John Stuart Mill

1806 - 1873

John Stuart Mill was the oldest of the nine children of James Mill (1773-1836) and his wife, Harriet. Mill left an extraordinary account of his life in his Autobiography (1873). As Alan Ryan has remarked: "Mill was at pains to treat his life with a detached scientific objectivity and to present it to his readers only as an example of what a well-designed education could achieve . . . . In reality, Mill was unusually intelligent, unusually sensitive, and to a distressing degree the victim of tougher but less subtle people than himself; the Autobiography is engrossing because it reveals all this in spite of its author's best efforts. He felt emotionally deprived but morally obliged to transcend such feelings-and, of course, could not entirely do so."

Mill's greatest fame is as a philosopher and political theorist. Why, then, should Mill's work be studied in a literature class? The answer is, simply, that he is preeminently a writer. He had the gift of making his literary style mirror the movement of his mind. The critic F. R. Leavis said of Mill that his writings are "models of method and manner . . . .[T]hey have an intellectual distinction that is at the same time a distinction of character."

Mill's first imposing work was his System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, which appeared in 1843. This was followed in due course by his Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844), and Principles of Political Economy (1848). His powerful treatise On Liberty was published in 1859. All through his life and thought we see him struggling to promote, refine, and even redefine the philosophy of utilitarianism that he derived from his father's hero, Jeremy Bentham. His most considered analysis is developed in Utilitarianism (1861). In the Parliament of 1865-68, Mill sat as Radical member for Westminister. He advocated three major issues in the House of Commons: women's suffrage, the interests of the laboring classes, and land reform in Ireland. His treatise on The Subjection of Women (1869) together with the Autobiography and On Liberty remain his most widely read and remembered works. Mill died at Avignon in 1873. The Autobiography was published posthumously as was Three Essays on Religion: Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism (1874).

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