense majority of their employers. Both these classes must learn by practice to labour and combine for generous, or at all events for public and social purposes, and not, as hitherto, solely for narrowly interested ones. (Autobiography, 239)
- 5.
Mill wrote that “History bears witness to the success with which large bodies of human beings may be trained to feel the public interest their own” (Principles, 206, 205), arguably a back-handed endorsement of the potential for the useful conditioning of the masses.
- 6.
Mill continues: “This recommended itself to me as a means of reconciling the irresistible claim of every man or woman to be consulted, and to be allowed a voice, in the regulation of affairs which vitally concern them, with the superiority of weight justly due to opinions grounded on superiority of knowledge.” “Superiority of knowledge” would be assessed via “a systematic National Education by which the various grades of politically valuable acquirement may be accurately defined and authenticated.” (Autobiography, 261–62)
- 7.
Mill is a mild constitutionalist in the sense that he endorses only those government actions that are allowed by a nation’s laws.
- 8.
Ashley writes: “Until the present social system should be fundamentally changed, Mill clearly regarded the Ricardian economics as so far applicable to existing conditions as to call for no substantial revision in method or conclusions” (Ashley 1929, xxiii).
- 9.
- 10.
He even ventures the conclusion that once such societies have “sufficiently multiplied,” their appeal to the working man will be so marked as to bring forth a situation where “both private capitalists and associations will gradually find it necessary to make the entire body of laborers participants in profits” (op. cit., 791; 793) (an ironic prediction to say the least, given that such an approach often characterizes modern capitalist firms’ relation with their laborers, while public-sector production invariably is exclusively salary-based).
- 11.
The language used and heavy sarcasm applied in these passages is so unlike Mill’s standard style that it is reasonable to speculate that the primary author of these passages was not Mill, but Harriet Taylor-Mill. Compare, for example, the style of these passages with the style of Taylor in her correspondence with Mill (Hayek 1951). Still, Mill clearly endorsed the sentiments, or they would not have ended up in his Principles.
- 12.
That Mill himself is quite aware of this historical tendency is made clear by him in the very next chapter, where he writes, in answer to those, like Carlyle, who would see the higher classes “protect and guide” (that is, control) the lower classes. Mill writes: “All privileged and powerful classes, as such, have used their power in the interest of their own selfishness, and have indulged their self-importance in despising, and not in lovingly caring for, those who were, in their estimation, degraded, by being under the necessity of working for their benefit” (Principles, 754; 759).
- 13.
With all the wreckage of the twentieth century to learn from (and, it would appear, many more learning opportunities to be forthcoming in the twenty-first), it is easy now for the reader educated in market processes to be contemptuous of such socialist dreams. But in Mill’s days, those dreams were yet to be tried-and-found-wanting, while capitalism’s promise seemed destroyed by Malthusian population theory. Mill’s utopian voluntary socialism, naive as it seems today, can be forgiven in a way that modern coercive socialists, with all the wreckage of failed socialist experiment after failed socialist experiment to contemplate, cannot and should not be forgiven.
References
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Montgomery, M.R. (2011). John Stuart Mill and the Utopian Tradition. In: Backhaus, J. (eds) The State as Utopia. The European Heritage in Economics and the Social Sciences, vol 9. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7500-3_5
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