Abstract
This book discusses John Stuart Mill’s intellectual activity from about 1827 to 1848, namely between his recovery from his so-called ‘mental crisis’ and the publication of Principles of Political Economy (hereinafter Principles ). The decision to treat only the specific period can be justified, given the following statement of Alexander Bain, Mill’s friend, collaborator, and the first biographer, written when referring to the publication of Principles:
His work, as a great originator, in my opinion, was done. The two books now before the world [i.e., A System of Logic and Principles] were the main constructions that his accumulated stores had prepared him for; and I do not think that there lay in him the materials of a third at all approaching to these. It is very unlikely indeed that he was even physically capable of renewing the strain of the two winters 1842–1843 and 1846–1847. His subsequent years were marked by diminished labours on the whole; while the direction of these labours was towards application, exposition and polemic, rather than origination; and he was more and more absorbed in the outlook for social improvements.
The years on which this book focuses seem to be the most productive period in Mill’s intellectual life, when he fully developed his own view on man and society, which differed from what he saw as the Benthamite one in certain crucial aspects. Besides its significance in its own right, his intellectual activity at this period is of huge importance for the further understanding of his later major works that appeared in the 1850s onwards, for these works were the projects to which he deployed all the ideas he had developed by the mid-1840s.
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24 February 2019
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Notes
- 1.
Bain (1882b, 91).
- 2.
- 3.
E.g. Ryan (1970), Ten (1980), Gray (1983), Berger (1984). For the traditional approach, see Cook (1998) 36–64. For a comparison between traditional and revisionist interpretations of Mill, see Gray (1979), in which the interpretation of John Plamenatz is seen as a typical example of the traditional view. (ibid., 8).
- 4.
This phrase is the title of Chapter V of Mill’s Autobiography. As John Robson points out, Mill himself never used the phrase ‘mental crisis’ to refer to his depression at this time. (Robson 1968, 21–49).
- 5.
JSM, Autobiography , CW, i, 67.
- 6.
Ibid., 69.
- 7.
Ibid., 107.
- 8.
Robson (1968, 7).
- 9.
JSM, Autobiography, CW, i, 177.
- 10.
Ibid., 169. Mill mentioned that ‘underneath all political philosophy there must be a social philosophy—a study of agencies lying deeper than forms of government, which, working through forms of government, produce in the long run most of what these seem to produce, and which sap and destroy all forms of government that lie across their path’. (JSM, ‘Armand Carrel’, CW, xx, 183–184) Cf. JSM, ‘Miss Martineau’s Summary of Political Economy’ (May 1834), CW, iv, 226–227, where he criticized political economists who tended to regard a class society consisting of landlords, capitalists, and labourers, as universal.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
E.g. JSM, ‘Civilization’, CW, xviii, 126–127. For this argument, see Burrow (1988, 23–24).
- 13.
Robson (1968, 117).
- 14.
JSM, ‘Definition’, CW, iv, 324. See also JSM to John Sterling, 20–22 October 1831, CW, xii, 78–79, in which he stated: ‘If there is any science which I am capable of promoting, I think it is the science of science itself, the science of investigation—of method.’
- 15.
- 16.
Ryan (1974, 85).
- 17.
See JSM, Autobiography , CW, i, 231–233. For the practical bias which Mill’s argument always had, see Robson (1968, ix).
- 18.
JSM, Autobiography, CW, i, 169.
- 19.
JSM, ‘Coleridge’, CW, x, 132. Mill saw James Mill as ‘the last of the eighteenth century’. (JSM, Autobiography, CW, i, 213).
- 20.
JSM, ‘Bentham’, CW, x, 86.
- 21.
Ibid., 109.
- 22.
JSM, ‘Coleridge’, CW, x, 112.
- 23.
JSM, ‘Coleridge’, CW, x, 138.
- 24.
JSM, ‘America’, CW, xviii, 94.
- 25.
- 26.
Crook (1965).
- 27.
My attention to Mill’s view of America does not imply that the French experience did not have any impact on the development of his political thought. My argument complements the interpretations that have emphasized his connection with France.
- 28.
See, for example, JSM to Gustav d’Eichthal, 15 May 1829, CW, xii, 31–32; JSM, ‘The Spirit of the Age [1–6]’ (1831), CW, xxii, 227–234, 246–247, 258–259, 289–295, 312–316; JMS and Joseph Blanco White, ‘Guizot’s Lectures on European Civilization’ (1836), CW, xx, 367–393; JSM, Logic, CW, viii, 906. Moreover, Mill even expressed the view that Britain was in rapid decline in comparison with France. For this, see JSM to Alexis de Tocqueville, 30 December 1840, CW, xiii, 457–459; JSM to Auguste Comte , 26 March 1846, CW, xiii, 696–697. (Haac 1995, 364–365); JSM, ‘Prospects of France [1–7]’ (1830–1831), CW, xxii, 128–140, 142–146, 149–163, 184–189, 295–301.
- 29.
JSM, ‘Civilization’ (1836), CW, xviii, 143.
- 30.
- 31.
Collini (1980, 204).
- 32.
Mill (1811: Chas, 417).
- 33.
- 34.
Biancamaria Fontana states: ‘If Mill was firm and explicit in his opposition to Whig journalism, his article on “Civilization” … could have been printed in the Edinburgh [Review] alongside the essays by Macaulay and Carlyle … without causing any surprise to the reader.’ (Fontana 1990, 51).
- 35.
JSM to Harriet Mill, 7 February [1854], CW, xiv, 152.
- 36.
Mill wrote in his Autobiography: ‘In those days [i.e. before his mental crisis] I had seen little further than the old school of political economists into the possibilities of fundamental improvement in social arrangements.’ (JSM, Autobiography, CW, i, 239).
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Kawana, Y. (2018). Introduction. In: Logic and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52221-4_1
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