James Mill

English philosopher

• Born: April 6, 1773
• Birthplace: Northwater Bridge, Logie Pert, Forfarshire, Scotland
• Died: June 23, 1836
• Place of death: London, England

A utilitarian propagandist and theorist, Mill shattered neat boundaries of modern special scholarship with his intellectual and practical interests. He believed in the perfectibility of humankind and regarded morality as more important than religion.

Early Life

James Mill was the son of a poor Scottish shoemaker of the same name. His mother, Isabel Fenton, was the daughter of a formerly wealthy farmer. Both parents were stern Puritans, but James’s mother was ambitious and tried to bring up her son to be a gentleman and a minister. He was educated at Montrose Academy, after which he met Sir James and Lady Jane Stuart, who made it possible for him to attend Edinburgh University. Mill entered there in 1790 and stayed for seven years, living with the Stuarts and tutoring their only child, Wilhelmina.

At Edinburgh, Mill became interested in Greek thought, particularly Plato and the Socratic method he would later use on his own son John. Dugald Steward, a professor of moral philosophy, gave James a taste for studies and a moral consciousness that were to stay with him for life. Here he also met Henry Peter Brougham and Francis Jeffrey—later literary associates—and Thomas Thomson, a fine scientist who became Mill’s lifelong friend.

Mill was licensed to preach in 1798, but his sermons were unsuccessful and he received no parish call. In 1802, he accompanied Sir John Stuart to London and the Parliament, where he observed the House of Commons and developed his interest in politics. Probably because of later opposition to religion and the aristocracy, Mill chose to forget his early days, and even though he later became an advocate of the free press, he maintained one’s young life was not for public knowledge.

During the early nineteenth century, Mill began to write for journals, the Anti-Jacobin Review, the Literary Journal, which he helped establish with his Scottish friends, and the St. James Chronicle. In this new setting, he wrote two essays that signaled his future thought, one on the corn trade (1804), in which he defended landholders who profited from the export of grain, and the other a translation of Charles François Dominique de Villers’s Essai sur l’esprit et l’influence de la reformation de Luther (1804; Essay on the Spirit and Influence of the Reformation, 1805) wherein, with the help of Thomson, he championed the progress of the human mind following an age of religious faith.

In 1805, Mill married Harriet Burrow and settled in Pentonville. Contrary to the thinking of Thomas Malthus, whom Mill would eventually support, he fathered nine children, educating the oldest, John Stuart, in his own philosophy to eventually became the spokesman of utilitarianism. After his literary jobs failed, Mill struggled to survive economically, adding to his own debts those of his bankrupt father. Hoping to free himself financially, Mill began work on his History of British India , but that was to take twelve years until it was published in 1817. In the meantime, in 1808, he met Jeremy Bentham, a man who was to determine the tone and character of the rest of his life.

Life’s Work

Almost immediately, Mill became the devoted disciple of Bentham, whose philosophy of utilitarianism—promoting the greatest good for the greatest number—needed practical application. Bentham wanted Mill close at hand, so he provided housing at Queen’s Square and supported him financially. Unlike the fanciful Bentham, Mill was stern and rigid, but the two conversed almost daily and, with the exception of a major quarrel in 1814, agreed that they needed each other if their thinking was to have a lasting effect.

Able from his family training and schooling to speak and write clearly and forcefully, Mill began to use the press and the public forum to further Bentham’s goals. By 1810, he had dropped his theology and became an open critic of the established church. He began to write for the Edinburgh Review, and though Brougham’s and Jeffrey’s editing concealed Mill’s connections to Bentham, Mill still was able to externalize utilitarian views in many areas—emancipation, foreign affairs, economics, and penal reform. In his article “Commerce Defended” he reversed his earlier defense of wealthy landowners to become an overt opponent of the aristocracy.

Mill was also interested in education. John Stuart Mill in his Autobiography (1873) speaks of how his father brought him up to be a rigorous rationalist at the expense of both feeling and sentiment. During the 1810’s, Mill championed the Lancasterian theory of education (teaching the poor to read and write, and having students help each other learn), as opposed to the church schools, which dwelt on the study of the catechism. He later espoused Bentham’s chrestomathic method (adult education in utilitarian tendencies), but generally his efforts to promote a lasting method failed.

Mill was more fortunate in the area of governmental reform. Supporting the Radicals, he was instrumental in increasing their representation in Parliament and promoted the consequent changes in government policy. Mill was able to work with men of vastly different persuasions—William Allen, a Quaker, and the Evangelical Zachary Macaulay—to accomplish such things as prison reform and legislation abolishing the slave trade. He continued to write, publishing articles on freedom of the press and governmental reform in the supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica from 1815 to 1824. His thinking on democratic government was rooted not in human rights but on the utilitarian principle that it best served the interests of all classes.

Between 1806 and 1817, Mill worked on his History of British India, which was to become the definitive work on that country. In his history, he focused on the importance of democratic government run as in England, not by the native peoples. Mill knew little of the class system in India, but he used that factor as an argument for objectivity. This work not only established Mill as an authority on India but also brought him employment with the East India House, thus securing his financial future for life; it also gave him the freedom to pursue the goals of utilitarianism and the Radical Party.

By the middle of the 1820’s the Radicals had become a major power in England, and there were many good men who supported the cause because of Mill—men such as David Ricardo, Francis Place, and George Grote. It was at that time that Mill’s brilliant son assumed the leadership of the group, leaving the older Mill with the opportunity to write and pull strings in the background. When the Radical magazine Westminster Review began publication in 1824, Mill for the first time was free to write without the restraints placed upon him by other publications.

In 1832, the Reform Bill passed the English Parliament, enabling the country to accomplish democratic reform without the violence of the French Revolution. Though the Whigs claimed victory and the Tories were thankful that bloodshed had been averted, it was the Radicals who provided a solid theoretical and practical basis for the historic bill. Mill had advocated middle-class governance rather than aristocratic control, progress through political reform rather than violent takeover, and education through the press rather than religious indoctrination, and these were the factors that prevailed. Having suffered from lung disease for several months, Mill died of bronchitis on June 23, 1836. He was buried in Kensington Church.

Significance

James Mill was at the height of his intellectual powers when England was undergoing a most significant time of unrest and change. Basically, he was a propagandist and a reformer, with philosophical underpinnings in the British empiricists. Unlike Thomas Hobbes, however, he was not an egoistic hedonist but believed in the perfectibility of humankind quite apart from divine grace. For him, morality was more important than religion, though he based his morality on utilitarian principles rather than on any inherent right or the goodness of humankind.

In Bentham, Mill found a mentor and a rational basis for cultural change. These two met in the context of Bentham’s interest in legal reform, but their mutual concerns spread to many fields—economics, government, psychology, ethics, and education. For the Utilitarians, the Church of England was spiritually dead and the aristocracy inherently selfish. Hence the importance of democratic (by which Mill meant middle-class) control to best satisfy the greatest number of people.

Sometimes called the last great eighteenth century man, Mill, mostly because of his Scottish past, was well-educated and highly disciplined. It was in England, however, that he became convinced that the intellect was humankind’s greatest asset. Mill rejected Romantics, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for he was unimaginative himself, and thoroughly distrustful of feelings. Moreover, he was disinclined to socialism, as were William Cobbett and Robert Owen, who believed that government, rather than any class, should be responsible for the just treatment of the people.

Perhaps Mill’s greatest gift, apart from his skillful pen and ability to articulate precise positions, was his propensity in work for common goals with people of widely differing points of view and to persuade others to go along with utilitarian ends. Harriet Grote (wife of the future historian) said of Mill:

Before many months ascendancy of James Mill’s powerful mind over his younger companion made itself apparent. George Grote began by admiring his wisdom, the acuteness, the depth of Mill’s character. Presently he found himself enthralled in the circle of Mill’s speculations, and after a year or two of intimate commerce there existed but little difference in point of opinion between master and pupil.

Even Thomas Macaulay, the champion of Whig politics and industrial progress, who had attacked the Encyclopædia Britannica’s “Essay on Government,” came to admire Mill in the end.

Mill was not an original thinker, but he held his intellectual convictions with vigor. By the mid-1820’s, when his son began to lead the Radicals, it became evident that Mill was a success. John Stuart Mill would eventually go beyond his father, incorporating the importance of feeling and imagination into his vision of the world, but he saw in James Mill, if not a good husband and father, certainly a disciplined teacher who gave him an intellectual advantage few parents pass on to their children.

The Reform Bill was perhaps the single most significant event of the first half of the nineteenth century in England, and James Mill had a giant’s part in its conception and passage. Though few agree with him now, he championed a philosophy that had an enormous impact in the shaping of Western civilization and perhaps still remains a subconscious, if not conscious, part of us all.

Bibliography

Bain, Alexander. James Mill: A Biography. London: Longmans, Green, 1882. Reprint. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966. Dated, but still the most thorough account of Mill’s life.

Bonner, John. Economic Efficiency and Social Justice: The Development of Utilitarian Ideas in Economics from Bentham to Edgeworth. Brookfield, Vt.: E. Elgar, 1995. Examines the economic theories of Mill, Bentham, and other utilitarians.

Halevy, Elie. The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism. Translated by Mary Morris. 3 vols. London: Farber and Gwyer, 1928. Reprint. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1955. Traces the evolution of utilitarianism from its philosophical roots in John Locke and David Hume, details the changes in Mill and Bentham as they worked together, and captures the essence of Mill’s debates leading up to the Reform Bill. A good reference book from a Continental perspective.

Hamburger, Joseph. James Mill and the Art of Revolution. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963. A book about radical strategy: how Mill employed extraparliamentary means—the press, petitions, public meetings—to change the English constitution. A scholarly work that gives a larger picture for understanding Mill’s time.

Mill, James. James Mill: Selected Economic Writings. Edited by Donald Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Best biographical sketch; relates Mill’s life to his economic and political contributions. Includes a bibliography of Mill’s works, some of which are reprinted with interesting introductions that trace the development of his thought.

Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography and Literary Essays. Edited by John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Mill recounts the place of Bentham in his father’s life and the rationalistic education he got during the time James was closest to Bentham. Short and moving in parts. The essay “Utilitarianism” in this volume is more wordy but represents John’s defense of his father’s philosophy of life.

Plamenatz, John. The English Utilitarians. London: Basil Blackwell and Mott, 1949. A succinct and thoughtful study of how Hume, Bentham, and James and John Stuart Mill each contributed to utilitarianism. Chapter 6 is a pithy analysis of James Mill and his accomplishments.

Schultz, Bart, and Georgios Varouxakis, eds. Utilitarianism and Empire. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005. Collection of essays examining how Mill and other English utilitarians conceived of race and the role race played in their political and ethical programs. Includes an analysis of Mills’s History of British India and his views on the “Negro question.”

Stephen, Leslie. The English Utilitarians. 3 vols. London: Duckworth, 1900. Reprint. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968. Scholarly but readable study of a complex time. Volume 2 is a thematic analysis of Mill’s involvement in politics, economics, legal changes, and church reform. Other chapters explain his relationship to movements (Whiggism and socialism) as well as key personalities (Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo). A good source book.