John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill was born in London, the son of prominent Scottish intellectual James Mill—who rose to fame for writing an outlandishly racist and deeply influential history of India, despite never visiting the country—and a mother about whom almost nothing is known, and whom Mill never even explicitly mentions in his autobiography. Hoping to create a genius, Mill’s father raised his son strictly and meticulously, isolating the boy from the world and immersing him in Greek and Latin literature, logic and economics, and most of all utilitarian philosophy. This education included audiences with many of his father’s illustrious friends, including the influential economist David Ricardo and the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who is generally considered utilitarianism’s founder and Mill’s greatest philosophical influence. Mill’s adolescence was punctuated by a yearlong sojourn in France, a brief attempt to become a lawyer, and a mental breakdown and severe six-month depression that came after he realized that he would be bored, not satisfied, if he managed to undo all the world’s injustices (and also in large part because he was exhausted by his strenuous, overly analytical upbringing). Mill followed his father to the East India Company, where he spent most of his adult life (25 years) as a colonial bureaucrat writing correspondence. Because his job was not difficult, he had plenty of time to write on a wide variety of subjects and remain active in London’s intellectual life, founding and participating in various philosophical and political groups (most notably the Utilitarian Society and Philosophical Radicals). His important works from this period include 1843’s A System of Logic, which made breakthroughs in thinking about scientific proof, essays on Bentham and Coleridge, and a number of books and articles on various political issues—always analyzed in terms of utilitarian principles. During these decades, Mill also married his close friend Harriet Taylor. Taylor died shortly after the British government dissolved the East India Company (including Mill’s job at it) and took direct control of India in 1858. Like his father, Mill remained a staunch defender of British imperialism throughout his whole life: he believed that the British were nobly “improving” the “barbarians” who lived in India and other territories. In contrast, when it came to the rights of British people, Mill was remarkably progressive for his time—after leaving the East India Company, he became an important administrator at University of Saint Andrews and served in the British Parliament, where he advocated for the economic rights of the poor and became the second ever Member of Parliament to come out in favor of extending voting rights to women. These views proved controversial, however, and he lost re-election in 1868, at which point he moved to the town where his wife was buried in France, bought a house and filled it with the furniture from the hotel room in which she died, and lived out his own last five years. Mill remains best remembered for two works in particular, which have cemented his reputation as the most important British philosopher of the 19th century: On Liberty, in which he argues for the protection of individual rights and limits on government authority, and Utilitarianism, his most succinct defense of the ethical theory at the heart of his thought and political career alike.