John Stuart Mill

12 John Stuart Mill INDER S. MARWAH Chapter guide This chapter introduces John Stuart Mill’s political philosophy, focusing on two particular features of his thought. First is Mill’s relation to the liberal political tradition. Second are his writings on race, gender, and empire, which have in recent years come into greater prominence. Following a brief introduction, Section 12.2 highlights Mill’s contributions to liberal political theory and utilitarian ethics, the two traditions of thought with which he’s most commonly associated. Section 12.3 elaborates his views on government (widely) and democracy (more narrowly). Section 12.4 considers Mill’s views on human diversity and difference, showing how his treatments of race, empire, and gender intersect with his liberalism. The chapter concludes with a brief reflection on how one might think about his political philosophy in light of his imperialist entanglements. 12.1 Introduction Few philosophers have lived as many lives as John Stuart Mill, both in their own time and since. Mill was Victorian England’s most influential philosopher—by some accounts, the most influential English-language philosopher of the nineteenth century. He was a pre-eminent public figure, a high-ranking administrator in the East India Company, a member of the Philosophical Radicals surrounding Jeremy Bentham, an outspoken feminist, a Member of Parliament (briefly), and an accomplished botanist. He wrote on every conceivable subject that might interest the era’s foremost public intellectual, from better-known excurses on liberty, economics, government, utilitarian ethics, and the history of philosophy, to lesser-known tracts on international law, psychology, socialism, women’s and working-class suffrage, character formation, race, gender, and more. Since his death in 1873, he has gained and lost reputations for being a leader of the utilitarian movement (or a lapsed utilitarian), a champion of free speech, an unrepentant imperialist, and, most often, the forefather of modern liberalism. Key Thinker: Jeremy Bentham Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was a jurist, philosopher, and political reformer widely credited as the originator of classical utilitarianism. While his philosophical writings touched on ethics, law, logic, political economy, and more, he is best known as a leader of an early nineteenth-century reformist movement seeking to develop legal, civil, penal, and political institutions grounded in utilitarian principles. Bentham believed that human experience could be reduced to a balance of pleasures and pains, whose proportions would yield a more or less happy life. Social institutions should, then, aim to maximize the overall happiness by increasing overall pleasure and decreasing overall pain. His utilitarianism is hedonistic: it aims to maximize the quantity of pleasures experienced by human beings, gauged by a ‘felicific calculus’ measuring the intensity, duration, certainty, and proximity of experiences of pleasure or pain. RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 203 13-12-2022 13:04:19 204 Read more about Mill’s life and work by accessing the thinker biography on the online resources: www.oup.com/ he/RamgotraChoat1e. JOHN STUART MILL There are, then, different Mills that we might discuss depending on where our interests lie, and where we choose to focus in the thousands of pages he penned over a long and turbulent life. This chapter examines Mill’s political philosophy and his place in the liberal tradition, highlighting his major contributions to social ethics and political theory. It also widens beyond these better-known topics by exploring Mill’s views on human difference—racial, gender-based, and class-based—and his work as a high-ranking bureaucrat in the East India Company from 1823 until 1858. The idea isn’t just to sit these topics side by side, but to consider how they influenced one another. Mill’s celebrated writings on liberty, for instance, excluded the very populations over which he presided as a colonial administrator, and his concerns for women’s autonomy shaped the extent and form of the liberties he defended. The chapter will thus outline the liberal commitments for which Mill is renowned and show how his thoughts on race, gender, empire, and civilization intersect with them. 12.2 Liberalism and utilitarianism Mill is best known for two principles that pull in opposing directions. These are the liberty principle, often taken as the touchstone of modern liberalism, and the principle of utility, the ethical core of his moral and political thought. This section begins by sketching out the liberty principle and the arguments following from it in On Liberty; it then looks at the ideal of individuality, central to Mill’s liberalism and utilitarianism alike; it concludes by sketching out Mill’s utilitarianism, pointing to its stress points in relation to the liberty principle. 12.2.1 Liberty In his Autobiography, Mill (1981: 259) speculated that as ‘a kind of philosophical text-book of a single truth’, ‘[t]he Liberty is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written’. He was right. On Liberty is Mill’s best-known and most enduring contribution to the canon of political philosophy, widely considered a foundational expression of classical liberalism (despite its affinities with modern liberalisms as concerned with social welfare as with individual freedom). On Liberty’s purpose is to ascertain ‘the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual’ (Mill, 1977a: 217). While questions surrounding the extent of political authority stretch back to antiquity, Mill’s inquiry is set within the conditions of his era, in the context of ascendant popular governments. He lived in a period in which increasingly representative forms of government were beginning to replace the largely monarchical institutions that had ruled Europe for centuries, and was attuned to democracy’s promise and anxieties. On Liberty thus aims to determine the scope of social and political power over individuals in a democratic context. Popular governments present two dangers to individuals, one political and the other social. The first, the ‘tyranny of the majority’, is that: [t]he ‘people’ who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the ‘self-government’ spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority. (ibid.: 219) From an institutional standpoint, democracy enables majorities to dominate minorities. The second problem lies in the power of majorities to exert, through customs and moral codes, ‘a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 204 13-12-2022 13:04:19 LIBERAL MODERNITY AND COLONIAL DOMINATION 205 details of life, and enslaving the soul itself ’ (ibid.: 219). Mill concludes that individuals need protection not only from overweening political authorities, but from prevailing opinions proscribing a person’s choices, preferences, and behaviours. The question is where to draw the line between those areas where society might interfere with an individual’s actions, and those where they should enjoy complete liberty. Mill’s answer lies in ‘one very simple principle’, which is that: the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant . . . The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. (ibid.: 223) This is the liberty principle or, as it’s also called, the harm principle. The liberty/harm principle is seemingly transcendent because it appears so simple, clear, and intuitive: we should be free to do what we choose so long as it doesn’t harm others. This moral obviousness, to late-liberal societies, has undoubtedly contributed to its longevity. Without denying its appeal, Mill’s account of liberty has faced challenges since he first enunciated it. First, the idea of harm is overly fluid and under-specified. Can one consent to be harmed? Is injurious language harmful, or are harms strictly material/physical? If it’s the former, what kinds of language cross the threshold from protected to injurious speech? Second, how exactly are we to distinguish ‘self-regarding’ from ‘other-regarding’ actions, since nearly everything we do affects those in proximity to us? Finally, Mill’s conceptualization of liberty is itself ambiguous. Is liberty intrinsically valuable (good in itself) or instrumentally valuable (good as a conduit to other goods)? Should we understand it in negative terms, as a sphere of non-interference, or does it require social or institutional supports? Is liberty a qualified good that holds only under certain conditions, or an unqualified good, regardless of time or place? This last question is sharpened by Mill’s infamous declaration, in On Liberty, that the liberty principle did not extend to ‘backward states of society’ (ibid.: 224). He considered insufficiently ‘advanced’ societies, such as the one over which he governed in India, as benefiting from the despotic government of European colonists. This was because the liberty principle did not apply ‘anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion’ (ibid.: 224). Such societies, he believed, could only progress through the forceful direction of ‘civilized’ Europeans. His account of liberty, then, is connected to his defence of imperialism and to his prejudiced assessment of non-Europeans. Without resolving all these tensions, I take Mill to express the conviction that one’s liberty is inviolable except in those cases where its exercise encroaches upon certain rights of others (and not their preferences, sensibilities, or interests). These would be entitlements in which we have a primary, justice-based interest lexically superior to other kinds of interests and to which we have a fundamental political claim—a core human interest (Donner, 2017: 436). Despite Mill’s appeal to harm, he appears to defend the view that the right to liberty is sacrosanct unless other basic rights are threatened by it. This would rule out limiting a person’s liberty to prevent them from, for instance, offending public sentiments, or acting against the majority’s will, or injuring their own interests, or joining a dissident organization. Understood this way, Mill defends (1) liberty of thought and discussion; (2) liberty of choice and action; and (3) freedom of assembly. ‘No society in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected,’ he maintains, ‘is free’ (Mill, 1977a: 226). RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 205 13-12-2022 13:04:19 206 JOHN STUART MILL 12.2.2 Liberty of thought and discussion Mill’s account of the right of free speech is deceptively complex, combining several distinctive but related arguments to defend a broad-ranging liberty to hold and disseminate one’s views. He addresses three possible scenarios: (1) cases where we do not know whether our ideas are true or false; (2) cases in which they are correct; and (3) cases in which they are ‘in error’. Starting with the first, Mill holds, most simply, that freedom of speech is necessary because the suppressed opinion may be true. Beyond its surface truth, Mill makes a historical argument, an epistemic one, and a sociological one. The historical argument is that silencing certain opinions assumes the infallibility of our own judgements, and that the most self-evident truths of a given people are almost always the object of bewilderment, consternation, or ridicule of future generations. The belief that we are warranted in censoring unpleasant, immoral, or socially dangerous views is not only baseless, but pernicious: it prevents present and future generations from questioning ideas and making social progress. This leads to the epistemic argument. Given the fallibility of our judgements, our best chance of approaching the truth on any given matter is to expose it to as many counter-opinions as possible. ‘[A]ny person whose judgement is really deserving of confidence’, Mill (ibid.: 232) maintains, earns it by ‘his practice to listen to all that could be said against him’. To shield them from argument because we are certain that they’re correct is the best way of limiting our capacity to assess the truth of our convictions. Finally, the sociological argument: democratic conditions increase social pressures towards conformity, custom, and convention, against which liberty of thought and discussion, and the critical spirit they engender, serve as a bulwark. In the modern world, we don’t need to burn heretics at the stake; they simply censor themselves in societies that don’t actively encourage and defend liberty of thought. The harm isn’t just to contrarians and originals, but to society itself, as the best and brightest minds are quietly dwarfed and pacified. These all fall under Mill’s first scenario: that suppressed opinions may be true or false. He goes on to defend liberty of thought and discussion when we know our ideas to be correct and the truth is not in question. Even here, Mill argues, liberty of discussion remains invaluable as a means of learning the grounds of our own convictions. Most of us settle into our beliefs without subjecting them to careful examination; defending them renews their truth and recalls their foundations, without which they devolve into dead dogma, articles of faith whose vitality is sapped by time and habit. Free speech invigorates conviction, forcing us to confront why we believe our beliefs at all. Finally, Mill addresses the more common case than either of the above: when truth is shared between conflicting doctrines. Historical reflection and a consciousness of our own fallibilism are, again, key to recognizing that no person, civilization, or doctrine contains the entire truth on any given matter. Much more frequently, given systems of thought hold some portion of it, which can only be supplemented through freewheeling discussion airing out dissenting views. Even ‘incorrect’ doctrines, then, reveal some measure of truth. As obvious as this may seem, few philosophical, religious, or moral systems acknowledge their own incompleteness; free speech, then, remains an important reminder of it. 12.2.3 Liberty of action Mill’s arguments concerning liberty of action borrow from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s dictum that humanity’s efflorescence depends on ‘freedom, and variety of situations’ (ibid.: 261). Just as human beings should be able to hold a wide range of opinions, ‘so is it that there should be different experiments of living’ (ibid.: 260–261). Mill’s view is, again, restricted by his prejudices, as he fails to see RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 206 13-12-2022 13:04:19 LIBERAL MODERNITY AND COLONIAL DOMINATION 207 the worth of such differences in many non-European societies. These ‘inferior and more backward portion[s] of the human race’ should instead be absorbed by ‘highly civilized and cultivated people’ (Mill, 1977b: 449). Despite these limitations, Mill provides both individual and social justifications for ‘experiments of living’. From the individual standpoint, different human beings have different ways of being in the world which may be ill-fitted to the customary way, particularly in the case of dissentient minorities. This is an argument about autonomy, development, and flourishing: forcing individuals to live as most people do cramps the human spirit to the detriment of eccentrics, mavericks, and geniuses. ‘Human nature’, Mill (1977a: 263) famously holds, ‘is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.’ From the collective standpoint, reducing the breadth of ways that we might think and live inhibits social progress. True originals by definition act outside (and often against) social conventions; only by allowing them to do so are the bounds of social existence widened. As Mill (ibid.: 267) observes, ‘these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool’, as ‘[g]enius can only breathe in an atmosphere of freedom’. Here, Mill reflects the anxieties of his early democratic era, in which popular opinion was becoming increasingly powerful, constraining through both law and custom all but the most ordinary ways of life. ‘[T]he despotism of custom,’ he reminds, ‘is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement’ (ibid.: 272). While carving out a fairly expansive sphere for individual autonomy, Mill’s defence of liberty is, by design, limited. Liberty is not a licence to incite violence or harm: my freedom to argue that property is theft does not extend to inciting others to destroy my neighbour’s property. Liberty also does not shield abuses of power in the private sphere, particularly those that men inflict on women. Mill’s argument here tallies with feminist scholarship: the state’s obligation to respect individual liberty must be balanced against the ‘almost despotic power of husbands over wives’ (ibid.: 301). Liberty’s good is thus neither unconstrained nor intrinsic. It is equally restricted in the economic sphere, where Mill steadfastly resists the free-market economics often attributed to liberalism. His mature economic and political thought is in fact inflected by socialism, recognizing the necessity of curbing capitalism’s excesses. Without embracing stronger forms of state socialism, Mill endorsed workers’ collectives, for instance, to improve the material and educational prospects of the working classes. He also argued against unlimited economic growth in advanced societies in favour of a redistributive system elevating the entire population’s standard of life. His liberalism, then, remains more nuanced and heterodox than is often credited. 12.2.4 Individuality Individuality is a central concern of Mill’s and of liberal political thought more generally. Liberalism’s focus on the individual has long been an object of non-liberal criticism, from communitarians taking aim at its atomism to postcolonial scholars pointing to its Eurocentrism. While such criticisms are in many cases warranted, Mill prizes individuality not as against community, but as a part of it. For Mill, individuality has an intrinsic and extrinsic worth. From the intrinsic standpoint, individuality is valuable in relation to the human capacity for self-development, our unique ability to improve ourselves by fostering an active and self-directing character (Donner, 1991). This is against the ‘ape-like imitation’ to which we consign ourselves by thinking and acting in conformity with dominant opinions—the despotism of custom that withers the human spirit (Mill criticizes this very deformation in The Subjection of Women: women’s individuality is sacrificed by the passive character forced upon them). Autonomy and dependency, however, need not conflict. Mill recognizes RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 207 13-12-2022 13:04:19 208 JOHN STUART MILL that our capabilities for individual self-development do not exist independently of social intercourse but are rather anchored in a social existence whose tendencies to overreach are checked by basic liberties. Human autonomy depends on a properly limited social and political life; Mill’s valuation of individuality is not libertarian. From the extrinsic—or social—standpoint, individuality is an engine of progress, the more of which exists, the better. As Mill (1977a: 272) puts it, ‘the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are individuals’. A nation that fails to preserve individuality, in this view, faces the eventuality of sliding into social stagnancy. Critics such as Uday Singh Mehta (1999) and Bhikhu Parekh (1994) have criticized Mill on this front, given his characterization of ‘the whole East’ as nations in which ‘the despotism of Custom is complete’ (Mill, 1977a: 272). Given his conviction that India could only be jolted out of its stationary state through British rule, Mill’s focus on individuality has come under fire for its Eurocentrist presumptions and for rationalizing imperialism. 12.2.5 Utilitarianism As with many of Mill’s intellectual commitments, his relationship to utilitarianism is anything but straightforward. That relationship is partly biographical. Mill was raised in an intellectual milieu dominated by his father and Jeremy Bentham, leading proponents of classical utilitarianism, which aimed to reform nineteenth-century social, political, and legal institutions. J.S. Mill shared in those ambitions and developed his own utilitarianism but retained a certain ambiguity in his commitments as he drifted from his father’s influence. There are also deep tensions between the principles of liberty and utility. As a result, commentators vary widely in interpreting Mill’s utilitarianism and reconciling it with his liberalism. Key Concept: Utilitarianism Utilitarianism is a normative theory of ethics that holds that the morally correct action is the one that maximizes good outcomes. It is consequentialist, taking the results of actions as the object of our moral concern. This is in contrast with deontological ethics––where what’s morally correct is given by a rule or maxim, for example, ‘thou shalt not kill’—or virtue ethics, which take a person’s character as the object of moral concern. Generally speaking, utilitarian theories aim to maximize the overall good, which includes both one’s own good and that of others. Though variants have existed throughout the history of ethics, classical utilitarianism came into prominence in the nineteenth century, primarily through the legal, political, and moral philosophies of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. Mill most clearly spells out his convictions in his 1859 essay, ‘Utilitarianism’. ‘Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle’, he asserts, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure . . . pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends. (Mill, 1969: 209–210) The utilitarian measure of happiness, Mill (ibid.: 218) specifies, is not the individual’s, but ‘that of all concerned’. Utility is, then, the basic ethical principle guiding Mill’s practical philosophy, governing both how we ought to act in various spheres of action and the organization of our social and RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 208 13-12-2022 13:04:19 LIBERAL MODERNITY AND COLONIAL DOMINATION 209 political institutions. It shapes our collective commitments, such that educational institutions, ‘laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole’ (ibid.: 218). Here, Mill steps into uncomfortable territory for liberals, for a few reasons. First, the argument flirts with perfectionism, the notion that there’s a particular ‘good life’ that public institutions should push citizens to adopt. This runs afoul of the liberal commitment to a neutral public sphere. This is exacerbated by a second feature of Mill’s view: his distinction between higher pleasures (which employ the ‘higher faculties’, such as the intellect) and lower pleasures (associated with base desiresatisfaction). Mill’s utilitarianism prioritizes the former over the latter, suggesting that we should cultivate the higher pleasures as ‘[i]t is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied’ (ibid.: 212). These points of friction illuminate the tension between Mill’s liberalism and his utilitarianism. At best, they pull in conflicting directions; at worst, they are irreconcilable. The utility principle enjoins us to maximize human happiness, even if it means that some person or minority could be made to bear the brunt of a social policy that increases the overall happiness (such as, for instance, banning minority religious practices disliked by a majority). The liberty principle, conversely, is strictly egalitarian: no one should be denied basic liberties, even if their preservation lessens the overall happiness. The principle of utility prioritizes the general welfare, which liberty may undermine, and the principle of liberty prioritizes individual freedom, which may not maximize the general welfare. There are a few responses to such inconsistencies. The first is that Mill simply is inconsistent—that he failed to square his commitments to utility and liberty. Isaiah Berlin (2015) most famously advances this view, suggesting that as Mill’s liberalism developed, he drifted away from the utilitarian fold. A second tack is to argue that Mill sees individuality and autonomy as constitutive of human happiness; by preserving them, the liberty principle maximizes pleasure. A variant of this argument is that if we recognize human happiness as implicitly variable, then liberty is required to carve out the space for us to determine and seek our happiness. Finally, we might emphasize the temporal dimension of Mill’s view when he describes utility, in On Liberty, ‘as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions: but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being’ (Mill, 1977a: 225). The measure of happiness here is our long-term interests as beings that will always develop and progress, which only liberty—rather than any fixed principle of government—can enable us to do over time. Liberty ensures that we can deliberate and improve ourselves on an ongoing basis, taking as its object not our immediate happiness as individuals, but our enduring and collective happiness as continuously evolving creatures. None of these resolutions is entirely satisfying and objections can be raised against them all. Nevertheless, they point to some tensions in Mill’s thought and to a few ways that he might have worked through them. Another serious concern with Mill’s utilitarianism is that it directly shapes his justification of imperialism. As he saw it, by pulling non-Europeans up the civilizational ladder, from the depths of barbarism into the light of modernity, the British Empire furthered overall human happiness. By raising ostensibly retrograde populations out of their social, intellectual, and political torpor, ‘pedagogical’ imperialism—understood as a ‘civilizing mission’—performed a service to the species by increasing its sum pleasure. That the measures of happiness, civilization, progress, and pleasure were strictly European; that the empire’s pedagogical mandate served its economic interests; that this service to humanity had to be performed by the force of arms; none of this appears to have sowed much doubt in Mill’s mind concerning the empire’s beneficence. RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 209 13-12-2022 13:04:19 210 JOHN STUART MILL 12.2 Liberalism and utilitarianism: Key Points ● Mill’s liberty principle, or harm principle, which states that we are free to act as long as we do not harm others, has been criticized for its ambiguous conceptualizations of ‘harm’ and ‘liberty’ and for failing clearly to distinguish ‘self-regarding’ from ‘other-regarding’ actions. ● Mill offers historical, epistemic, and sociological arguments in defence of liberty of thought and discussion, and individual and social justifications for liberty of choice and action. ● Mill values individuality both for enabling individual self-development and as an engine of social progress. ● Mill’s defence of utilitarianism—which holds that actions are right insofar as they maximize overall happiness—is in tension with his liberalism. ● Mill’s valuations of liberty, individuality, and utility are qualified by, or contribute to, his justifications of British imperialism. 12.3 Government and democracy 12.3.1 Government Mill measures government, like liberty, against the standard of utility, arguing that ‘the influence of government on the well-being of society can be considered or estimated in reference to nothing less than the whole of the interests of humanity’ (Mill, 1977b: 384). As above, this sits awkwardly with his liberalism by supporting more activist forms of government than are typically countenanced by classical liberal views. This activist bent is apparent in Mill’s two criteria for good government. The first is ‘the degree in which it tends to increase the sum of good qualities in the governed, collectively and individually’ (ibid.: 390). The second relates to ‘the quality of the machinery itself; that is, the degree in which it is adapted to take advantage of the amount of good qualities which may at any time exist, and make them instrumental to the right purposes’ (ibid.: 390–391). Taken together, these criteria balance principles of order (government should employ the population’s existing resources and capacities) and progress (government should increase the population’s resources and capacities). As Mill understands them, these principles are complementary: governments should maintain a stable foundation for their populations while also seeking to improve them, cultivating the ‘active character’ and self-developing individuality lauded in On Liberty. How a government goes about this, however, depends on a society’s ‘state of civilization’ (ibid.: 393). Mill does not espouse any fixed, singular form of government, resisting the notion that political institutions can be set out from a speculative void. Governments should be fitted to a people’s social, cultural, and historical circumstances and must satisfy three basic conditions: [t]he people for whom the form of government is intended must be willing to accept it . . . They must be willing and able to do what is necessary to keep it standing. And they must be willing and able to do what it requires of them to enable it to fulfil its purposes. (ibid.: 376) These conditions are a double-edged sword. On one hand, Mill’s view of government is attractive in registering the nature of its population and adapting to it. There is no universally best form of government, which varies according to its population’s needs. On the other hand, Mill’s attention to a people’s state of civilization sustains the argument for colonial domination over ‘unfit’ or ‘barbaric’ RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 210 13-12-2022 13:04:20 LIBERAL MODERNITY AND COLONIAL DOMINATION 211 non-Europeans. While ‘the ideally best form of government is that in which the sovereignty, or supreme controlling power in the last resort, is vested in the entire aggregate of the community’ (ibid.: 403), this is only the case for ‘advanced’ peoples—Europeans. By contrast, ‘a people in a state of savage independence . . . is practically incapable of making any progress in civilization until it has learnt to obey . . . To enable it to do this, the constitution of the government must be nearly, or quite, despotic’ (ibid.: 394). For such people, Mill argues, ‘a government under their own control would be entirely unmanageable by them. Their improvement cannot come from themselves, but must be superinduced from without’ (ibid.: 395). Mill’s sensitivity to the conditions of government, then, yields very different forms of rule for different societies. For ‘civilized’ Europeans, the best governments are popular, free, and democratic, while ‘uncivilized’ non-Europeans benefit from ‘benevolent’ European despotism. He reconciles the contradiction by appealing to an ideal of progress: Europeans’ advancement enables them to benefit from liberty and self-rule, while non-Europeans’ underdevelopment leads them to require external direction. 12.3.2 Democracy Mill’s democratic theory is most clearly enunciated in Considerations on Representative Government. While certain commentators have found it more elitist than democratic, some such charges are mitigated by a close reckoning of his aims and concerns. Mill’s milieu, in which popular sovereignty and representative governments were ascendant but by no means the norm that they are today, shapes his democratic theory. Like Alexis de Tocqueville— with whom Mill corresponded, and whose landmark Democracy in America he reviewed—Mill endeavours to strike a balance between giving voice to the masses and mitigating its possible excesses. In his Victorian context, that meant balancing between Britain’s working class, who were gradually gaining voting rights, and its elites, who largely controlled Parliament. Ultimately, his democratic theory aims to weigh principles of equality and inclusiveness (by increasing working-class participation in government) against those of competence and education (by preserving some of the upper-class’s political power and raising the educational level of the working class). Mill was a lifelong advocate for women’s and working-class suffrage, both in his theoretical work and in his brief parliamentary career; his conviction that the working class should be educated before being enfranchised, however, also betrays his democratic hesitations. Key Thinker: Alexis de Tocqueville Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a French aristocrat, historian, and politician, whose Democracy in America (Tocqueville, 2003 [1835, 1840]) is among the nineteenth century’s most wide-ranging and enduring analyses of democracy. It was one of the earliest examinations of modern, mass democracies, capturing both their promise and the anxieties they provoked—notably, the worry about the tyranny of the masses shaping Mill’s political thought. Like Mill, with whom he corresponded, Tocqueville led an active political life both domestically and abroad, as a colonial official. While he criticized slavery and the treatment of Black Americans in the United States, he advocated French domination of North Africans in Algeria. For Mill (1977b: 404), popular government ‘is both more favourable to present good government, and promotes a better and higher form of national character, than any other polity whatsoever’. Democracies preserve citizens’ rights and flourishing while also ensuring that ‘the general RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 211 13-12-2022 13:04:20 212 JOHN STUART MILL prosperity attains a greater height, and is more widely diffused’ (ibid.: 404). Democratic governments carry particular advantages in relation to individuals’ interests and development. As regards the first, Mill (ibid.: 404) sees that ‘the rights and interests of every or any person are only secure from being disregarded, when the person interested is himself able, and habitually disposed, to stand up for them’. This concerns the working class, traditionally excluded from political leadership. For Mill, working-class interests can only be defended through democratic inclusion in decision-making processes, by drawing its members into political institutions rather than depending on representation by other classes. ‘Every class knows some things not so well known to other people’, Mill (1988: 65) proclaims in an 1866 speech before Parliament, ‘and every class has interests more or less special to itself, and for which no protection is so effectual as its own’. Democracy’s second advantage is pedagogical: drawing citizens into the machinery of government develops their civic capacities, teaching them to become self-governing. Local democracy and small-scale politics cultivate citizens’ habits of collective action. Mill is again thinking of the working class, whose disconnect from civic life is redressed by incorporating them into democratic political institutions that foster public habits. By contributing to democratic processes, [the citizen] is called upon, while so engaged, to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private partialities; to apply at every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common good . . . He is made to feel himself one of the public. (Mill, 1977b: 412) Democratic participation thus develops our abilities for self-government and self-development, individually and collectively. However, Mill hardly endorses an unchecked universal suffrage, given his trepidations regarding democracy’s potential pathologies such as social domination, class-specific interests, waning public spirit, failures of representation, political pandering, and more. The greatest of these is the tyranny of the majority, democracy’s ability to empower majorities to run roughshod over the rights of minorities. Despite his support of working-class suffrage, Mill worried about the dangers presented by unrestricted enfranchisement, given their numerical preponderance. Without regulation, democracy made it all too easy for the working class’s interests to surpass the common interest. A second and related concern, outlined above, concerns competence: the working class’s lack of education (generally) and experience in government (more narrowly). Democracy’s inclusiveness runs the risk of drawing into government citizens unaccustomed to considering the public good. As a result, Mill (ibid.: 287) frets, ‘the benefits of completely universal suffrage cannot be obtained without bringing with them, as it appears to me, a chance of more than equivalent evils’. He thus turned from championing ‘pure democracy’ early in his career ‘to the modified form of it, which is set forth in my Considerations on Representative Government’ (Mill, 1981: 199). The middle chapters of Considerations address these problems, and Mill’s solutions contribute to his reputation as an elitist. These include a weighted voting scheme endowing the better educated with greater civic power; Thomas Hare’s single-transferable voting system, which limited the numerical power of the majority and enabled an ‘instructed minority’ (Mill, 1977b: 457) to air its views in Parliament; and imposing conditional voting restrictions on citizens dependent on, or abusive of, the public weal (tax defrauders, welfare recipients, etc.). While such inequalities are deeply problematic, Mill’s context is crucial in understanding his apprehensions. Enfranchising a large mass of uneducated voters in a class-divided society carried a risk of class-driven legislative action, and of quashing minority views. What Mill fails to state more directly, however, is the threat that workingclass enfranchisement also presented to governing elites’ power and interests. RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 212 13-12-2022 13:04:20 LIBERAL MODERNITY AND COLONIAL DOMINATION 213 Mill’s claims about competence and the shortcomings they reveal in this democratic theory are also connected to his defence of colonialism. As he sees it, both the working class and colonized peoples are incapable of self-government due to their supposed incapacities and are thus relegated to political subjection until deemed to have acquired sufficient ‘maturity’. While domestically, Mill championed working-class education, internationally, the argument about competence rationalized colonial powers’ indefinite deferral of Indian self-determination. Mill’s democratic theory does not, then, advocate the absolute sovereignty of the masses but rather aims to strike a balance between competing social blocs, forces, and principles—the working and employing classes, participation and competence, equality and experience. It aims to maximize the benefits of popular sovereignty while limiting its possible excesses. More generally, it operationalizes Mill’s belief that progress depends on the antagonism between divergent social powers and that societies lacking such a tension sink into immobility. This notion of progress also underlies his conviction that such ‘stagnant’ societies—invariably non-European, such as China and India—require the strong arm of European imperialism to get back on the civilizational track. We now turn to just this topic. 12.3 Government and democracy: Key Points ● Rather than advocating a single form of government, Mill argues that governments should be fitted to a people’s social, cultural, and historical circumstances. ● For ‘civilized’ Europeans, Mill supports representative government and working-class enfranchisement, emphasizing the advantages of democracy in defending working-class interests and promoting capacities for self-government and self-development. ● Like Alexis de Tocqueville, Mill worries about what he views as the dangers of democracy, including the ‘tyranny of the majority’. ● While supporting the education of the working class, Mill also proposes a weighted voted system giving greater power to the better educated. ● Mill sees many non-Europeans as incapable of self-government and as best governed through European despotism. 12.4 Race, gender, empire 12.4.1 Race In an era when biological racism was commonplace, Mill swam against the tide. To be sure, he employs racist stereotypes in the frequent and troubling aspersions he casts upon variously ‘uncivilized’, ‘barbaric’, and ‘savage’ peoples. However, Mill emphatically opposes biological racism, actively—and publicly—declaiming against it. He also draws clear links between the oppression of non-white races and women: both take as natural an inequality grounded in social conventions. In criticizing the presumption of women’s inferiority, Mill asks: Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? . . . Did [Southern slaveholders] not call heaven and earth to witness that the dominion of the white man over the black is natural, that the black race is by nature incapable of freedom, and marked out for slavery? (Mill, 1984a: 269) RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 213 13-12-2022 13:04:20 214 JOHN STUART MILL Slavery and women’s subordination, Mill argues, trade in the same fallacy and are both as unjust as they are regressive. He registers their parallels, recognizing that ‘[w]hat, in unenlightened societies, colour, race, religion . . . are to some men, sex is to all women; a peremptory exclusion from almost all honourable occupations’ (ibid.: 340). Mill most famously opposes racial essentialism in ‘The Negro Question’ (1850), an essay that strenuously contests Thomas Carlyle’s endorsement of biological racism and slavery in ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (1849). Against Carlyle’s claim that West Indians should be ‘emancipated’ from their own indolence through white domination, Mill (1984a: 93) charges Carlyle with ‘the vulgar error of imputing every difference which he finds among human beings to an original difference of nature’. Mill (1974: 859) cuts to the root of the problem: beyond their evident prejudices, biological racists fail to attribute ‘mental differences to the outward causes by which they are for the most part produced, and on the removal of which they would cease to exist’. Cognitive capacities are shaped by environment and education, and Mill (ibid.: 859) lambasts dogmatists treating such differences as ‘ultimate facts, incapable of being explained or altered’ rather than as remediable by more just institutions. These convictions shape Mill’s politics. He was a committed abolitionist, supporting the Union in the American Civil War, which he saw as ‘a war of principle for the complete extirpation of that curse [slavery]’ (Mill, 1986: 1204–1205). As a Member of Parliament, he also chaired a committee seeking to bring Edward John Eyre, governor of Jamaica, to trial for using brutal and excessive force to put down a native rebellion. The attempt was ultimately unsuccessful but Mill was, here, prescient. Eyre’s British supporters were ‘the same kind of people who had so long upheld negro slavery’ (Mill, 1981: 282) and their views, he correctly saw, would sink into obsolescence. 12.4.2 Gender Mill’s views on gender are justly recognized as ahead of their time. His firm belief in women’s equal rights, his advocacy for women’s suffrage, his consciousness of the multiple levels of women’s subordination, and his fierce criticisms of patriarchal rights and institutions contribute to his deserved reputation as an early feminist. Mill’s feminism shaped his thought as much as his personal life. From a biographical standpoint, he regarded Harriet Taylor Mill, with whom he shared a decades-long intellectual partnership and, ultimately, a marriage, as an intellectual equal. He publicly recognized her part in developing his most celebrated ideas—On Liberty’s dedication is ‘[t]o the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings’. ‘Like all that I have written for many years,’ Mill (1977a: 217) acknowledges, ‘it belongs as much to her as to me.’ While Mill himself ascribed to Taylor Mill an equal share in his intellectual endeavours, her subsequent reception has been decidedly more ambivalent. Early commentators treated Mill’s effusive praise of Taylor Mill as an embarrassing flattery. Some took his assessment of Taylor Mill’s capacities as embellished, others depicted her as having had little sway over his thought, and others still regarded her as corrupting his liberalism and dragging him towards socialism. Key Thinker: Harriet Taylor Mill Harriet Taylor (1807–1858)—Harriet Taylor Mill as of 1851—was a British philosopher and an interlocutor of Mill’s for nearly 30 years. Following her first husband’s death, she and Mill married and remained so until her passing in 1858. Mill saw Taylor Mill as an intellectual equal and partner, crediting her in his autobiography with playing a major role in developing the ideas of On Liberty, Principles of Political Economy, and On the Subjection of Women, and in newspaper articles published throughout the 1840s RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 214 13-12-2022 13:04:20 LIBERAL MODERNITY AND COLONIAL DOMINATION 215 and 1850s (he did not, however, list her as co-author on any of them). Taylor Mill’s interests were chiefly in social and political philosophy, where she addressed socialism, women’s rights, legal reform, individual liberty, and more. The precise extent of her influence over Mill has long been a matter of controversy. More recent scholarship has sought to understand better their entanglements, raising important questions about how we measure contributions to the intellectual labour of canonical thinkers (McCabe, 2017; Philips, 2018). Though Mill ‘held the pen’ (Mill, 1981: 252), there is no doubt that Taylor Mill was the interlocutor with whom his thoughts developed. They held similar views on marriage, the family, women’s education, and a wide range of subjects touching on gender and justice, all of which they discussed closely. Their shared affinities stretched well beyond women’s rights. A note of Taylor Mill’s from 1831–1832 reads ‘[e]very human being has a right to all personal freedom which does not interfere with the happiness of some other’ (cited in McCabe, 2017: 117), prefiguring On Liberty’s central argument by nearly 30 years. They converged on such topics as resisting custom and public opinion, education’s centrality to democratic citizenship, and the need to improve working-class conditions. Mill’s feminist commitments are spelled out in On the Subjection of Women, which holds that ‘the legal subordination of one sex to the other . . . is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement . . . it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality’ (Mill, 1984c: 261). Reflecting the utilitarian standard against which he gauges all social policies, Mill makes the case for the individual and societal advantages of women’s accession to complete civil and legal equality. The essay confronts two stances defending women’s inequality: first, that their ‘natural’ subordination to men is beneficial to women themselves (an individual good); and second, that society benefits from confining women to those occupations for which they’re best fitted (a social good). Mill raises moral, practical, and historical objections against both propositions. The first is that we don’t actually know what women’s nature is. ‘What is now called the nature of women,’ he maintains, ‘is an eminently artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others’ (ibid.: 276). Women’s purportedly inborn qualities are instilled by social institutions that have from time immemorial cemented their subjection and then rationalized it by appealing to those very qualities. Their near-universal subordination is a form of social inertia, little more than ‘the primitive state of slavery lasting on’ (ibid.: 264). Given men’s unbridled power over women in the private sphere, this domination is also totalizing, in contradiction of all considerations of right and justice. Against this, Mill applies On Liberty’s argument to women’s circumstances: if we accept that individuals are best judges of their own good, then we must reject a social condition in which ‘to be born a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person’s position through all life’ (ibid.: 274). While Mill criticizes many social and political institutions sustaining women’s inequality, two are especially pernicious. The first is marriage, through which ‘the wife is the actual bondservant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves’ (ibid.: 284). He points to the deep asymmetry of the marriage relation: women have no rights or control over property, finances, or children; they are subject to domestic violence against which they have no recourse; they have no legal advantages over their husbands, to whose absolute and arbitrary authority they are subject and from which, barring exceptional circumstances, they are powerless to free themselves. Under such conditions, Mill maintains, marriage is akin to a contract of slavery, one-sided to the point of invalidity by any passable moral measure. The solution lies in ‘[t]he equality of married persons before the law’, ‘the sole mode in which that particular relation can be made consistent with justice’ (ibid.: 293). As elsewhere, Mill here conjoins principled argument and sociological observation. RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 215 13-12-2022 13:04:20 216 JOHN STUART MILL Where inequality renders marriage and family despotic, based on relations of command and obedience unacceptable in other spheres of social life, marital equality would be aligned with modern moral sentiments and make it a ‘school of moral cultivation’ (ibid.: 293). The second social institution that Mill criticizes is property. Rejecting the automatic legal transfer of women’s property to their husbands through marriage, he proposes that ‘whatever would be the husband’s or wife’s if they were not married, should not be under their exclusive control during marriage’ (ibid.: 297). Control over one’s material existence, he sees, is a pre-condition for autonomy. Few social institutions maintain women’s subordination more firmly than a marital contract ensuring women’s economic dependency on their husbands. Mill then addresses the social question: whether society benefits from excluding half the human race from the greater number of lucrative occupations and from almost all high social functions; ordaining from their birth either that they are not, and cannot by any possibility become, fit for employments which are legally open to the stupidest and basest of the other sex. (ibid.: 299) The social benefits argument, he observes, works on the presumption that no women are suited to certain employments, such that the most capable women would do a worse job than the dullest of men. The contention is plainly ludicrous. Despite systemic disadvantages, women persistently demonstrated their excellence in the highest posts of the highest offices, Queen Victoria—Britain’s ruling monarch for most of Mill’s life—being only the most obvious example. Women’s peremptory exclusion from a wide range of social and political positions creates at least two problems. First is the straightforward injustice of banning half the species from even competing for certain positions. Second is the loss to humanity of an inestimably deep well of resources. Women’s accession to all occupations would double the pool of doctors, engineers, scientists, professors, advocates, politicians, and so on, benefiting the overall social good. Women should, then, have the right to compete for the opportunities presented to men. Mill argues that this should begin with suffrage, the starting point of widespread social reform aiming at women’s total equality. 12.4.3 Empire Recent years have witnessed an important development in the scholarship on Mill, part of a wider ‘turn to empire’ in political theory excavating the imperial and colonial foundations of modern Western political thought. This has not only altered our view of certain canonical figures, but of modern political theory’s conceptual landscape, showing how the categories constructing our political world are enmeshed with imperialism. Ideas such as right, liberty, the social contract, and property are neither natural, neutral, nor universal, but rather reflect the preoccupations of EuroAmericans engaged in projects of empire. Against the fiction that our political ideas emerged from discussions between and about Europeans, the turn to empire has illuminated the outward-looking face of modern political thought. With the possible exception of John Locke (see more on Locke in Chapter 7), no figure better exemplifies those embroilments than Mill. He has come to be regarded as a paradigmatic liberal imperialist, synthesizing a defence of liberty domestically with commitments to empire abroad. Mill is related to empire in three ways. The first is biographical. Mill was drafted into the East India Company (which ruled colonial India) by his father at the age of 17, in 1823, and occupied a high-ranking post until its dissolution in 1858. RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 216 13-12-2022 13:04:20 LIBERAL MODERNITY AND COLONIAL DOMINATION 217 His father was a chief administrator of the Company from 1819 until his death in 1836. This was the only real employment of J.S. Mill’s life and while he dismissed it as little more than a day job, his views on the benefits of civilizing imperialism pervade his philosophical writings. His conviction that non-Europeans should be elevated by despotic rule was undoubtedly shaped by his decades in an administration enacting it over hundreds of millions. Just as he was a pivotal figure in nineteenthcentury liberal reformism, so too was he a pivotal figure in the East India Company during the same period. The second is conceptual. Mill treats Euro-Americans as at the apex of human civilization and non-Europeans as further down the developmental ladder. This civilizational scale structures his view of historical advancement, rationalizing British imperialism as the only way to pull retrograde societies forward, for their own good. This is no appendage to Mill’s political philosophy, but rather goes to its core. He stipulates that the liberty principle ‘is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties’, such that ‘we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage’. ‘Despotism,’ he concludes, ‘is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement’ (Mill, 1977a: 224). The linchpin of Mill’s liberalism is thus qualified by a developmentalism that excludes the majority of the world’s populations. His democratic theory is also touched by this understanding of social progress. In Considerations, he suggests that ‘it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in another: and when it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race, the absorption is greatly to its advantage’ (Mill, 1977b: 549). Mill’s commitments to liberty and democracy, both pivotal to his liberalism, are inflected by his imperialism: their goods are limited to those civilizations he deemed sufficiently advanced. Both, also, contribute directly to his defence of colonialism. Finally, there is the problem of Eurocentrism, Mill’s unquestioning faith in Euro-American civilization’s superiority over ‘backward’ peoples. That he was culturally myopic is unsurprising, but no less problematic is his readiness to depict non-European societies as frozen in time, relics of Europe’s own past. Mill (1977c: 120) describes ‘the uncivilized’ as ‘wandering or thinly scattered over a vast tract of country’, having ‘no commerce, no manufactures, no agriculture’, ‘little or no law, or administration of justice’, and as incapable of ‘systematic employment of the collective strength of society’. ‘The savage,’ he argues, ‘cannot bear to sacrifice, for any purpose, the satisfaction of his individual will. His social cannot even temporarily prevail over his selfish feelings, nor his impulses bend to his calculations’ (ibid.: 122). Given that ‘[t]heir minds are not capable of so great an effort, nor their will sufficiently under the influence of distant motives’, Mill (1984b: 118) excludes such peoples from the rules of international exchange governing free states. His Eurocentrism thus shapes his assessment of non-Europeans’ incapacities, justifying their political domination. ‘To suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians,’ Mill reflects, ‘is a grave error’ (ibid.: 119). These problems have led to an important revision of Mill’s ethical and political thought. While his defences of liberty and self-government undoubtedly remain compelling, they also served to deny those goods to ‘unfit’ populations. Mill can no longer simply be regarded as the fountainhead of liberalism, or as advancing politically neutral notions of liberty and democracy; he is also a theorist of empire, and these facets of his thought are imbricated. The scholarship is divided in its response to this revised Mill. Some commentators take Mill’s views of the uncivilized as regrettable but philosophically inconsequential, the marks of his era’s prejudices; others take the civilizational hierarchies qualifying his liberalism as impugning it entirely. RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 217 13-12-2022 13:04:20 218 JOHN STUART MILL 12.4 Race, gender, empire: Key Points ● Mill was an early feminist who supported women’s rights, including suffrage, and denounced genderbased inequalities in marriage and property rights. ● While Mill opposes biological racism and endorses the abolition of slavery, he simultaneously portrays many non-Europeans as ‘backward’, ‘barbaric’, or otherwise ‘uncivilized’. ● Mill’s belief in the superiority of Euro-American civilization shapes his defence of imperialism, which he also helped carry out as an employee of the East India Company. 12.5 Conclusion Mill was a great champion of liberty, self-government, working-class suffrage, and women’s equality, and his political philosophy remains a bedrock of liberal political thought. His imperialism, however, cannot be extricated from his political philosophy. What this means for his liberalism, or for liberalism more generally, remains an open question. But to read Mill’s defences of liberty, democracy, freedom, progress, and self-government in isolation from the imperialist context within which he conceptualized them is to read them incompletely. This does not mean that we should throw them out, whatever that might entail. But it does mean that that any full understanding of Mill’s moral and political philosophy cannot afford to disregard its imperialist features. This is all the more so in a world increasingly coming to terms with empire’s long shadow and catastrophic global impacts, past and present. Mill’s legacy is, in this sense, the legacy of liberalism itself, caught in the tension between universalist aspirations to equality, freedom, and self-determination and the persistent limitation of those goods to Euro-American populations alone. Take your learning further by accessing the online resources for a library of web links to relevant videos, articles, blogs, and useful websites for this chapter: www.oup.com/he/RamgotraChoat1e. Study questions 1. How does the utilitarian ethical standpoint differ from deontology and virtue ethics? 2. What, according to Mill, is the liberty principle? 3. Should harmful speech be limited by the state, or should all forms of speech/expression be permitted? 4. How do Mill’s commitments to liberty and utility relate to his defence of colonialism? 5. Are Mill’s political ideas undermined or contradicted by his work as an imperialist? 6. Do Mill’s feminist arguments still hold today, in contexts where women have formally equal marriage and voting rights? 7. What are some of the limitations of Mill’s democratic theory? 8. Do contemporary democracies remain subject to the ‘tyranny of the majority’? RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 218 13-12-2022 13:04:20 LIBERAL MODERNITY AND COLONIAL DOMINATION 219 Further reading Primary sources Mill, J.S. (2015) On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays. Ed. M. Philp and F. Rosen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This collection draws together Mill’s four best-known political essays. Secondary sources Capaldi, N. (2012) John Stuart Mill: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A lucid intellectual biography that traces shifts in Mill’s views across distinctive periods of his life. Donner, W. (1991) The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Argues that Mill’s liberalism revolves around the formation and development of moral character. Kinzer, B., Robson, A., and Robson, J. (1992) A Moralist in and out of Parliament: John Stuart Mill at Westminster, 1865–1868. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Examines Mill’s political career as a Member of the British Parliament. Mehta, U.S. (1999) Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Analyzes Mill’s ‘liberal imperialism’, arguing that the impulse to dominate non-Europeans is embedded in his liberalism. Miller, D. (2010) J. S. Mill. Cambridge: Polity Press. An excellent introduction to Mill’s social and moral thought. Pitts, J. (2005) A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Argues that nineteenth-century British liberalism—including Mill’s—became increasingly imperialistic, in contrast to eighteenth-century liberalisms generally opposed to European colonialism. Thompson, D.E. (1979) John Stuart Mill and Representative Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Argues that Mill’s notion of representative government balances principles of political participation and civic competence. Urbinati, N. (2002) Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Demonstrates that Mill’s democratic theory incorporates features of ancient Athenian political life. Zastoupil, L. (1994) John Stuart Mill and India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Treats the interrelation of Mill’s professional work at the East India Company and his political philosophy. References Berlin, I. (2015) ‘John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life’. In J. Gray and G.W. Smith (eds), Mill’s On Liberty in Focus. London: Routledge. Donner, W. (2017) ‘Mill on Individuality’. In C. Macleod and D.E. Miller (eds), A Companion to Mill. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Donner, W. (1991) The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. McCabe, H. (2017) ‘Harriet Taylor Mill’. In C. Macleod and D.E. Miller (eds), A Companion to Mill. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 219 13-12-2022 13:04:20 220 JOHN STUART MILL Mehta, U.S. (1999) Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Equality, Law, and Education (Subjection of Women). Ed. J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mill, J.S. (1969) ‘Utilitarianism’. In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. X: Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society (Utilitarianism). Ed. J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mill, J.S. (1984b) ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’. In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XXI: Essays on Equality, Law, and Education (Subjection of Women). Ed. J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mill, J.S. (1974) ‘A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation’. In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. VIII: A System of Logic Part II. Ed. J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/ London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mill, J.S. (1984c) ‘On the Subjection of Women’. In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XXI: Essays on Equality, Law, and Education (Subjection of Women). Ed. J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mill, J.S. (1977a) ‘On Liberty’. In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XVIII: Essays on Politics and Society Part 1 (On Liberty). Ed. J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mill, J.S. (1977b) ‘Considerations on Representative Government. In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XIX: Essays on Politics and Society Part II’. Ed. J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mill, J.S. (1977c) ‘Civilization’. In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XVIII: Essays on Politics and Society Part I (On Liberty). Ed. J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mill, J.S. (1981) ‘Autobiography’. In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. I: Autobiography and Literary Essays. Ed. J.M. Robson and J. Stillinger. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mill, J.S. (1984a) ‘The Negro Question’. In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XXI: Essays on RamgotraandChoat_9780198847397_12.indd 220 Mill, J.S. (1986) ‘“The Civil War in the United States”, Our Daily Fare, 21 June, 1864’. In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XXV: Newspaper Writings Part IV. Ed. A.P. Robson and J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mill, J.S. (1988) ‘Representation of the People, 13 April 1866’. In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. XXVIII: Public and Parliamentary Speeches Part I. Ed. B.L. Kinzer and J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Parekh, B. (1994) ‘Decolonizing Liberalism: A Critique of Locke and Mill’. In A. Shtromas (ed.), The End of ‘Isms’? Reflections on the Fate of Ideological Politics after Communism’s Collapse. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 85–103. Philips, M. (2018) ‘The “Beloved and Deplored” Memory of Harriet Taylor Mill: Rethinking Gender and Intellectual Labor in the Canon’. Hypatia, 33(4): 626–642. Tocqueville, A. de (2003 [1835, 1840]) ‘Democracy in America’, 2 vols. In G.E. Bevan (trans.), Democracy in America and Two Essays on America. New York: Penguin Classics, pp. 1–863. 13-12-2022 13:04:20