John Stuart Mill, 1806–73: a Figure of Transition

Abstract

John Stuart Mill was born in 1806, the first son of James Mill. His youthful education was rigorous, and by the age of fourteen, Mill was learning political economy during long walks with his father. By 1823 his education was completed and he joined the East India office, from which he retired in 1857. His work left him leisure for writing and during his years at the India Office, he wrote and published his two major works: A System of Logic (1843), and Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848), following Essays on Some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy (written during 1829/30, published in 1844). In 1851 he married Harriet Taylor, claiming later to have been strongly influenced by her when writing On Liberty (1859), Representative Government (1861), Utilitarianism (1863), and The Subjection of Women (1869) as well as the final chapter of Book IV of his Principles, ‘On the probable Futurity of the Labouring Classes’. He was a Member of Parliament (1865–68), supporting Disraeli’s 1867 reform bill and land reform. In 1869, he recanted his mechanical view of the wages fund doctrine, following criticism by his friend and colleague, William Thornton. He died in France in 1873. Mill’s essays on socialism were posthumously published in 1879 in the Fortnightly Review.