Two Minds or One? The Mills, the Webbs, and Liberty in British Social Democracy

Abstract

Hearts may be romantically entwined: but can two minds be one? Such questions lie at the indistinct border separating biography from considerations of a more philosophical nature.¹ To speak of unified hearts and minds is to speak figuratively; making literal sense of such utterances requires examples in actual lives. The biographies of the Mills and the Webbs bear on both the individual and doctrinal aspects of the question. The Mills referred to are not John Stuart Mill and his father, James, but rather John and Harriet Taylor Mill, whose partnership has been a subject of enduring and tendentious biographical speculation among liberal democrats ever since Mill’s own extravagant tribute to Harriet’s influence in his dedications to the Political Economy and On Liberty, and again in his posthumous Autobiography, where Harriet’s presence looms every bit as large as that of Mill’s equally overbearing father. The story of Sidney Webb’s marital and intellectual partnership with Beatrice Potter, arguably even more famous than that of the Mills, has long served to symbolise the spirit and the letter of Fabian Socialism.