John Stuart Mill

Life and thought

John Stuart Mill was educated by his father, James Mill, in an experiment of intensive schooling: Greek at three, Latin at eight, political economy at thirteen. At twenty he fell into a depression that convinced him that analysis alone starves the feelings, and he found relief in Wordsworth’s poetry. He worked for the East India Company for thirty-five years, wrote major books on logic, economics, liberty and the position of women, much of it in partnership with Harriet Taylor, whom he married in 1851, and sat in Parliament from 1865 to 1868.

Mill revised Bentham’s utilitarianism: some pleasures, those of intellect and feeling, are higher than others — “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”. On Liberty defends the harm principle: society may coerce someone only to prevent harm to others, never for their own good, and free discussion is needed because even true opinions turn into dead dogma when no one challenges them. The Subjection of Women argued that women’s legal subordination was a relic of the rule of force, and in 1867 he proposed in Parliament to give women the vote. He remains the classic voice of liberalism.