Abstract
John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848) was the dominant text in economics for about forty years. Mill was also a leading contributor to liberal thought, both economic liberalism and moral liberalism. Mill and Charles Darwin were also almost exact contemporaries. In fact, On Liberty and the Origin of Species were published in the same year (1859). Yet few scholars have delved into the possible biological or, more specifically, evolutionary context of Mill’s economics conjoined with liberalism. This paper will argue that there are some significant points of overlap, pivoting on the idea of reproduction and individual improvement. It brings out Mill’s appreciation of evolutionary thought prior to Darwin, Mill’s complex analysis of capital in biological terms, and the sense in which Mill’s appeal to the potential stationary state that secures biodiversity is also one that fosters the ideals of moral liberalism.
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Notes
Jonsson (2013) extracts an environmental tenor in the economic texts of Adam Smith and Thomas Robert Malthus, but the claims are scattered and implicit rather than a coherent statement such as the one offered by Mill. Carl Linnaeus offered an interesting account of the oeconomy of nature but held to the opposite of environmental decay; he believed his Swedish kingdom might produce every possible crop and become a land of abundance. See Koerner (1999).
Ricardo’s theory of economic growth entailed the law of the falling rate of profit. As profit rates became lower, rents rose, such that ‘the only real gainers would be the landlords’. Ricardo depicted landowners as parasites, serving no genuine economic purpose. For all of these reasons, and notwithstanding the fact that periodic improvements in machinery might check this downward trend, he believed that the economy was headed to the stationary state. See Ricardo (1951, pp. 120–127).
The only scholarship I have found on this is O’Connor (1997). His focus is on equity for future generations and the libertarian bent of Mill’s ethics.
See Schweber (1985), Gordon (1989) and Schabas (1994) on the pervasive appeal to economic terms in nineteenth-century biology. Insofar as this article demonstrates that Mill absorbed the evolutionary predilections of Comte and Spencer, if not Darwin, I do not share the interpretation of Winch (2001), who emphasizes that Mill was indifferent to evolutionary thought. Mill’s general philosophy of science was more aligned with evolutionary thought at the time, arguably more than the contributions of John Herschel or William Whewell. See Harrison (1979), Wilson (1990) and Snyder (2006).
Robert J. Richards unpacks some of the shared set of beliefs in the respective moral theories of Mill and Darwin (see Richards 1987, pp. 234–242).
Mill also used the word evolution in the context of embryology, where the term had greater purchase at the time to denote the stages of the unfolding embryo (see Mill 1984, 21:242).
Persky (2013) has developed this theme in assessing Mill’s ethics in the context of his political economy.
This foreshadows the subjective theory of capital as broached in 1871 by W.S. Jevons. See Schabas (1990, pp. 50–52)
The most detailed exposition of Mill’s economics is Hollander (1985). His analysis of Mill’s theory of capital, however, passes over the claims about reproduction without querying their significance. Marx is better known for his appeals to the metaphor of reproduction in Das Kapital (Vol. 1, 1867), but this was issued long after Mill’s Principles. Mill never knew about Marx. Marx cites Mill, but the influence was minor. The first mainstream economist to acknowledge Marx, albeit his doctrine of historical materialism, was Alfred Marshall.
This emphasis on labour as solely an impulse for motion can be found in James Mill’s text: ‘The agency of man can be traced to very simple elements. He does nothing but produce motion. He can move things towards one another, and he can separate them from one another. The properties of matter perform the rest’. (Mill 1844, pp. 5–6).
Reynolds (2007) has explored the mirror image, whereby contemporaries of Mill, Rudolph Virchow and Henri Milne-Edwards, treated the cell as a chemical factory and thus the seat of production.
Mill argued in his posthumous essay ‘On Nature,’ that the more workable definition of nature was one that drew a sharp line between human agency and the wilderness (see Schabas 1995). But with more current definitions that see humans as entirely entangled with nature, the so-called “Anthropocene”, it is clear that the soil too is linked to our human efforts to labour and reproduce.
Gopal Sreenivasan’s excellent study of Locke highlights the indeterminate standing of the account of property, but sees the dependency of children on parents, that is, reproductive continuity, as one of the more compelling motivations for sustaining property rights. See Sreenivasan (1995, Chap. 4).
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the two anonymous referees and the following scholars for suggestions: John Beatty, Neil De Marchi, Tyler DesRoches, Jean Gayon, Diane Paul, and Mark Warren. Portions of this paper were given at the University of Freiburg, the University of Bielefeld, the University of Toronto, Duke University, the Sorbonne, and the University of British Columbia.
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Schabas, M. John Stuart Mill: evolutionary economics and liberalism. J Bioecon 17, 97–111 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-015-9196-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10818-015-9196-1