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MILL AND PATERNALISM
Many discussions of J. S. Mill’s concept of liberty focus too narrowly

on On Liberty and fail to acknowledge that Mill’s treatment of related
issues elsewhere may modify its leading doctrines. Mill and Paternal-
ism demonstrates how a contextual reading suggests that in Principles
of Political Economy, and also his writings on Ireland, India and on
domestic issues like land reform, Mill proposed a substantially more
interventionist account of the state than On Liberty seems to imply.
This helps to explain his sympathies for socialism after 1848, as well
as his Malthusianism and feminism, which, in conjunction with Har-
riet Taylor’s views, are central to his later discussions of the family
and marriage. Feminism, indeed, is shown to provide the answer to
the problem which most agitated Mill, overpopulation. Thus Gregory
Claeys sheds new lights on many of Mill’s overarching preoccupations,
including the theory of liberty at the heart of On Liberty.
g r e g o r y cl a e y s is Professor of the History of Political Thought

at Royal Holloway, University of London. His previous publications
include Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (2010)
and Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Social-
ism (1989). He has also edited The Cambridge History of Nineteenth
Century Political Thought (2011), with Gareth Stedman Jones, and The
Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (2010).
MI L L AND PAT ER NALISM
G R E G O RY CL AEY S
Royal Holloway, University of London
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C Gregory Claeys 2013
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Claeys, Gregory.
Mill and paternalism / Gregory Claeys, Royal Holloway, University of London.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-521-76108-6
1. Mill, John Stuart, 1806–1873. 2. Paternalism. I. Title.
b1607.c53 2013
192 – dc23 2012032868
isbn 978-0-521-76108-6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
To the staff of Ward A9 of the Hammersmith Hospital, London,
from surgeon to cleaner, Albanian to Zimbabwean, for
their tender mercies, with heartfelt gratitude.
Secondly, to twenty years of students in Royal Holloway’s
‘Victorian Social and Political Thought’ course, who first heard
and probed many of this book’s arguments, and
inspired me to push them further.
And finally, to M.T.L., epitome of feline excellence, RIP.
Contents
Acknowledgements page ix
Introduction: Mill, liberty and paternalism:

context, intention and interpretation 1
Mill, liberty and paternalism 1
Negative liberty and ideal character 1
The value, rights and duties of interference: the role of On Liberty 8
Models of authority: Bentham, Malthus, Carlyle,
the Saint-Simonians and Comte 16
Evidence of authority: ‘henpecked’ restated 34
Self-dependence: the critique of blind paternalism 42
Conclusion 59
1 Intervention, progress and the state –
domestic and foreign 61
Mill and domestic reform 61
The scope of government 61
Taxation and inheritance 70
Poor relief 76
Franchise regulations 79
Education 83
Miscellaneous issues respecting state intervention 88
Foreign intervention: India and Ireland 93
India: ‘parental despotism’ 99
Ireland and land reform 108
Conclusion 118
2 Mill, socialism and collective autonomy 123
Owenism and Saint-Simonism: from the mid 1820s to
c. 1840 128
From ‘Coleridge’ (1840) to ‘The Claims of Labour’ (1845) 134
1848 139
Land, cooperation and the ‘Chapters on Socialism’, 1852–73 153
vii
viii Contents
The ‘Chapters on Socialism’ and the limits of Mill’s socialism 162
Conclusion: red in context? 166
3 Rethinking On Liberty: superstition, expediency
and family values 173
Introduction: the ‘strongest case’ 173
Superstition and family values 180
Mill’s Malthusian reputation 205
Conclusion 209
Conclusion: the aims of positive paternalism:
equal association and radical meritocracy 211
The argument restated 211
Mill and paternalism 219
Bibliography 226
Index 249
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the staff of the London Library; the Inter-Library Loan

department at Royal Holloway; the British Library; the Cambridge Univer-
sity Library; the Hull History Centre, University of Hull; the International
Institute of Social History, Amsterdam; the Library, Somerville College,
Oxford; and the Archives, the London School of Economics. At Cam-
bridge University Press I have benefitted from the guidance of Richard
Fisher, as ever, and of Liz Friend-Smith. To Michael Levin I owe a special
debt for his attentive reading of an earlier draft of the book. For references
and miscellaneous advice I would also like to thank Jocelyn Betts, Annabel
Brett, Thomas C. Jones, Philip Schofield, Florian Schui, Quentin Skinner,
Georgios Varouxakis and Donald Winch.
An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘Justice, Independence and
Industrial Democracy: the Development of John Stuart Mill’s Views on
Socialism’, Journal of Politics, 49 (1987), 122–147. Chapter 3 was first pre-
sented at the Bicentenary Conference on John Stuart Mill held at University
College London in 2006.
ix
Introduction
Mill, liberty and paternalism:
context, intention and interpretation
mill, liberty and paternalism
Negative liberty and ideal character

John Stuart Mill is chiefly famous today as the philosopher of liberty.
His best-known work, On Liberty (1859), vigorously defends individual
freedom, and powerfully condemns undue interference with it, even where
the good as well as the happiness of individuals might be enhanced thereby.
Seemingly radical to the core, the text preaches much greater toleration than
many have found tolerable. Heretical at every turn, it appears to demand
that conformity, the restraint of custom and suffocating conventionality be
jettisoned in favour of ‘experiments in living’ which promote diversity of
character. The overzealous enforcement of Christian morals in particular
seems to have been supplanted by a secular utilitarian ethics.1 By contrast,
‘paternalism’, being treated like a child, particularly by a ‘nanny-state’ or
‘big government’, seems to be described as draining, vampire-like, our
moral essence as mature human beings, dooming us to become prisoners
in our own society and to march like automatons to the trumpet-blast
of faceless bureaucrats. Hence Mill’s great work is often referred to as the
‘classic critique of paternalism’,2 and its author as ‘the greatest critic of
paternalism’ of our times,3 with ‘anti-paternalism’ being ‘the essence’ of his
liberty principle.4
A ‘libertarian’ reading of Mill which portrays On Liberty as chiefly
devoted to ‘negative liberty’, or the absence of constraints on pursuing
1 This was the thrust of the objection of Mill’s great Victorian critic, James Fitzjames Stephen, whose
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873) stated that the ‘true centre . . . of Mr. Mill’s book upon liberty’ was
simply the question, ‘Is there or not a God and a future state?’ (p. 74). Elsewhere, however, Stephen
indicated that he thought Mill believed that ‘if all men are freed from restraints and put . . . on an
equal footing, they will naturally treat each other as brothers’, whereas his own view was that many
men were bad, and that enmity and strife were inevitable (p. 264).
2 LaSelva, ‘Selling Oneself into Slavery’, 211. 3 Kateb, Human Dignity, p. 99.
4 O’Rourke, ‘Mill and the Freedom of Expression’, p. 224.
1
2 Mill and Paternalism
one’s chosen ends, can indeed be constructed upon these assumptions.5
Mill did define liberty as ‘doing what one desires’.6 He appears, Crusoe-
like, to have ‘crowned the individual as monarch of his own realm’ in
insisting that ‘neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted
in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do
with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it’.7 ‘The only
freedom which deserves the name’, he insisted, was ‘that of pursuing our
own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others
of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.’ Each person was ‘the proper
guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual’, for
all were ‘greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to
themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest’. Mill
refused to countenance the possibility, taking the instance of the Mormons,
that any modern community, within itself, had a right to ‘force another to
be civilized’.8 On Liberty promoted Josiah Warren’s arresting phrase, the
‘sovereignty of the individual’. Elsewhere Mill spoke of an inviolable ‘circle’
of liberty around each person. Contemporaries did indeed consequently
sometimes view his principle of liberty as ‘absolute’.9 And, from H. T.
Buckle and David Ritchie to Isaiah Berlin, Mill’s conception of liberty
has thus often been associated with a concept of ‘negative’ liberty, the
freedom to pursue our own idea of the good life, so long as we allow others
to pursue theirs.10 These seem to be arguments, then, for seeing placing
‘autonomy’, in the sense of freedom from the interference of others, as the
highest intrinsically valuable good, rather than as a means of realising other
5 Also construed as a ‘negative opportunity’ concept as opposed to a ‘positive exercise’ concept,

though historically the two may often have coexisted quite happily. See Quentin Skinner’s dis-
cussion of this definition in ‘The Idea of Negative Liberty’, pp. 193–224. The term ‘libertarian’
of course can mean different things; some use it to describe those who are strong supporters of
liberty, others, strong advocates of extreme, particularly anti-statist, forms of liberty – quite a dif-
ferent proposition. Hamburger uses it in the former sense to describe both Mill and Tocqueville
(‘Mill and Tocqueville on Liberty’, pp. 115–20), and also sees Mill as championing a ‘libertarian
utopia’ (p. 120). Gray also positions Mill here (‘John Stuart Mill and the Future of Liberalism’,
p. 140).
6 The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (hereafter ‘CW’), vol. 18, p. 294. (All citations here from
this edition have removed the textual variants noted there.)
7 August, John Stuart Mill, p. 147; CW 18, p. 277. 8 CW 18, pp. 226, 291.
9 E.g. Harrison, Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill and Other Literary Estimates, p. 274.
10 Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, pp. 121–39, 181–206. For support, see, e.g., Stegenga, ‘Mill’s Concept
of Liberty and the Principle of Utility’, 281–9. Buckle described Mill’s position as being that ‘we must
vindicate the right of each man to do what he likes, and to say what he thinks, to an extent much
greater than is usually supposed to be either safe or decent’ (1859, reprinted in Liberty: Contemporary
Reponses to John Stuart Mill, p. 58). Ritchie asserted that ‘Mill takes liberty in the merely negative
sense of “being left to oneself”’ (The Principles of State Interference, p. 83).
Introduction: Mill, liberty and paternalism 3
ends.11 In this view autonomy even trumps happiness: Socrates dissatisfied,
in Mill’s most famous statement of the issue in Utilitarianism, was an
autonomous, but possibly unhappy, man, and is to be preferred as an ideal
type to the fool satisfied. For to Mill:
[N]o intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person
would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and
base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal
is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.12
Many acquainted with Mill’s works will, however, query their supposed
devotion to negative liberty. No man so imbued with the love of humanity
and ‘the superior excellence of unselfish benevolence and love of justice’ as
Mill was likely to leave the species to its foibles.13 A leading disciple, John
Morley, denied that his idea of liberty was ‘that the only need of human
character and of social institutions is to be let alone’.14 Mill, we will see,
11 Or at least as ‘essential to well-being’, in Talbott’s terms (Which Rights Should Be Universal?, p. 133).
See also Gray, Mill On Liberty, pp. 54–7, for a defence of applying this concept to describe Mill’s chief
principle. It is often assumed that Mill came ‘very close to assigning a direct and irreducible value
to autonomy in On Liberty’ (Christman, ed., The Inner Citadel, p. 15). See generally Dworkin, The
Theory and Practice of Autonomy and Young, Personal Autonomy, pp. 24–5, which takes Mill to value
autonomy as an end in itself. Though the term itself was not used in this way in English by Mill, he
did describe his system as defending ‘l’autonomie de l’individu’ in a letter of 1871 (CW 17, p. 1832),
which is adequate to the interpretation. See Hamburger’s consequent objections to it, in John Stuart
Mill on Liberty and Control, p. xii. Beyond its association with negative liberty, the concept can
describe a variety of other disparate states, attributes or possibilities. Joel Feinberg’s The Moral
Limits of the Criminal Law (vol. 3), pp. 27–97, sees autonomy as embracing four main meanings:
the capacity to govern oneself; the actual condition of self-government; an ideal of character derived
from these; and the sovereign authority one might possess over one’s own moral boundaries (p. 28).
Richard Arneson analyses these issues in ‘Joel Feinberg and the Justification of Hard Paternalism’.
None of these exactly overlaps, however, with late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century ideas of
‘independence’ based on property ownership and freedom from the mastery of another, which is
chiefly a financial rather than a moral description, or certainly makes rational moral action depend
upon not working for others and hence being under their influence.
12 CW 10, pp. 211–12. But ‘content’, Mill stresses, is not ‘happiness’, and there is always the residual
suspicion that the knowledge that we possess a higher freedom brings another form of happiness to
counterbalance such dissatisfaction: in Utilitarianism Mill explicitly describes the pursuit of virtue
for its own sake as being, at least for some, a pleasure (CW 10, p. 237). But the sacrifice of one’s own
happiness could also be justified if it aimed at promoting that of others. Hence Mill’s statement that
it was ‘noble to be capable of resigning entirely one’s own portion of happiness, or chances of it’ was
followed by the observation that ‘this self-sacrifice must be for some end; it is not its own end; and
if we are told that its end is not happiness, but virtue, which is better than happiness, I ask, would
the sacrifice be made if the hero or martyr did not believe that it would earn for others immunity
from similar sacrifices?’ (CW 10, p. 217). On some problems in Mill’s use of Socrates, and the need
to cater for the happiness of fools too, see Hollis, ‘J.S. Mill’s Political Philosophy of Mind’.
13 CW 1, p. 112.
14 Morley, On Compromise, p. 281. Mill’s method, said Morley, was rather: ‘Persuade; argue; cherish
virtuous example; bring up the young in habits of right opinion and right motive; shape your social
arrangements so as to stimulate the best parts of character.’
believed that societies had to progress towards an optimal goal. Regression
from civilisation to barbarism was not a worry (he was wrong here). But
negative liberty, particularly in democracies, was distinctly unprogressive.
It tended to breed ‘miserable individuality’ or individualism in the alien-
ated, Tocquevillean sense, as well as ‘tyranny of the majority’ over opinion
in particular, and a downward trend in standards of taste to the lowest
common denominator.15 People often lack the requisite skills and infor-
mation to make the best of their lives. They often feel themselves to be
mere putty in the hands of fate. But Mill wanted them to feel that they
possessed a free will, particularly in crafting their own personalities, and
he wanted them to have the means of improving. Owenite fatalism was
paralysing. Circumstances formed character, Mill conceded, but people
‘in their turn, mould and shape the circumstances for themselves and for
those who come after them’.16 Mill’s ideal of character might have per-
mitted, but it was not meant to encourage, the liberty to be stupid, to be
enslaved to the baser passions, or to be satisfied with ‘ape-like’ imitation.17
Only when people mastered their habits and temptations could they pos-
sess ‘moral freedom’, and thus Mill proclaimed that ‘none but a person of
confirmed virtue is completely free’.18 He consequently recognised many
justifiable restrictions upon liberty, particularly as grounded in utility ‘in
the largest sense’, defined as ‘the permanent interests of a man as a progres-
sive being’, an ambiguous phrase we will have to unpack in due course.19
Such progress was towards greater virtue: not perfection, but less brutality,
less domination, less demeaning dependence, and crucially too, as we will
see, more equality. In 1836 Mill used the term ‘neoradicalism’ to express his
preference for virtue over mere material interest. What he now regarded
as the deficiencies of his own education led him to believe that making
people mere reasoning machines was mistaken. He aimed instead to rede-
fine utilitarianism by allowing feelings to be weighed with thought, and
by making poetry a condition of philosophy.20 He became increasingly
15 CW 10, p. 411; Tocqueville, Democracy in America (vol. 2), pp. 90–97.

16 CW 8, p. 913 [1843]. It is in this sense that On Liberty is, notwithstanding Mill’s disclaimer, also
emphatically a book about freedom of the will.
17 See CW 2, p. 367, on the ‘epicurean indifference’ of maximising personal satisfaction even ‘without
injury to any one’.
18 CW 8, p. 841 [1843]. 19 CW 18, p. 224.
20 CW 12, p. 312. This interpretation is pursued in particular by Semmel, John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit
of Virtue. As Robson notes, Mill’s departure here from Bentham and James Mill’s consequentialism,
by estimating the motive of actions as a measurement of the worth of agents, was significant (The
Improvement of Mankind, pp. 143–4). There is also some tension here between Mill’s supposed
conversion to a Romantic ideal of the ‘unique self’ (van Holthoon, The Road to Utopia, p. 7) and
the notion that universal principles of virtuous conduct were to be sought.
concerned with identifying a moral ideal to which most, hopefully, could
subscribe. By 1843 he termed ‘nobleness of will and conduct’ as the end
‘to which the specific pursuit either of their own happiness or of that of
others (except so far as included in that idea) should, in any case of con-
flict, give way’.21 The System of Logic used the idea of the ‘Art of Life’ to
describe how each could choose their life’s plan.22 On Liberty reiterated
that it was really ‘of importance, not only what men do, but also what
manner of men they are that do it’, and described character formation in
terms of an idea of ‘self-cultivation’.23 This solved the crucial problem of
free will versus necessity, by making self-education a conscious pursuit.24
It also allowed Mill to declare that not all individuals were ‘equal in worth
as human beings’ either intellectually or, even more importantly, morally:
with minimal standards of dignity observed, differential treatment might
be merited.25 In Utilitarianism ‘the general cultivation of nobleness of char-
acter’ implied a preference for so-called higher over lower utilities.26 Isaiah
Berlin has argued that Mill was interested in diversity – at least of opinion –
for its own sake.27 But Mill also believed that judgements about the good
life would eventually converge, at least on the definition of basic civility.
This challenges the degree of his commitment to moral pluralism.28
Mill’s enthusiasm for virtue has been the focus of earlier studies.29 Some
have accused Mill of extreme over-exuberance in the cause. Maurice Cowl-
ing, most notably, described Mill as promoting ‘something resembling
moral totalitarianism’ because he wished to ‘moralize all social activity’,
21 CW 8, p. 952. One inference being that ‘nobleness of character’, as described in Utilitarianism, is not
identical to ‘individuality’ or ‘character’ more generally, as formulated in On Liberty, but represents
a more virtuous subset thereof, based not merely on self-government but a duty to others as well.
See, e.g., Clor. ‘Mill and Millians on Liberty and Moral Character’.
22 CW 8, p. 949.
23 CW 18, p. 263. To this degree nobleness of character, not autonomy, as least as construed from the
negative liberty perspective, thus becomes the end to which individuality and self-cultivation are
the means.
24 This in turn was evidently the solution of Mill’s famous ‘mental crisis’, a good part of which was
generated by an obsession with the ‘incubus’ of philosophical necessity (CW 1, pp. 174–5). The
emphasis on cultivating the feelings, especially through poetry, of course, owes more to Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and German sources.
25 CW 19, p. 323.
26 CW 10, pp. 213–14, where Mill adds ‘even if each individual were only benefited by the nobleness
of others, and his own, so far as happiness is concerned, were a sheer deduction from the benefit’;
CW 8, p. 952.
27 Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, pp. 190–1.
28 Gray, for instance, wishes to see Mill as a ‘paradigmatic liberal’ in aiming ‘to defend and occupy a
point of moral neutrality between rival conceptions of the good life’ (Mill On Liberty, p. 119).
29 In particular, Semmel’s John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue, which portrays Mill as ‘distinctly
more conservative than he has generally been depicted’ (p. ix).
and also believed that the number of contested truths would be con-
stantly reduced as society progressed, ending in a utilitarian variation on
the Religion of Humanity, overlooking, perhaps, the fact that liberty was
an essential part of the consensus itself.30 Joseph Hamburger, too, has
seen Mill as having a well-defined moral agenda in which liberty was
only one amongst several principles to be satisfied. For Hamburger we
must read On Liberty ‘in light of Mill’s overarching purpose of bringing
about . . . moral regeneration’. This might conceivably demand substantial
interference with individual freedom, or at least minimally a form of moral
engagement falling short of coercion, in the name of moral order.31 Mill
told friends to seek that freedom alone which resulted ‘from obedience to
Right and Reason’.32 This did not mean that only one narrow ‘end’ was
‘right’, though Mill did come to think one very broad social and economic
end, to be defined later here in terms of both equality and liberty, was. But
‘what one is free for’ was not variety of character as such, it was character
defined from an essentially moral perspective.33 This meant choosing the
right ends, not the right to choose any ends.34 Yet such choice did not
entail the constant sacrifice of one’s own desires. ‘Why is it necessary that
all human life should point but to one object, and be cultivated into a
system of means to a single end?’ Mill queried of Auguste Comte’s system,
wondering whether it might ‘be the fact that mankind, who after all are
made up of single human beings, obtain a greater sum of happiness when
each pursues his own, under the rules and conditions required by the good
of the rest, than when each makes the good of the rest his only object, and
30 Cowling, Mill and Liberalism, pp. xii–xiii, 87–93. This interpretation is assessed in Rees, ‘Was
Mill for Liberty?’, Halliday, ‘Some Recent Interpretations of John Stuart Mill’ and Ten, ‘Mill and
Liberty’. See also Ryan, ‘Mill in a Liberal Landscape’, pp. 531–2 and Wollheim, ‘John Stuart Mill
and Isaiah Berlin’, pp. 253–70. Cowling’s argument hinges on the assertion that when ‘Mill uses
happiness, he means the happiness that rational reflection would approve, not any pleasure a man
happens to pursue. This greatly limits the range of acceptable action’ (p. 32, emphases added). But
Mill’s willingness to tolerate Mormonism would alone seem to weaken this argument fatally: because
we may not approve a form of conduct does not make it ‘unacceptable’. An agreement as to what
constitutes basic civility might also imply great toleration of differences in behaviour. Nor is Mill
nearly so vehement as Cowling suggests about there being only one definition of happiness (p. 32) or
only one ‘disinterestedly utilitarian ethic’ (p. 43), or so insistent that ‘the principle of utility and the
Religion of Humanity alike induce a higher disinterestedness than any that has ever been advocated
by the highest ethical doctrines in the past’ (p. 91).
31 Hamburger, John Stuart Mill On Liberty and Control, p. xi. On the spectrum of possible forms of
non-coercive engagement see my ‘Mill, Moral Suasion, and Coercion’.
32 Fox, Memories of Old Friends (vol. 1), p. 141.
33 Thilly, ‘The Individualism of John Stuart Mill’, 15; Jones, ‘John Stuart Mill as Moralist’.
34 See Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (vol. 3), pp. 32–3, for a discussion of these issues.
Gray distinguishes between autarchy and autonomy to explain some of these differences (Mill On
Liberty, pp. 74–5).
allows himself no personal pleasures not indispensable to the preservation
of his faculties?’ The ‘regimen of a blockaded town should be cheerfully
submitted to when high purposes require it’, Mill thus concluded, but the
‘ideal perfection of human existence’ was not the morality of complete self-
lessness. Some middle ground was more desirable, though as Hamburger
stresses, Mill’s greatest anxiety respected tendencies which made a person ‘a
selfish egotist, devoid of every feeling or care but those which centre in his
own miserable individuality’, which included extravagance and excessive
devotion to the lower pleasures.35 This language, in Utilitarianism, thus
offers an instructive contrast to Mill’s discussion of individuality in On
Liberty. It is clear that Mill sought a happy balance, ethically, between two
extreme positions. We will see here, however, that a focus on moral ends
alone does not exhaust Mill’s model of interference, and indeed may lead
us off course somewhat.36
As Richard Reeves has recently concluded, then, ‘Mill wanted our lives
to be free, but he also wanted them to be good’.37 An ‘equal devotion to the
two cardinal points of Liberty and Duty’ were what he most admired in
his closest early friend, John Sterling.38 Mill’s plea for virtue was intended
to be contrasted sharply to the general drift of identity (de)formation in
modern societies. A concern for the public good was naturally declining.
Commercial peoples would succumb to an ‘essentially mean and slavish’
spirit if this was not counterbalanced politically, in particular, ‘by an exten-
sive participation of the people in the business of government in detail’.39
The trick here initially was to be content with a satisfactory, if high, level
of development once this had been reached. To precipitate modernity,
nations required their industrial spirit to be stimulated. But eventually
Englishmen and Americans needed this spirit to be moderated so ‘more
numerous and better pleasures’ might alleviate the ‘all-engrossing torment
of their industrialism’, even if this reduced their overall output. Those who,
Mill stressed, had ‘no life but in their work’, that alone standing ‘between
them and ennui’, were ‘too deficient in senses to enjoy mere existence in
repose’. Obsessed with ‘the desire of growing richer, and getting on in the
35 CW 10, pp. 337, 216. Cf. Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control, p. 168.
36 Nor are the moral ends focussed on by Hamburger, in particular, and the role of religion played
in their definition, central to the arguments of this book. The lack of an extended discussion of
the scope of legitimate state interference, and of the goals of such activity, such as the promotion
of equality, notably relative to the Principles, also weaken an otherwise illuminating argument
considerably.
37 Reeves, John Stuart Mill. Victorian Firebrand, p. 6. A similar interpretation is proposed in Jones,
Victorian Political Thought, pp. 36–40.
38 CW 1, p. 161. 39 CW 18, p. 169.
world’, they lacked the ‘higher aspirations’ and ‘nobler interests of human-
ity’. They needed thus to be taught both how to use wealth, and even more
how to appreciate ‘the objects of desire which wealth cannot purchase, or
for attaining which it is not required’.40
People and nations, then, might progress adequately to a high stage of
development and civilisation, and then degenerate into a cycle of fren-
zied work, vacuous consumption, and increasing selfishness. Mill clearly
regarded the avoidance of such regression as one of the greater challenges
of later modernity. The ‘most important quality of the human intellect’,
he wrote in 1826, was progressiveness, which involved ‘the questioning of
all established opinions’, the human intellect being ‘only in its right state
when everything that is believed is believed on evidence’.41 The destina-
tion of progress, he had decided by 1843, was not only self-development,
but a higher form of social unity. This was to become central to his later
social theory, though Mill’s account of it would remain, by later stan-
dards, lamentably thin and sometimes apparently contradictory. Hitherto
the strongest propensities had tended ‘to disunite mankind, not to unite
them – to make them rivals, not confederates’. But social existence required
disciplining ‘those more powerful propensities’, and ‘subordinating them
to a common system of opinions’ which would underpin ‘the moral and
political state of the community’.42 The degree of this subordination was
‘the measure of the completeness of the social union’, and ‘the nature of
the common opinions’ determined ‘its kind’. Progress, then, would not
be ‘in talents or strength of mind’ but ‘in feelings and opinions’.43 And
here the leadership of the educated had a vital role to play in ‘the order of
progression in the intellectual convictions of mankind, that is, on the law
of the successive transformations of human opinions’.44 Yet the opinions to
be enjoined had to be broadly the right ones, or we might only substitute
one form of malevolent conformity for another (to a secular mythology,
for example, after shedding a religious one). A tension between liberty and
consensus, and conformity, unity and sociability, thus runs throughout
Mill’s later writings.
The value, rights and duties of interference: the role of On Liberty

The gap between the desirability of considerable negative liberty, the need
for autonomy, the requirement of progressive self-development and the
40 CW 2, pp. 104–5. 41 CW 26, p. 349. 42 CW 8, p. 926 [1843].

43 CW 27, p. 643 [1854]. 44 CW 8, p. 927 [1843].
necessary role played in progress by the intellectual elite left considerable
scope for the ideal usually referred to as ‘positive liberty’, where the freedom
to unfold and extend ourselves can be aided by others.45 Freedom to be
left alone to choose our own ends was valuable. But Mill never believed
that all were equally capable of reaching a satisfactory mental condition
unaided; to the contrary. ‘The uncultivated cannot be competent judges of
cultivation’, he wrote, adding that those ‘who most need to be made wiser
and better, usually desire it least, and, if they desire it, would be incapable
of finding the way to it by their own lights.’46 Such a distinction permits
the possibility that we might also interfere in other areas where desirable
long-term common ends might not result naturally from social progress,
or be adequately understood by many people. In such cases individuals
might themselves not be the best judges even of their own interests, much
less those of later generations.47 But how far might we be entitled to
entice, persuade or cajole others into rising above their baser foolish or
ignorant selves? Might we ‘interfere in people’s lives in order to educate
them into autonomy’, analogous to Rousseau’s famous proclamation that
citizens could be ‘forced to be free’?48 And when might such interference
hinder the attainment of this end? For if liberty, as an aspect of autonomy,
is an important end itself, how can interference with liberty suffice as a
means? Or is it perhaps permissible, even requisite, to interfere in some
types of liberty in order to promote others? Might we, for instance, adjust
property rights in order to promote greater collective autonomy? Mill
had to confront cases where society was harmed as much by the acts of
supposedly mature individuals incapable of making correct choices as the
individuals themselves were. He thus faced the dilemma, which some have
seen as central to his thought,49 as to whether the modern state, like modern
individuals, should act to protect and promote an ideal of virtue, or remain
the tool of narrower sectional or class interests and lesser aspirations.
45 On the problems associated with these definitions, see MacCallum, Jr., ‘Negative and Positive
Freedom’, and Skinner, ‘A Third Concept of Liberty’, esp. pp. 245–7. Skinner has distinguished
between negative liberty as freedom from interference, and a republican conception of liberty in
which the absence of dominion, or not having a master (or broadly, ‘independence’), is central. See
Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism. In mid-Victorian terms, this implies that an individual’s ability
to think and act freely hinged upon their financial independence or lack of servitude.
46 CW 3, p. 948.
47 See McCloskey, ‘Mill’s Liberalism’, for a general outline of this approach. This challenges the view
that Mill consistently upheld the idea that each person was the ‘best judge’ of their own well-being.
Ryan’s riposte to this approach remains useful (‘Mr. McCloskey on Mill’s Liberalism’).
48 As presented by Bird (The Myth of Liberal Individualism, p. 133), who however dissents from this
interpretation.
49 E.g., Semmel, John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue, p. 114.
Such interventions are normally associated with the term ‘paternalism’.
Just how far Mill went down the paternalist road and whether he went
too far, or not far enough, was controversial in his own life, and remains
so today. Few would deny that Mill defended a ‘strong’ account of pater-
nalism in justifying despotic rule over less ‘civilised’ peoples,50 with the
full-blown theory of liberty associated with On Liberty being applicable
only to competent adults in developed societies. But most accounts of the
famous ‘harm’ principle when applied domestically simply treat Mill as an
opponent of ‘paternalism’ as such. They write of Mill’s ‘rejection of pater-
nalism’ or the ‘absolute nature of Mill’s prohibitions against paternalism’.51
They assert that On Liberty aimed to preclude paternalism from being
practised,52 or to deny the legitimacy of paternalist interference, even if
this grated against Mill’s ‘general utilitarian commitments’.53 And Mill has
also been described as rejecting ‘welfare-paternalism’, despite his resolute
support for the Poor Laws.54
Yet some critics have also discerned markedly paternalistic trends in
Mill’s thought. He made the ‘strongest case’, as Alexander Bain termed it,
respecting children’s rights in civilised societies, and of the state’s right to
interfere where parents failed to uphold them. Letwin saw him as moving
towards paternalism in reacting to Benthamism and in commending ‘the
leadership of those who knew better’.55 Himmelfarb has noted Mill’s much
more interventionist strategy in relation to parental duty.56 Hamburger has
accused Mill of being ‘far from . . . libertarian and permissive’, and instead
‘placing quite a few limitations on liberty and many encroachments on
individuality’.57 Other interpreters have seen Mill’s ‘paternalist side’58 as
emerging in the Principles, in the Considerations, and elsewhere. Some have
50 Or at least ‘temporary paternalism’, in Urbinati’s phrase (Mill on Democracy, p. 177).
51 Monro, ‘Utilitarianism and the Individual’, p. 47; Ten, Mill On Liberty, p. 8; Dworkin, ‘Paternalism’.
The single most exhaustive modern study, Hollander’s The Economics of John Stuart Mill, simply
dismisses as ‘untenable’ any charge of paternalism against Mill (vol. 1, p. xvi, vol. 2, pp. 695, 724). The
most wide-ranging study of the principle itself and its implications is Feinberg’s The Moral Limits of
the Criminal Law. See vol. 1, pp. 26–7 for a summary of the exhaustive typology of ‘liberty-limiting
principles’. The best general starting points for the text itself are Ten, Mill On Liberty, pp. 52–97,
Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, pp. 233–56, Skorupski, John Stuart Mill, pp. 337–88, and
Phillips Griffiths, Of Liberty.
52 Bogen and Farrell, ‘Freedom and Happiness in Mill’s Defence of Liberty’, 325.
53 Lively, ‘Paternalism’, pp. 163, 148. Lively assumes that the ‘paternalist principle, if consistently and
extensively applied as a warrant for state intervention, would leave little or no freedom of action
and virtually eliminate all individual responsibility for action’ (p. 147).
54 Semmel, ‘John Stuart Mill’s Coleridgian Neoradicalism’, p. 76.
55 Letwin, The Pursuit of Certainty, p. 306.
56 Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism, pp. 116–20.
57 Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control, p. xi.
58 Hollis’s phrase, in ‘The Social Liberty Game’, p. 33.
found Mill to be ‘in turn a libertarian and a paternalist’.59 Mary Waithe
sees Mill as ‘for paternalism’ when those who were not morally responsible
for wrongful self-harm could be assisted in moving towards greater self-
government or autonomy.60 Thus it has been argued that Mill conceived of
‘autonomy-enhancing’ or ‘deliberation-enhancing’ forms of interference,
whose benefits outweighed any concomitant ‘liberty-limiting’ provisions.61
If autonomy, as John Skorupski has argued, is only one component in well-
being, there is no prima facie case for dismissing ‘paternalist’ attempts to
improve other parts thereof (and this may incidentally have a knock-on
effect on autonomy itself ).62 At the very least this line of argument, as we
will see, vindicates Stefan Collini’s judgement that Mill hardly seems ‘the
voice of the text book stereotype of liberal individualism’.63 This is a much
richer, denser and ultimately irksome argument.
Despite his general reputation as an anti-paternalist, then, there has in
fact been surprisingly little consensus about Mill’s chief aims. Some have
simply thought Mill to be inconsistent and warn us about contriving too
hard to make him systematic. Contemporaries noted his ‘great’ change ‘of
kind and degree together’,64 and wondered whether it reflected well or ill
on him.65 A variety of ‘two Mill’ interpretations have resulted from such
allegations.66 On Liberty, as we have seen, upholds ideals of both negative
liberty and individuality, where intervention might come into play, without
necessarily reconciling the two. In Himmelfarb’s account of ‘Mill contra
Mill’, the Principles seemingly counsels much more state intervention than
59 Kurer, ‘John Stuart Mill on Government Intervention’, p. 458, and generally Kurer, John Stuart
Mill, esp. pp. 109–97.
60 Waithe, ‘Why Mill Was For Paternalism’.
61 Notably in denying the right to sell oneself into slavery. See Brink, ‘Mill’s Liberal Principles and
Freedom of Expression’, p. 56.
62 Skorupski, John Stuart Mill, p. 359. 63 Collini, Public Moralists, p. 71.
64 Martineau, The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau (vol. 4), p. 155.
65 For the extreme case of Mill as an inconsistent thinker defending incompatible principles on
multiple occasions, see Anschutz, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, pp. 31–2. A strong case for
Mill’s consistency, on the other hand, respecting the ‘paramount importance of the right to liberty’,
is presented in Gray, Mill On Liberty, pp. xi–xii et seq.
66 The first hints of this theory are already evident in Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 7. For
one rendition of the ‘two Mill’ hypothesis, see Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism (pp. xvi–xvii,
73–4), which however, strikingly, has no discussion of ‘paternalism’ as such, and Victorian Minds,
pp. 113–54. Gray, ‘Mill and Other Liberalisms’, pp. 119–41, offers another variation on the theme,
as does Gray’s Mill On Liberty, which sees the text as offering a utilitarian defence of liberty as a
moral right over other values. Gray’s Two Faces of Liberalism (p. 29) also portrays Mill as attempting
to reconcile an Enlightenment ‘project of universal civilisation’ which ‘endangered freedom and
diversity’ and produced a constant, unreconciled tension in his thought. For a review of the theory
see Rees, ‘The Thesis of the Two Mills’ and Collini, ‘Liberalism and the Legacy of Mill’, which
effectively demolishes the Himmelfarb variant. See also Gray, ‘John Stuart Mill: Traditional and
Revisionist Interpretations’.
On Liberty.67 Then there is the contrast between On Liberty and Utili-
tarianism. Here Mill’s statements regarding virtue appear much stronger,
and much greater deference seems to be extended to ‘the social feelings of
mankind, the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures’ and the senti-
ment that it is ‘noble to be capable of resigning entirely one’s own portion
of happiness’.68 This to Himmelfarb accordingly represents the ‘other’ Mill
who prioritises morality and a sense of unity, by contrast to proclaiming
liberty and individuality as ‘goods in themselves’ in On Liberty.69 Parts of
the System of Logic, as we have seen, also seem to privilege unity over diver-
sity. Contradictions also appear when we juxtapose Mill’s more ‘socialist’
works, especially where Harriet Taylor’s influence appears (notably in the
third, 1852 edition of the Principles), and his other writings, especially On
Liberty, ‘one long indictment of socialism’, in one critic’s view.70 And the
present study offers, indeed, another variant on this theme.
The many accounts of Mill’s supposed anti-paternalism which take
On Liberty as their sole focus, because only here is the ‘harm principle’
unpacked, thus simply bypass the problems which arise by contextualising
this work.71 In terms of methods of reading, we can term this the fallacy of
the authoritative text: On Liberty is presumed to present Mill’s complete
statement of an issue which may in fact be significantly modified by his
other writings. At the outset students of these themes thus face two key
problems: the relationship between On Liberty and Mill’s other writings;
67 A point forcibly argued by Himmelfarb (On Liberty and Liberalism, pp. 133–5).
68 CW 10, pp. 231, 217.
69 Himmelfarb proclaims particularly strongly that ‘On Liberty did not teach, as Mill had counselled
elsewhere, that egoism should “give way to the well-understood interests of enlarged altruism.” It
did not make an “ideal object” paramount over “all selfish objects of desire.” It did not offer a creed
of “fraternity” in place of the prevailing creed of “self-indulgence.” It represented, in short, . . . a
rejection of all that Mill elsewhere took to be the best in Comte – community, fraternity, and
morality’ (On Liberty and Liberalism, p. 91). Himmelfarb views Mill in Utilitarianism as giving
‘to society a large and positive role in the promotion of liberty’, and in On Liberty as wishing
to ‘withdraw such sanctions as currently existed (apart from those required to prevent injury)’.
In sum, she argues, the ‘primary goods in Utilitarianism were morality and a sense of unity;
the primary goods in On Liberty were liberty and individuality. In Utilitarianism Mill’s purpose
was precisely to overcome the separateness of individuals, to make the “social state” as natural,
habitual, and compelling as the individual, private state was in On Liberty’ (pp. 106–7). Harrison
had earlier asserted that Mill never reconciled the ‘militant Individualism’ of On Liberty with the
‘enthusiastic Altruism’ of Utilitarianism (Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and Other Literary Estimates, pp.
305–6). Ryan has noted that while Mill in On Liberty seems to prefer non-paternalist means, and
in the Considerations espouses paternalism, both texts aim at education and improvement, and
different means are required according to the different domains addressed in both texts (J.S. Mill,
p. 199). Arneson however responds that this does not remove the objection that paternalist means
might well work equally in the circumstances addressed in On Liberty (‘Democracy and Liberty in
Mill’s Theory of Government’, 49–51). See generally Dixon, The Invention of Altruism.
70 Donisthorpe, Individualism, p. 366.
71 Exceptions include Habibi, who takes up the examples of both children and imperialism as excep-
tions to Mill’s hostility to paternalism (John Stuart Mill and the Ethic of Human Growth, pp. 158–216).
and the interpretation of the key doctrines of On Liberty itself. The latter,
first conceived as a short essay in 1854, was described by Mill as an attempt
to confront the problem of social liberty, or the individual’s relation to
society.72 It is not about political liberty (a chief theme in the Considerations)
or economic liberty (addressed in the Principles). It is not therefore a
book about governmental intervention or interference, or ‘paternalism’
in its widest sense, but, centrally, a book about restraining society from
undue interference in individual behaviour which does not harm others.73
The domain of liberty, the self-regarding sphere, is the subject of On
Liberty: government plays a much larger role in the non-self-regarding
sphere.
On its face, then, On Liberty is Mill’s least paternalistic work because
the central issues of paternalism have been outlined elsewhere, and because
here the goal of attaining ‘nobility’ does not require intervention per se, but
voluntarily following a moral and intellectual elite, ‘heroes’, or a pouvoir
spirituel, the ‘highly gifted and instructed One or Few’.74 This argument,
however, must also be treated in light of Mill’s other works. The doctrine
much of On Liberty relies on, that each competent civilised adult can best
judge their own interests, is for instance modified considerably by the
Principles’ introduction of exceptions to this rule, particularly cases where
the consumer was an ‘inadequate judge of the commodity’. (Education,
we will see, was one major such instance.) On Liberty does not take up
such examples in detail: the reader’s acquaintance with the Principles is
tacitly assumed, and there is no prima facie contradiction between the
two accounts.75 Individuals appear more often the best judges of their
own interest in On Liberty because the range of examples is much more
restricted than in the Principles. This represents what Martin Hollis has
termed a ‘shift of approach’, but it does not present a different theory.76 On
Liberty does not trump the Principles, then. It was meant as a supplement
72 Critics have noted its singular failure to address the power of social and economic organisations;
e.g., Spitz, ‘Freedom and Individuality’, p. 215. These are however partly treated by Mill under the
rubric of bureaucracy.
73 Its subject, Mill wrote, was ‘the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion
and control’ (CW 18, p. 223).
74 CW 18, p. 269. Even Morley called On Liberty ‘one of the most aristocratic books ever written’
(Nineteenth-Century Essays, p. 125). Few would today accept such a description; see, e.g., Spitz,
‘Freedom and Individuality’, pp. 185–6, where ‘elitist’ is also rejected as applicable to Mill. But some
do, e.g., Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism, pp. 4–5.
75 As Collini also suggests (‘Liberalism and the Legacy of Mill’, 245). McCloskey argues that the
Principles ‘seriously qualifies the self-regarding, other-regarding formula he himself so often uses’
(‘Mill’s Liberalism’, 151). Hollis fruitfully contrasts the two texts in ‘The Social Liberty Game’,
pp. 31–44, but sees Mill as essentially treating ‘pre-social’ individuals in the Principles, and rational,
free individuals in On Liberty – an odd if intriguing contrast.
76 Hollis, ‘The Social Liberty Game’, p. 39.
to and illustration of ideas already suggested there, particularly in Book
5, Chapter 11, as indeed were the rest of Mill’s major writings, which he
planned with his wife in 1854.77
The privileging of On Liberty has, however, produced a largely unhis-
torical portrait of Mill’s intentions. In the first instance the present book is
concerned with reconstructing the range of Mill’s positions regarding the
scope of governmental activity, showing how they shifted over his life, and
demonstrating how Mill’s approach to liberty was accordingly altered.78
The case presented here views Mill’s commitment to liberty as substan-
tially different from what is often supposed. Mill, we will see, carried
forward two quite disparate strands from Benthamism and other sources,
one tending towards more negative liberty, the other paternalism. The first
of these has been exhaustively studied, while the second has been largely
neglected and/or misunderstood, producing a reading of Mill which is not
faithful to his intentions in several key areas. The most important of these,
respecting the population question, feminism and social equality, are the
chief focus of this book.
The central argument offered here is the following. A close historical and
contextual reading of Mill’s writings suggests that from youth onwards he
envisioned substantial intervention by the state as well as other agencies in
the lives of the poor, the less civilised and those verging on both conditions.
Mill’s account of intervention, we will see, was deeply coloured by three
key factors in particular. The first was his growing sympathy, from the
mid-1840s, with social justice and with strategies designed to secure greater
equality. The second was his Malthusianism, which remained central to his
thought throughout his life – Donald Winch brands him a ‘neo-Malthusian
zealot’79 – though this theme has often either been ignored in accounts of
his ideas or, worse still, regarded as a peculiarly archaic or even pernicious
dogma.80 Both of these ideas would lead Mill to adopt a much more
collectivist strategy respecting autonomy in later life. They would also lead
him to defend a much more stringent theory of familial responsibility
in particular than most of his readers have acknowledged: paternalism,
we will see, commenced for Mill with paternity. Finally, Mill’s feminism
77 See Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, p. 368.
78 One study of Mill which moves in this direction, albeit in a different manner, is Baum, Rereading
Power and Freedom in J.S. Mill.
79 Winch, Riches and Poverty, p. 365. See also Winch, Wealth and Life, pp. 31 ff.
80 The exceptions generally are the historians of economic thought, e.g., Schwartz, who argues that
Mill ‘used the population principle as a master key to open all doors’ (The New Political Economy of
J.S. Mill, p. 47) and Hollander (The Economics of John Stuart Mill, vol. 2, pp. 945–55). Van Holthoon
similarly takes it to be central to Mill’s system (The Road to Utopia, p. 103).
would also become increasingly central to his thought, and wedded to
both the former ideals, though its focus would be both on women as such
and the (much more ignored) issue of the family as the nexus of all social
relationships. Here, we will see, a doctrine approaching what we might call
‘maternalism’ – a specifically female duty to ensure social progress through
the regulation of family size – would emerge by the 1850s to occupy an
increasingly prominent role in Mill’s thought. Respecting each of these
areas, hence, this book is also really about two people: Mill and Harriet
Taylor (Mill),81 whose influence, much debated, loomed so largely over so
much of what he wrote. Mill’s feminism would also be much more closely
wedded to the growing egalitarianism of his later years than has usually
been conceded, because a conception of direct personal equality between
men and women was increasingly linked to a meritocratic ideal and to a
cooperative approach to economic activity. Mill’s conception of the ideal
familial relationship, effectively, came to serve as a model for his conception
of the ideal society.
My account here proceeds in the following manner. This introduction
outlines the basic argument respecting Mill’s lifelong concerns with liberty,
independence and self-development in relation to his growing commit-
ment to equality and social justice, and the means by which the latter
generated an altered view of the former. The book is then divided into
three chapters. The first examines Mill’s view of domestic reforms within
Britain, in light of his theory of state activity. It then outlines his analysis of
the government of both India and Ireland, as instances where British rule
might promote reform. Chapter 2 examines Mill’s controversial sympathy
for some forms of socialism, and argues that he moved from a conception
of individual autonomy to one which was more collective and class-based,
though not necessarily ‘socialist’. Chapter 3 reassesses the central argu-
ments of On Liberty, particularly in light of Mill’s insistence that society
possessed a right to control family size. It argues that interpretations of On
Liberty misunderstand Mill’s intentions insofar as they fail to confront his
Malthusianism. This indeed has a central bearing upon his famous distinc-
tion between actions which are ‘self-’ and ‘social-’ regarding. We will also
see that Mill’s feminism after 1852 led to an important shift respecting the
means by which population was to be controlled.
81 A note on how their names are used here: to term Mill ‘Mill’ and Harriet Taylor ‘Harriet’, though
common, can appear condescending to the latter, and does not indicate the allocation of intellectual
responsibility which is contended for here. ‘Taylor’, reiterated too frequently, however, seems cold
and unduly formal. I have opted to vary between these names where it seems appropriate.
A conclusion draws these disparate threads of argument together in order
to argue that Mill’s eventual conception of society was much more egali-
tarian than his devotion to liberty and individuality seemingly indicates. It
also eventually comprised a sovereignty-enhancing concept of paternalism,
by which we can help others to help themselves (and in turn to help oth-
ers). Mill’s goals eventually included greater equality, mutual ownership of
economic enterprises, feminism and population reduction, a massive task
when treated as a collective project. The ‘utopia’ upon which he eventually
settled aimed to maximise what Mill termed ‘equal association’, and to
create a radical meritocracy which rewarded labour and initiative, while
dramatically restricting all forms of unearned income and wealth. The
resulting portrait of Mill defies easy categorisation: it demonstrates in turn
a harshly paternalist view of the poor, a strongly liberal view of freedom,
individuality and sexual equality, and an extraordinarily radical approach
to social inequality. This combination of disparate elements, less contra-
dictory than might seem apparent, it will be argued, defines the uniqueness
of Mill’s thought.
models of authority: bentham, malthus, carlyle, the

saint-simonians and comte
Mill acknowledged that at various points he might well have veered towards
a distinctly interventionist and paternalist outlook; he has been accused of
flirting with Tory authoritarianism in particular in the early 1830s.82 We
need briefly here to consider how he understood the options available to
him in this respect in order to clarify the course he took. Here four models
of paternal intervention with which Mill was intimately acquainted by
the early 1840s, based upon the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, T. R. Malthus,
Thomas Carlyle, the Saint-Simonians and Auguste Comte, are relevant.
(Coleridge is treated later here.)
Bentham, of course, was Mill’s intellectual grandfather, and in his
view had ‘done more for the world than any man of modern times’.83
Yet Mill’s appraisal of the limitations of Benthamism was crucial to his
own development. This began with an anonymous assessment published
in 1833, a year after Bentham’s death, which focussed upon the prob-
lem of how utilitarianism related to ideas of the public or common
good. Bentham had, Mill stressed, neglected those senses of feeling and
conscience which fed a ‘social interest’. The latter in turn might crucially
82 Chiefly by Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, pp. 132–3. 83 CW 14, p. 78.
provide the psychological basis for social improvement, rather than merely
relying upon ‘self-regarding’ interests (which in the vulgar interpretation
was all that ‘utility’ consisted of ). Bentham’s assumption that any advance
towards public interest had to be predicated on private interest Mill thought
a ‘very serious evil . . . inconsistent with all rational hope of good for the
human species’. ‘Social interests’ like patriotism and disinterested benev-
olence, particularly when driven by ‘the interest of feeling or by that of
conscience’, needed to occupy their proper place.84
In a famous essay of 1836 Mill explored these flaws at length.85 Bentham’s
most valuable idea had been ‘the formation of all human character by
circumstances, through the principle of association, and the consequent
unlimited possibility of improving the moral and intellectual attributes of
mankind by education’.86 But, partly owing to his limited horizons, he
misconceived the goal at which education should aim. Having neglected
feelings like love, admiration and reverence, his philosophy lacked the
capacity to promote ‘genuine benevolence, or sympathy with mankind’
as well as ‘any high enthusiasm for ideal nobleness’. Most importantly,
perhaps, Bentham had ignored ‘the training, by the human being himself,
of his affections and will’. Individuals might pursue ‘spiritual perfection
as an end’ and desire, for its own sake, to model their character upon a
standard of excellence with no other sanction than ‘inward consciousness’.
‘Self-culture’ was conspicuously lacking in Bentham’s system, which never
addressed ‘the spiritual interests of society’.87 Bentham’s own character was
too narrow, Mill thought, to be universalised successfully as embodying a
philosophical principle. The same charge would be later made against him
as well, and as justly.88
What was true for individuals applied equally to peoples. Bentham
lacked any conception of what Mill thought were comparative advan-
tages in various types of national character. Throughout his life Mill grew
84 CW 10, pp. 14–15.
85 He later admitted that he had erred here on the negative side (CW 1, pp. 226–7).
86 CW 1, pp. 108–10.
87 CW 10, pp. 76–7, 98, 95, 99. On the background to this view, see Smith, ‘Freedom and Virtue in
Politics’, 112–34.
88 E.g., by Hart, who describes Mill’s ideal as flawed by presenting ‘too much of the psychology
of a middle-aged man whose desires are relatively fixed, not liable to be artificially stimulated by
external influences; who knows what he wants and what gives him satisfaction or happiness; and
who pursues these things when he can’ (Law, Liberty and Morality, p. 33). It has also been suggested
that Mill’s ‘low degree of sensuality’ led him to underestimate the sexual passions of the majority
when proposing voluntary restraints on population (Mill, The Letters of John Stuart Mill, p. xxiv).
He had in fact generally relatively limited experience of most of the range of what he termed the
‘lower’ pleasures. This has considerable bearing both upon his conception of the ends of self-culture
and his defence of higher over lower pleasures in Utilitarianism.
steadily more critical of what he regarded as the limitations of the English
mentality. He wrote Comte in 1846 that he had been ‘for quite some time
in a kind of open opposition to the English character, which arouses my
animosity in several respects’, noting that ‘all in all, I prefer the French,
German or Italian character’.89 The Autobiography contrasted ‘the frank
sociability and amiability of French personal intercourse’ and ‘the English
mode of existence’, where most treated others as ‘either an enemy or a
bore’, and where general society was merely ‘insipid’ and serious discus-
sion on contentious topics considered ‘ill bred’.90 His focus in this regard
from the mid 1830s was what Mill thought was the propensity of civili-
sations towards intellectual stagnation. Alexis de Tocqueville, more than
anyone else, had identified ‘the real evil to be struggled against . . . Chinese
stagnation & immobility’.91 Tocqueville had also impressed on Mill that
‘the most serious danger to the future prospects of mankind’ lay ‘in the
unbalanced influence of the commercial spirit’.92 ‘Individuality’, in Mill’s
term, would become the chief antidote to this process (in part, curiously
enough, to ‘individualism’). Yet Mill remained torn between two differing
approaches to character. He believed the ‘striving, go-ahead’ character, if
‘a fit subject of disapproving criticism, on account of the very secondary
objects on which it commonly expends its strength’, was ‘the foundation
of the best hopes for the general improvement of mankind’.93 But he came
increasingly to perceive the weaknesses of this as any kind of ultimate ideal,
noting specifically in 1844 that ‘the Norwegian, & German, & French state
of society are much better for the happiness of all concerned than the
struggling, go-ahead English & American state’.94 Britain and America,
he increasingly believed, had become obsessed with sordid money-getting,
materialism and hedonism, possessing and spending.
To Mill Bentham’s political legacy was also ambiguous. Bentham’s Con-
stitutional Code, in particular, described the aim of securing the greatest
happiness of all as resting upon (in descending order of importance) secu-
rity, subsistence, abundance and equality. Security rested upon law more
than liberty. Liberty was not an end as such, but a means to other ends.
A minimal subsistence was to be guaranteed, but abundance would result
largely from free economic activity, though with limitations (a maximum
89 The Correspondence of John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, ed. Oscar A. Haac (hereafter ‘CMC’),
p. 365.
90 CW 1, pp. 61, 234. It also lamented that ‘the English character and English social circumstances
make it so seldom possible to derive happiness from the exercise of the sympathies that it is not
wonderful they should count for very little in an Englishman’s scheme of life’ (CW 1, p. 156).
91 CW 13, p. 434 [1840]. 92 CW 18, p. 198. 93 CW 19, p. 409. 94 CW 12, p. 622.
price on corn, special taxes for bankers, for instance). Equality as such
was far less an aim than it would become for Mill.95 Individuals were
here obviously presumed to pursue their own pleasure and interests above
all others. Equally, however, they were supposed to promote the ‘greatest
happiness of the greatest number’, which was the sole criterion of morally
correct conduct. Legislators were tasked with bridging this gap by offer-
ing rewards and inflicting punishments to minimise collisions of interest.
With some tinkering, economic interests might fuse to produce something
like a public good. But in the wider society, stronger artificial means were
required to achieve the same end.96 A leading question here was the degree
to which individuals could be construed as being the best judges of their
own interests. Bentham thought adults normally were, and termed ‘pupil-
lage’, ‘a state of dependence’, ‘an evil which ought to cease as soon as it is
possible without occasioning a greater evil’.97
Where rational judgment was impossible, however, others might inter-
vene. Bentham was chillingly illiberal in his treatment of the least fortu-
nate. Paupers and criminals were leading candidates for being instructed
in what was good for them, and Bentham wanted the message drilled in
by shock measures, with punishments becoming so unattractive that crime
would virtually disappear. Bentham described his ‘Panopticon’ or ‘Inspec-
tion House’ scheme for a new-style prison as ‘a mill for grinding rogues
honest and idle men industrious’.98 It was framed around the maxim that
‘the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave’, and proposed
exposing prison inmates to maximum supervision (with fourteen hours’
daily work), to attain ‘power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto
without example’.99 Bentham’s parallel plans for a National Charity Com-
pany to manage poor relief would also have forced labour upon as many as
half a million poor (in a population of 12 million in 1811) in some 250 work-
houses, paying at best an average minimum wage, and abolishing ‘outdoor’
relief (that received outside the workhouse). Beggars, prostitutes and others
without visible property or means of livelihood were to be rounded up like
95 Dinwiddy, Bentham. Selected Writings, pp. 91–2.
96 Bentham generally supported the rule that where increasing wealth, subsistence or enjoyment was
concerned, ‘nothing ought to be done or attempted by government’ (Jeremy Bentham’s Economic
Writings (vol. 3), p. 333). But he also approved of substantial public works, some poor relief and free
education.
97 Dinwiddy, Bentham, p. 28; Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham (vol. 1), p. 348.
98 Bentham to J. P. Brissot to Warville, c. 25 November 1791 (The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham,
vol. 4, p. 342).
99 Bahmueller, The National Charity Company, p. 114; The Works of Jeremy Bentham (vol. 4), p. 39.
Idle prisoners were to be fed bread and water, made to wear coats without shirts, and wooden shoes
without stockings and to sleep in sacks to spare the expense of sheets.
cattle, uniformed, confined and constantly scrutinised (even on the toi-
let), in conditions approaching slavery, until someone employed them.100
Such proposals were justified by the somewhat risible assumption that they
would be imposed only with the poor’s consent. Bentham thought some,
indeed, would offer their children to the scheme, though as Bahmueller has
objected, with starvation as the alternative, ‘voluntary’ acquiescence exag-
gerates the agreement reached. Privately, thus, Bentham increasingly saw
the poor as minors rather than mature adults.101 Their liberty, especially ‘to
do mischief ’, could be curtailed as security was increased.
Whether the Panopticon and pauper management schemes were
intended to be paradigmatic for a social ideal based on increasing con-
trol, even a ‘utopia’, has been the subject of some controversy.102 Other
utilitarians, however, would pick up on some of the possible authoritarian
implications of Benthamism.103 Though it was said of James Mill that his
‘creed of politics results less from the love for the many, than from hatred
of the few’,104 he seems to have been unwilling to expropriate the wealth of
the aristocracy too quickly, though he doubtless thought the introduction
of universal (male) suffrage would move in this direction. The elder Mill
certainly never moved in the socialist direction his son would take, and was
more prone to defend inequalities of property as a basis for leisured cul-
ture. He was certainly much more disposed to seeing property rights as an
extension of a right to liberty.105 Yet if James Mill agreed that government
should aim to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number, he
also did not treat liberty as such as its chief end. In promoting laissez-faire
to enable individuals to achieve most of what their happiness required, the
state had a major role to play in dismantling the ancien régime and cre-
ating a new order.106 Representative institutions would prevent the abuse
of power. Amongst other later utilitarians, James Fitzjames Stephen, John
Stuart Mill’s great Victorian critic, preferred the constant intervention of
100 Bahmueller, The National Charity Company, p. 150. The harsher provisions of the Poor Law
Amendment Act of 1834 are sometimes linked to Bentham’s influence, notably through Edwin
Chadwick. These themes are also taken up by Long, Bentham on Liberty. See also Himmelfarb,
Marriage and Morals among the Victorians, pp. 111–43.
101 Hume, Bentham and Bureaucracy, p. 130; Bahmueller, The National Charity Company, pp. 147, 149.
102 See the summary of this debate in Semple, Bentham’s Prison, who draws out their utopian implica-
tions (see pp. 282–308). Bentham called the National Charity Company ‘my utopia’, and envisaged
the Panopticon as an eventual centre of scientific and technical development and experimentation.
103 But subsequent writers have noted that the ‘larger and more efficient state apparatus’ generally
implied by Benthamism did not imply more authoritarianism as such (e.g., Dinwiddy, Bentham,
2004, p. 92).
104 The Works of Jeremy Bentham (vol. 10), p. 450.
105 Fenn, James Mill’s Political Thought, pp. 83–4, 119.
106 Mill, Essays on Government, pp. 4–5, 7–8.
the wise few to prevent the foolish many from ruining themselves, jus-
tifying interference wherever the good achieved overbalanced the pain of
compulsion.107
As Leonard Hobhouse later wrote, then, there were thus ‘possibilities
of a thoroughgoing Socialism or of an authoritarian paternalism in the
Benthamite principle’.108 Virtue, indeed, might be ‘despotically imposed’
either by a majority or an elite.109 To the Philosophic Radicals of the 1830s,
Benthamism offered a reforming outlook which regarded legislation as a
vehicle for social and political change. But, as the late Victorian jurist Albert
Venn Dicey recognised, this produced collectivist as well as individualist
approaches, with the Factory Acts and the more centralised New Poor Law
amongst its products.110 The greatest happiness of the greatest number
might be promoted by a benevolent state and local authorities, or by
leaving individuals free, or some combination of both. Mill worried that
Bentham’s system invited the ‘despotism of Public Opinion’.111 But he
never renounced his understanding, as he put it in 1867, of the ‘enormous
power of politics, that is to say, of legislation to confer happiness and also
to influence the opinion and the moral nature of the governed’.112
A second potentially paternalist strand in Mill’s ideas, inherited from his
father, Francis Place and others, was Malthusianism.113 The famous Essay
on Population (1798) had been widely understood as undermining every
radical proposal to improve working-class standards of living, by claiming
that increases in wages would be invariably offset by population growth. To
radicals like Paine and Cobbett (who detested ‘Parson’ Malthus) a corrupt,
profligate, aristocratic state impoverished the working classes. To Mill a
‘perception of the abuses of existing Governments without a sense of the
107 Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 50. 108 Hobhouse, Liberalism, p. 75.
109 In the words of Schwartz, ‘Jeremy Bentham’s Democratic Despotism’, p. 74.
110 Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion During the Nineteenth Century.
Roberts reassesses the hypothesis in ‘Bentham and the Victorian Administrative State’.
111 CW 10, p. 107. 112 CW 16, p. 1303.
113 Place wrote at greatest length on the issue. See Illustrations, esp. ch. 6, sect. 3. Carlile assumed the
movement to derive from Owen (Every Woman’s Book; or, What is Love?, p. 24). But others thought
that Place had converted Owen to the ‘conjugal prudence’ idea (The Malthusian, no. 15, April 1880,
105), and Place elsewhere insisted that Owen preached the view that the earth could sustain a much
larger population (Illustrations, p. 329). For background see Himes, ‘The Place of John Stuart Mill
and of Robert Owen in the History of English Neo-Malthusianism’, ‘John Stuart Mill’s Attitude
towards Neo-Malthusianism’ and his introduction to 1930 edn of the Illustrations, which claims that
Place was the first to systematise neo-Malthusian ideas (pp. 7, 51–2n20), and Mineka, ‘John Stuart
Mill and Neo-Malthusianism, 1873’, McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England, Dean,
‘Owenism and the Malthusian Population Question, 1815–1835’, Miles, Francis Place, pp. 149–55
and Hollander, The Economics of John Stuart Mill (vol. 2), pp. 968–70. The movement as a whole
is studied in Fryer, The Birth Controllers.
dependence of wages on a limitation of the number of labourers’ had ‘led
many into grievous errors’.114 Though he abandoned the wage-fund the-
ory in 1869, Mill upheld Malthusian principles throughout his life.115 He
described these as having been ‘quite as much a banner, and point of union’
among his early radical associates as Benthamism. But, he added, this ‘doc-
trine, originally brought forward as an argument against the indefinite
improvability of human affairs, we took up with great zeal in the con-
trary sense, as indicating the sole means of realizing that improvability, by
securing full employment at high wages to the whole labouring population
through a voluntary restriction of the increase of their numbers’.116 Malthus
had warned that if the Poor Laws failed to control population an eventual
‘enactment of direct laws against marriage’ might result, and thought that
the law should not permit a situation in which ‘though he marry, with-
out being able to support a family, yet his family shall be supported’. His
ideas implied at least making the Poor Laws relatively punitive rather than
generous; this was the view Mill would hold to, rather than encouraging
their abolition.117 ‘Neo’-Malthusians, unlike Malthus, for whom ‘prudence’
principally meant delaying marriage, and then restraint within marriage,
believed that artificial birth control within marriage might more success-
fully control population. With Bentham’s and James Mill’s tacit approval,
the indomitable Francis Place first publically advocated this method in
Britain in 1823.118
How the younger Mill became – and whether he remained – a neo-
Malthusian, has however been contentious.119 The story has often been
114 CW 1, p. 374 [1833].

115 To some later writers this would become obsessive and was perhaps rooted in psychological premises,
notably coming from such a large family. See, e.g., Schapiro, ‘J.S. Mill: Pioneer of Democratic
Liberalism in England’, p. 51. It is sometimes implied that Mill had no children of his own because
of these beliefs, an idea now probably unsustainable as a result of Jacobs’ research on Harriet Taylor.
See Stigler, ‘The Scientific Uses of Biography’, p. 57.
116 CW 1, pp. 106–8. The first draft has ‘restriction’; ‘voluntary’ was inserted in the revised version
(Stillinger, Early Draft, p. 99; CW 1, pp. 107–8). But ‘voluntary’ here can of course also mean
collectively agreed upon and enforced.
117 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (vol. 1), pp. 374, 161. Foreigners sometimes thought
that British ‘moralists and statesmen’ drew the conclusion, as Tristan put it, that Malthus’s message
included the injunction ‘to forbid marriage’ (Flora Tristan’s London Journal 1840, p. 136).
118 Marchant, ed., The Control of Parenthood, p. 17; Himes, ‘Jeremy Bentham and the Genesis of English
Neo-Malthusianism’; Place, The Autobiography of Francis Place, p. xvii. Respecting population
control, James Mill decried the ‘superstition of the nursery’ (The Article ‘Colony’, Reprinted from
the Encyclopedia Britannica, p. 13). On Bentham’s support for birth control, see Bahmueller, The
National Charity Company, pp. 94–5, Boralevi, Bentham and the Oppressed, pp. 48–52 and Sokol,
Bentham, Law, and Marriage, p. 140, but also Stack, ‘Bentham and Birth Control’, which reassesses
the chronology of Bentham’s views.
119 Nearly all the concerned parties had an interest here. George Jacob Holyoake, though he named
one of his own children Malthus Holyoake, was worried about damaging both his own and Mill’s
told that, appalled by several times discovering murdered infants left in
the park, Mill was arrested briefly and ‘dragged before an indignant crowd’
in 1823 for disseminating birth control tracts, and spent several nights in
gaol.120 Mill’s public neo-Malthusianism commenced with four letters to
T. J. Wooler’s Black Dwarf the same year, which contended that ‘it is
always wise in the labourers, to keep down their numbers a little below the
means of employment’. This was a first step in a chain of consequences:
‘Until they are well fed, they cannot be well instructed: and until they are
well instructed, they cannot emancipate themselves from the double yoke
of priestcraft and of reverence for superiors.’121 In 1825, in a brief speech
intended partly to refute Owenism, Mill termed over-population ‘a ques-
tion of such magnitude that if mankind were right on every other subject,
and wrong on this, there would need no more to ensure their perpetual
misery and degradation’. This was ‘a subject in which the happiness of
the mass of mankind is involved in a degree far surpassing almost any
other question which can be named’. He challenged the Owenites to prove
reputation, and insisted that Mill in later life never advocated anything other than ‘prudence’ or
‘abstinence’ before and during marriage (John Stuart Mill as Some of the Working Classes Knew
Him, p. 18). This is broadly upheld by Christie (John Stuart Mill and Mr. Abraham Hayward Q.C.,
p. 11). But he too may have been motivated by a desire to protect Mill’s reputation. Joseph McCabe
stated that in 1873 Holyoake wrote ‘that he had, at a much earlier date, received a letter from
Mill emphatically repudiating the opinions of his youth’ (Life and Letters of George Jacob Holyoake,
vol. 2, pp. 64–6), and that ‘Mr. Mill always confined himself to advising deferred marriages, and so
strongly did he hold this view that he fiercely assailed any who by accident or ignorance imputed
to him complicity with any other suggestion’. McCabe stated that Stopford Brooke and Alexander
Bain held ‘that in his early years Mill advocated the deliberate restriction of families by artificial
means’, and himself added that ‘in his later years, at least, Mill did no more than advise that the
date of marriage should be postponed’, which implies only that he did not ‘advocate’ (i.e. publicly
defend) such views later, not that he did not hold them privately. A substantial correspondence
between Place and Mill once existed which was evidently lost in 1854. Bain asserted that while there
was a ‘veil of ambiguity over his meaning’, Mill championed ‘the continence of married couples’ to
restrict population, thus making him a Malthusian rather than a neo-Malthusian (John Stuart Mill,
p. 89). But Bain also suggested that Mill may have withheld his real opinions on the matter, even
hinting to Holyoake that he privately supported artificial controls (Mineka, ‘John Stuart Mill and
Neo-Malthusianism’, p. 7). Some see him as plumping for abstinence as the ‘only solution’ to the
problem (Carlisle, John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character, pp. 153–5). Some later Victorians
described him as a neo-Malthusian (Ussher, Neo-Malthusianism, pp. 1–2), and as offering ‘the
most earnest advocacy of artificial restraints on multiplication’ (Mackay, A Plea for Liberty, p. 54).
These views are taken up later here. For doubts as to his support for artificial birth control, see
also Hollander, The Economics of John Stuart Mill (vol. 2), pp. 968–70. Boner describes him as an
advocate of contraception (Hungry Generations, p. 99), as do Huzel (The Popularization of Malthus
in Early Nineteenth-Century England, p. 206) and Winch (Malthus, p. 7). But ‘contraception’ was
not necessarily artificial. Some of the evidence is raked over and usefully supplemented in Stack,
‘The Death of John Stuart Mill’, pp. 172–6.
120 The Amberley Papers (vol. 2), pp. 247–8. The tracts, soon dubbed the ‘diabolical hand-bills’, were
probably co-authored by Carlile and Place (Miles, Francis Place, p. 154). They were not What is
Love?, as is sometimes supposed, and have been reprinted (Himes, ‘The Birth Control Pamphlets
of 1823’). A more recent account is Bush, What is Love?, pp. 29–31, 129, 138, 195–6.
121 CW 22, pp. 80–2.
‘that subsistence will follow mouths’.122 Mill retorted instead that even on
the most optimistic assumptions any socialist community would soon be
forced to labour solely to produce food. Eventually starvation would reduce
the population ‘again to that number for which food can be provided, and
food alone’. In proportion, however, ‘as the people are better instructed’,
Mill thought, ‘prudential habits’ would prevail. Yet despite these criticisms,
Mill may have picked up from the Owenite William Thompson (‘a very
estimable man with whom I was well acquainted’), the suggestion that
extending women’s rights might help to solve the population problem,
because women would assume greater control over childbearing.123 A year
later, in 1824, Mill wrote, however, that he was ‘far from wishing to regulate
population by law, or by compulsion in any shape’, and thought it should
‘regulate itself’. But he added that ‘a man cannot accommodate the num-
bers of his family to his means of supporting it, unless he knows how to
limit those numbers; for I have no belief in the efficacy of Mr. Malthus’s moral
check, so long as the great mass of the people are so uneducated as they
are at present. Therefore I think it highly desirable that the physical check
should be known to the people’, adding that thereafter ‘each man will then
be the best judge of his own convenience’. He also insisted, quoting his
father, that controlling population was ‘the most important practical prob-
lem to which the wisdom of the politician and moralist can be applied’.124
Unless it can be proven that Mill abandoned this perspective thereafter, this
indicates that he had passed from Malthusianism to neo-Malthusianism.
Clearly reluctant to broach the issue for fear of repercussions, Mill made
no later major public pronouncements on this issue, while remaining
firmly committed to seeing population control as central to overcoming
122 CW 26, pp. 286–9 [1825]. He was probably aware that various Owenites, including Owen’s eldest
son Robert Dale Owen (whose Moral Physiology appeared in 1830) had already taken up the
neo-Malthusian cause.
123 CW 26, pp. 293, 305; CW 1, pp. 128–9. Thompson and Wheeler had written that the ‘sharing equally
in political rights with men . . . is the only mode of curing the defects of character to which the
organization of women renders them more prone than men, and which have a constant tendency
to render them indifferent and inattentive to those remote circumstances and arrangements, those
delicate agencies of laws and morals on which the possibility of acquiring happiness ultimately
depends’, an oblique reference to birth control if ever there was one (Appeal on Behalf of One-Half
the Human Race, pp. 180–1). Mill never cited from the text, but mentioned it in the Autobiography
(CW 1, pp. 128–9). As the target was his father’s denial of the right of women to the vote, however,
he had probably read it (see CW 26, p. 314). Robert Dale Owen had also suggested that as women
bore the burden of childbirth ‘with her also should the decision rest’ as to the number of children
produced, and that no man could rightfully expect 12 to 15 children if women exercised this role
(Moral Physiology, p. 39). For the context, see Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem.
124 CW 22, pp. 96, 100 [1824].
poverty.125 He had noted approvingly in 1820 that France seemed ‘much
less populous than England’.126 The Principles observed that in parts of the
south of France the workers were well paid and affluent, but the ‘population
is regulated’, despite the fact that the government was ‘not good’, the same
being true in parts of the despotic Austrian empire.127 Yet it was never
possible for Mill to air his views on this question as openly as he would
have liked, and became more difficult in later years. (Gladstone with-
drew support for a memorial to Mill after his death because of this issue).
Some, too, thought him an ‘anti-sensualist’; he was evidently squeamish
about the subject. Hence he disguised his proposals frequently, employing
euphemisms to describe birth control (notably ‘continence’, ‘restraint’) and
its failure (‘incontinence’, intemperance’, etc.). Privately he was sometimes
more candid.128 A crucial question for this book is whether his position on
this issue hardened to include any form of ‘compulsion’ in later years. All
such discussions were invariably tendentious, however; the ‘Marcus’ satire,
On the Possibility of Limiting Populousness (1838), produced a veritable storm
of controversy.129 But a large measure of Mill’s later writing about pater-
nalism would nonetheless focus on the population issue. His complaint in
1845 that ‘I never remember a time when any suggestion of anti-population
doctrine of forethought and self-command on the part of the poor was so
contemptuously scouted as it is now’, shows how indissolubly linked these
themes were in his mind.130 They were early, and remained, the essential
foundation of his utopianism: as late as Utilitarianism, he would insist that
‘[P]overty, in any sense implying suffering, may be completely extinguished
by the wisdom of society, combined with the good sense and providence
of individuals.’131
125 Bain insisted that this meant ‘the continence of married couples’ (John Stuart Mill, p. 89). Mill’s
reluctance to discuss the issue runs parallel with his views on religion. He wrote Comte in 1844 that
the time had ‘not yet come when we in England shall be able to direct open attacks on theology,
including Christian theology, without compromising our cause. We can only evade the issue by
simply eliminating it from all social and philosophical discussion and by passing over all questions
pertaining to it on our agenda’ (CMC, p. 227).
126 CW 26, p. 24. 127 CW 22, pp. 83, 89.
128 See Mill’s letter to T. J. Haslam in 1868, acknowledging his receipt of the latter’s birth control
pamphlet, where Mill wrote that nothing was ‘more important than the question to which it
relates, nor more laudable than the purpose it has in view’, adding that ‘medical advisers’ should
in his view inform the poor on such matters (CW 16, pp. 1363–4.) Haslam advocated birth control
through avoidance of intercourse during women’s fertile period, but also by artificial methods if
need be, and Mill did not criticise the latter (cf. Oedipus, [T.J. Haslam], The Marriage Problem,
pp. 7, 10).
129 See Claeys, ed., The Chartist Movement in Britain (vol. 1), p. 383–436. The author was probably
the Owenite George Mudie.
130 CW 13, pp. 640–1. 131 CW 10, p. 216.
A third possible source of paternalist ideas for Mill was Thomas Carlyle,
whom he first met in September 1831.132 Carlyle detested Benthamism,
telling Mill it was a ‘nullity’, an unguided, mindless and, even worse,
godless hedonism whose alliance with laissez-faire would only induce
anarchy.133 Mill was initially impressed with Carlyle’s forceful, unbounded
self-confidence, and thought him a great historian and deep thinker. In
1831 he wrote that Carlyle had ‘by far the largest & widest liberality &
tolerance . . . that I have met with in any one’.134 He thought Carlyle’s ‘epic
poem’, the History of the French Revolution (1837), had brought ‘the People’
to life, though Mill was also irritated by some of the ‘mere mannerisms’ in
its style.135 He agreed, however, that the Revolution represented the break-
ing of ‘the great imposture’ that the king, nobility and clergy provided
guidance any longer in return for their privileges.136 Mill disagreed with
Carlyle’s analysis in ‘Chartism’ of the declining working class standards of
living, but nonetheless wrote that ‘all that you say on the matter, ought to
be said by those who think it, & the far greater part of it, I think too’.137
Carlyle gloated over having won over a new ‘mystic’ from the ranks of his
opponents, even referring to Mill as a ‘disciple’.138
In this he was mistaken. But Carlyle did quite clearly encourage Mill to
think about the philosophical limits of utilitarianism. His ideas on action
and volition helped to counter Mill’s bugbear, necessitarianism. He urged
Mill to write about ‘the new aristocracy’ for which all democracy was but a
‘transitory preparation’.139 He also provided the most authoritarian pater-
nalist state model of this period, based partly on Saint-Simonism, partly on
an idealised image of feudalism, in which industrial and agricultural armies
would be led by a new aristocracy of talent to govern and a new priesthood
to teach.140 Past and Present (1843) was the classic presentation, on Carlyle’s
part, of these views, but Mill seems to have been unimpressed. Organising
labour on an essentially military model (an ideal shared by Comte) troubled
132 On their relationship generally see Neff, Carlyle and Mill and Levin, The Condition of England
Question. Carlyle, Mill, Engels.
133 Carlyle, Letters of Thomas Carlyle to John Stuart Mill, John Sterling, and Robert Browning, p. 113.
134 CW 12, p. 85.
135 CW 20, p. 133. Mill’s own style was temporarily infected; he later wrote that his ‘“Genius” paper
is no favorite with me, especially in its boyish stile. It was written in the height of my Carlylism, a
vice of style which I have since carefully striven to correct’ (CW 13, p. 449).
136 CW 20, pp. 158–9. 137 CW 13, p. 414.
138 The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (vol. 6), p. 39.
139 Carlyle and Carlyle, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (vol. 12), pp. 277–8.
140 On his relations with Saint-Simonism, see Cofer, Saint-Simonism in the Radicalism of Thomas
Carlyle, Murphy, ‘Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians’, Hainds, ‘Mill and the Saint Simonians’ and
Fielding, ‘Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians’, pp. 35–59.
him: its possible economic advantages were outweighed by an overdose of
unthinking, rigid authority. (But he did appreciate the moral advantages of
the military ideal as applied here.) In any case Mill was by this stage more
engaged with Carlyle’s description in On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841)
of the failure of traditional forms of authority, the oscillation of histori-
cal periods between époques organiques and époques critiques, and the need
to reorganise the literary elite, akin to Coleridge’s clerisy ideal, to ensure
guidance for the masses.141 But great differences remained. Unlike Carlyle,
Mill was not inclined to romanticise the Middle Ages, seeing it as a cruel,
unchivalrous, superstitious and greedy epoch.142 Carlyle had suggested that
improved character might result from imitating those who possessed moral
and intellectual authority rather than from assertive self-definition. Mill,
however, had much less confidence in a literary class as suitable leaders
in the modern world.143 Nor was he so obsessed with labour. To Carlyle’s
‘gospel of work’ Mill in 1850 indeed juxtaposed a ‘gospel of leisure’. ‘The
worth of work’, he argued, surely did not consist ‘in its leading to other
work, and so on to work upon work without end’. Instead, ‘the multipli-
cation of work, for purposes not worth caring about, is one of the evils
of our present condition’. Justice and reason demanded asking how many
of the luxuries of life were worth the labour required to produce them,
when weighed against the fact that ‘human beings cannot rise to the finer
attributes of their nature compatibly with a life filled with labour’.144
Like Carlyle, Mill remained constantly perplexed by the great problem
of the time, as to who would replace the old rulers, who would become ‘the
Acknowledged Wisest, who, if not always the really wisest, are at least those
whose wisdom, such as it may be, is the most available for the purpose’.145
Mill was never comfortable with the idea of one leader as such, no matter
how benevolent, preferring ‘the worship not of a hero but of heroes’ to
avoid enslavement to ‘a clever man’s twists and prejudices’.146 Carlyle had
no qualms in restraining the multitude in order to improve them, remarking
141 He noted that the work ‘contains almost all his best ideas in a particularly attractive shape, & with
many explanations which he has not given elsewhere or has given only by way of allusion’ (CW 13,
p. 475). See generally Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 140–77.
142 CW 20, p. 40.
143 Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, p. 23. Mill conceded that the ‘initiation
of all wise or noble things, comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some
one individual’, and that while the ‘honour and glory of the average man is that he is capable of
following that initiative; that he can respond internally to wise and noble things, and be led to
them with his eyes open’, the man of genius possessed only ‘freedom to point out the way’, not
carte blanche to wield power (CW 18, p. 269). This weakens some of the claims made on behalf of
the supremacy of self-created ‘autonomy’ in Mill’s thought.
144 CW 21, p. 91. 145 CW 20, p. 162 [1837]. 146 CW 27, p. 666.
to his brother that it was no ‘sin to control, or coerce into better methods,
human swine in any way; . . . Ach Gott im Himmel!’147 But Mill could not
accept Carlyle’s proposed ‘organisation’ of Britain’s literati, writing that
‘that very feeble and poor minded set of people, taken generally, the writers
of this country . . . would like to be indeed a priesthood, an aristocracy of
scribblers, dividing social importance with the other aristocracies, or rather
receiving it from them and basking in their beams’.148
The shadow of Carlyle can be discerned fleetingly at various points
in Mill’s later writings. He is a hidden interlocutor in On Liberty and
probably helped (with Coleridge) provide part of the theory of obligation
in Utilitarianism, where Mill described the natural sanction of our sense
of duty as being founded in ‘the social feelings of mankind, the desire to
be in unity with our fellow creatures’.149 And yet Carlyle’s legacy to Mill
was twofold, too, for he doubtless also reinforced aspects of Mill’s theory
of self-responsibility. Addressing Carlyle in 1834, Mill wrote that he had
never ‘belonged to the benevolentiary, soup-kitchen school’, and that while
conceiving ‘the good of the species . . . to be the ultimate end, (which is the
alpha & omega of my utilitarianism)’ he had ‘the fullest Belief that this end
can in no other way be forwarded but by the means you speak of, namely
by each taking for his exclusive aim the development of what is best in
himself ’.150
Fourthly, we should consider the influence on Mill’s ideas about pater-
nalism of the Saint-Simonians, followers of the French industrial reformer
Henri de Saint-Simon, and the acolytes of his one-time secretary, Auguste
Comte. (The more socialistic aspects of these schemes will be treated in
greater detail below.) The Saint-Simonians saw the present age as one of
transition from feudalism, where idleness was privileged, to an industrial
regime which would reward labour and effort alone. This would involve
reorganising the nation state, on the basis of a division between spiritual
power (writers, artists and scientists) and temporal power (chiefly indus-
trialists and bankers), with all useful workers having the right of election
to a European-wide parliament. Amongst other things, Mill found deeply
appealing the meritocratic ideal at the heart of this scheme, and particu-
larly its opposition to inheritance as perpetuating a class ‘uniquely devoted
to pleasure’. This he agreed needed to be suppressed and replaced by
‘reward according to work’.151 Around 1829, just as he began reading the
Saint-Simonians, Mill began to speak of the ‘authority of the instructed’
147 Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, p. 405. 148 CW 27, p. 653.
149 CW 10, p. 231. 150 CW 12, p. 207.
151 Saint-Simon, Oeuvres de Saint-Simon et D’Enfantin (vol. 1), p. 313, (vol. 2), pp. 164, 402. Durkheim
would later follow the same ideas to similar conclusions (Socialism and Saint-Simon, p. 13).
(in a letter to a recent convert to the cause, Gustave D’Eichthal, who
claimed to have greatly influenced him).152 Mill’s articles entitled ‘The Spirit
of the Age’ (1831) described those who had hitherto possessed worldly power
and moral influence, chiefly the hereditary aristocracy, as having abrogated
any just claims to such influence. A moral and social revolution had trans-
ferred their power to more competent parties, and established a principle
of reward, eventually crucial to Mill’s social theory, which would ‘leave no
man one fraction of unearned distinction or unearned importance’. It was
inevitable, Mill now stressed, that ‘most men’ would inevitably ‘fall back
upon the authority of still more cultivated minds’ in order to make key
decisions. He aspired to a time, he wrote privately, when ‘the same feelings
of deference and submission’ were shown ‘to the authority of the instructed
in morals and politics’ as was now the case in the physical sciences, even
calling this ‘the only wholesome state of the human mind’. Liberalism,
by contrast, meant ‘making every man his own guide & sovereign mas-
ter, & letting him think for himself & do exactly as he judges best for
himself, giving other men leave to persuade him if they can by evidence,
but forbidding him to give way to authority’. Bentham and ‘the laissez
faire spirit of the prevailing philosophy’ viewed men as the best judges of
their own interest, an idea which, Mill now wrote, would lead society to
‘retrograde, for a certain space, towards the state of nature; by limiting the
ends and functions of the social union, as strictly as possible, to those of a
mere police’. But ignorance was rife. This was, therefore, the wrong course
of action: flattering the ignorant masses, as Tocqueville would soon teach
him, might inevitably occur in a democracy, but might equally be the road
to ruin. Hence ‘the antithesis of liberalism’, submitting ‘to the guidance of
a higher intelligence & virtue’, was necessary.153 But to the question, where
was ‘the authority which commands this confidence, or deserves it?’, Mill’s
answer was ‘nowhere’. Here, then, a major problem posed itself. On its
resolution would hinge every subsequent discussion of Mill’s support for
or antagonism towards paternalist principles.154
At this time Mill encountered the ideas of Auguste Comte, whom
he first read in 1829 upon D’Eichthal’s recommendation.155 His initial
152 CW 6, xvi; D’Eichthal, A French Sociologist Looks at Britain. Gustave D’Eichthal and British Society
in 1828, p. 3. See generally Pankhurst, The Saint-Simonians, Mill and Carlyle.
153 CW 12, p. 84. And thus having one’s personality formed by ‘circumstances’, albeit to some degree
of one’s choosing.
154 CW 22, pp. 228, 231, 244–5, 252, 280–1, 320–1, 325; CW 12, pp. 40, 84. For commentary see
especially Friedman, ‘An Introduction to Mill’s Theory of Authority’, pp. 379–425.
155 CW 12, p. 34. The best contemporary account of their relationship is Bridges, The Unity of Comte’s
Life and Thought. The most detailed subsequent study is Raeder, John Stuart Mill and the Religion
of Humanity. See also Pickering, Auguste Comte (vol. 2), pp. 70–113.
reactions were favourable, though he noted that Comte’s theory of gov-
ernment seemingly neglected that ‘the highest & most important of these
purposes is the improvement of man himself as a moral and intelligent
being, which is an end not included in M. Comte’s category at all’. In
1837 he described Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive as ‘one of the most
profound books ever written on the philosophy of the sciences’.156 He cor-
responded with Comte from November 1841 until May 1847. Here, as with
Carlyle, Mill moved from initial enthusiasm through ambivalence to even-
tual critique. Comte’s influence on him, however, long underestimated,
certainly exceeded Carlyle’s. Initially Mill praised Comte for helping to
undermine religion in Britain. He was highly receptive to Comte’s themes
of philosophical renewal, and the need for a guiding spiritual elite and
for a clear ‘separation of the temporal and the spiritual powers’. Comte
had proposed that ‘the mass of mankind, including even their rulers in
all the practical departments of life, must, from the necessity of the case,
accept most of their opinions on political and social matters, as they do
on physical, from the authority of those who have bestowed more study
on those subjects than they generally have it in their power to do’.157 Mill
was very receptive to this argument, and it became central to his mature
social philosophy.158 Carlyle’s plea for organising men of letters, after all,
was firmly before him, and Mill saw a parallel between Comte’s description
of ‘the high social qualities which we will come to discover in the world of
business and industry’ and some of Carlyle’s insights.159 Comte had thus
become, in Mill’s words, ‘by far the first speculative thinker of the age’,
who had provided a ‘natural history of society . . . far superior to any which
preceded it’.160
But Mill soon came to believe that Comte had carried the argument
for intellectual deference too far. In 1842 he wrote Comte that the latter
had cured him ‘of all leanings toward the Utopian doctrines, which try
to entrust the government of society to philosophers, or even to make it
depend on high intellectual capacity such as it is most commonly under-
stood’. Such attempts, thought Mill, would produce a government like
China’s, ‘as close as possible to Saint-Simon’s theory’ but ‘most opposed to
156 CW 12, pp. 36, 363. 157 CW 1, p. 219.

158 ‘From this time’, he later recalled, in a passage eventually deleted from the Autobiography, ‘my hopes
of improvement rested less on the reason of the multitude, than on the possibility of effecting such
an improvement in the methods of political and social philosophy, as should enable all thinking
and instructed persons who have no sinister interest to be so nearly of one mind on these subjects,
as to carry the multitude with them by their united authority’ (CW 1, p. 616).
159 CMC, pp. 36, 51, 109. 160 CW 12, p. 579; CW 8, p. 950 [1843].
any kind of progress . . . a pedantocracy’.161 By late 1842 Mill saw common
cause with Comte in the desire to bring about ‘a true organization of indus-
try’ embodying ‘the social qualities which so far seemed most hostile to it’,
and thus foreign to the egotism which had hitherto dominated it. This was
not, he agreed with Comte, to be accomplished by granting democratic
institutions to the rebellious proletariat, but by creating a new spiritual
power. Comte refused to be drawn into a discussion as to how representa-
tive institutions might both reflect proletarian demands and acknowledge
or reject instructions from the elite, disdaining any treatment of ‘prob-
lems of a temporal nature’ before spiritual regeneration had taken place.162
But despite Comte’s assurances that ‘no type of [philosophical] despotism’
would arise when positivism was established, Mill increasingly saw Comte’s
politics as moving in this direction.163 In 1855 he wrote that ‘opinion tends
to encroach more & more on liberty, & almost all the projects of social
reformers in these days are really liberticide – Comte, particularly so’.164
On Liberty described Comte’s system as ‘a despotism of society over the
individual surpassing anything contemplated in the political ideal of the
most rigid disciplinarian among the ancient philosophers’.165 Mill’s final
judgement on the subject, Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865), praised
Comte’s empiricism, his philosophy of history, his broad agnosticism and
his ambitious programme of education, while finding fault with Comte’s
inability to apply psychology to understand variations in individual and
national character. Mill did this without formally subscribing to the Reli-
gion of Humanity (which he nonetheless admired), or to Comte’s plea for
a spiritual authority to supervise education, which indeed he rejected as
essentially ‘spiritual despotism’. His objections to Comte, then, did not
centre upon the Religion of Humanity.166 The idea ‘that all education
161 CMC, pp. 51–2. Though Mill doubtless meant it to be abrasive, Comte liked the latter ‘excellent
term’, and frequently adopted it thereafter (CMC, p. 77).
162 CMC, p. 115. 163 CMC, p. 275 [1844]. 164 CW 14, p. 294. 165 CW 18, p. 227.
166 CW 10, pp. 298, 314. Oscar Haac has claimed that Mill ended with ‘the rejection of positivist
religion’ (CMC, p. xxiii), but Mill in 1854 commended ‘the thoroughness with which he [Comte]
has enforced and illustrated the possibility of making le culte de l ’humanité perform the functions
and supply the place of a religion’ (CW 27, p. 646). He wrote elsewhere of Comte in 1854: ‘je
soutiens comme lui que l’idée de l’ensemble de l’humanité, représentée surtout par les esprits et
les caractères d’élite, passés, présents, et à venir, peut devenir, non seulement pour des personnes
exceptionelles mais pour tout le monde, l’objet d’un sentiment capable de remplacer avec avantage
toutes les religions actuelles, soit pour les besoins de cœur, soit pour ceux de la vie sociale’ (CW
14, p. 237). This was a strategy Mill was willing to contemplate, in the belief that any religion
should be judged ‘by its fruits’ (CW 16, p. 1069 [1865]). Writing in 1868, he noted that he had ‘long
thought that what we now want in the present stage of the world is a union among all those men
(& women) who are deeply impressed with the fundamental essence of religion, in so far as religion
affects this world ’ (CW 16, p. 1499). Comte thus gave Mill considerable insight into how to deal
should be in the hands of a centralised authority, whether composed of
clergy or of philosophers’, Mill later insisted, would ‘assuredly be more
repugnant to mankind, with every step of their progress in the unfettered
exercise of their highest faculties’.167
The Autobiography summarised Mill’s mature critique of Comte. Mill
rejected Comte’s reliance on ‘spiritual authority as the only security for
good government’ and ‘the sole bulwark against practical oppression’, and
Comte’s expectation that ‘by it a system of despotism in the state and
despotism in the family would be rendered innocuous and beneficial’. He
described the Système de Politique Positive as ‘the completest system of
spiritual and temporal despotism, which ever yet emanated from a human
brain’, and ‘a monumental warning to thinkers on society and politics,
of what happens when once men lose sight, in their speculations, of the
value of Liberty and of Individuality’.168 Philosophers were not meant to
be kings; indeed they should not generally ‘either govern or administer’.169
As Mill made clear in the Autobiography, he became less of a democrat
later in life, and more inclined to bolster the role played by educated elites
in democracies, to the extent, as we will see, even of proposing in the
Considerations substantial modifications of the voting system. Yet Comte
in particular had cured him of any inclination to regard the educated as
any kind of new priesthood. Writing in 1844, he insisted that it was ‘the
characteristic evil incident to a corporation of priests, that the exaltation
of their order becomes, in and for itself, a primary object, to which the
ends of the institution are often sacrificed’.170 Nor would Comte’s ideal of
‘moralised’ capitalists ever seemingly appeal to Mill.
Nonetheless it was not politics as such but feminism which made a breach
with Comte inevitable. By late 1842 Mill, completing the Logic, thought
‘real differences’ existed between them. Cracks appeared in mid-1843, when
Mill, while acknowledging ‘the social necessity for the basic institutions
of property and marriage’, and accepting ‘no Utopia concerning either
one’, added that he was ‘still inclined to believe that these two institutions
may be destined to undergo more serious modifications than you seem to
with the issue of religion. Mill had signed an 1823 letter on the case of Richard Carlile ‘An Atheist’
(CW 22, p. 9). He wrote Comte in 1842 that he had ‘had the rather rare fate in my country of never
having believed in God, even as a child’ (CMC, pp. 119–20). But in 1868 he wrote a correspondent,
‘If any one again tells you that I am an atheist, I would advise you to ask him, how he knows and in
what page of my numerous writings he finds anything to bear out the assertion’ (CW 16, p. 1483),
which is somewhat disingenuous. The Autobiography clarifies this, recounting that Mill ‘never had
religious belief’, and thought ‘concerning the origin of things nothing whatever can be known’,
which is contrasted to the ‘absurd’ position of ‘dogmatic atheism’ (CW 1, pp. 44, 41).
167 CW 10, pp. 314–15. 168 CW 1, pp. 219–21.
169 CW 15, p. 769 [1862]. 170 CW 20, p. 240.
think, even though I feel quite unable to foresee what these will be’. Comte
ignored these ‘heresies’, assuring Mill that a ‘mind such as yours cannot for
long be subject to the aberrations of our era concerning the basic conditions
of domestic association’, and immodestly insisting that his ‘seven or eight
years of seniority explain quite naturally why I have gone beyond this
temporary position, while you are still caught in it’. This was not a line of
argument Mill was likely to warm to. He was moreover simply unwilling to
accept the subordinate position Comte assigned to women. ‘[O]ur dissent
has deeper roots than those you point to’, he insisted, adding that ‘there
is also a place for equality in human affections’, and that true ‘reciprocal
sympathy’ was impossible without it. Comte urged a biological basis for his
views on inequality. Mill rejected the view that ‘the organic constitution
of the feminine sex’ produced ‘a state of prolonged childhood’, seeing
this as analogous to the view ‘that the inferiority of children as compared
to men depends on the anatomical difference of their brain[s], while it
evidently depends to a large degree, if not entirely, on the lack of training’.
Mill admitted his own ignorance of biology, but insisted that women’s
behaviour and achievements demonstrated that education made all the
difference. Comte continued to harp upon women’s ‘inborn inferiority’.
Eventually, to Mill, this ‘disagreement on the question which you rightly
consider the most basic social speculation’, became decisive.171 Comte’s
key problem, like Bentham’s, was that as a narrow-minded recluse his
ignorance of ‘the laws of the formation of character’ led him to assume
that the differences between people were ‘ultimate, or at least necessary
facts’ upon which he grounded ‘universal principles of sociology’.172 Mill
in turn insisted that his own budding science of ethology, ‘the theory of how
external circumstances, either individual or social, influence the formation
of moral and intellectual character’, could solve this problem.173 But the
answer, so far as Mill provided it, was not to come for twenty years, until
the publication of The Subjection of Women (1869). Yet we should recall
at this point that Mill evidently already believed that increasing female
equality would also reduce family size. This was not a point he could make
to Comte.174 But in his mind it remained as important as justice towards
women as such.
171 CMC, pp. 165, 171, 174, 183, 197. 172 CW 13, pp. 738–9. 173 CMC, p. 198.
174 Ironically, since Mill believed that birth control was much more widely practised in France, but
he also knew of Comte’s traditionalism in his own private life. The closest Mill came was the
suggestion that the ‘servitude of women . . . is a servitude without respite, encompassing all of their
activities, which discharges them, much more completely than was ever true for the serfs, from all
essential planning for the future and from all active direction of their own conduct with respect to
society but even in the way of individual interest’ (CMC, p. 202) [1843].
evidence of authority: ‘henpecked’ restated

We have seen so far that Mill moved steadily away from Benthamism,
though not utilitarianism as such, from the late 1820s onwards. The chief
influence of all upon the trajectory of this movement was doubtless the
great love of his life, Harriet Taylor (1808–58), whom he met in 1830 and
married, after her husband died, in 1851.175 Mill would recall, respecting
both ultimate aims and practicable means, he ‘acquired more from her
teaching, than from all other sources taken together’.176 Few relationships
have been so productive both of fruitful ideas and of painful controversy.
Early rumours reported his having ‘fallen desperately in love with some
young ill-married philosophic Beauty’. Doubtless susceptible on the emo-
tional side, Mill was, indisputably, besotted with her. After a childhood
dominated by fear, he now knew love for the first time.177 He would pay
dearly for this cardinal breach of propriety. The ensuing scandal left him
‘shunned by every one’ and ‘very bitter against society’, and badly affected
his nerves.178 Psychologically minded interpreters have had a field day
with this relationship, with some assuming that Mill sought in his beloved
another mother, though in search of tenderness another father would prob-
ably be more accurate.179 But his reaction was also quite understandable:
175 The sole study is Jacobs, The Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill, which generally takes the line that Taylor
gave Mill a greater appreciation of self-sufficiency (pp. 33–4) and that she helped him move away
from Benthamism (p. 39). She appears to presume Taylor was at least a joint author of the Principles
(pp. 124–7, 155, 207), but portrays her as more sceptical about socialism in 1848 than most accounts
have done (p. 211), if ‘more eager’ to see communism tried thereafter (p. 213). Jacobs surveys the
treatment of Taylor generally in Hypatia’s Daughters, pp. 214–45. Another good summary is Rossi,
Essays on Sex Equality, pp. 3–63. See also Rose, Parallel Lives. Five Victorian Marriages, pp. 95–140.
176 CW 1, p. 197. Mill wrote that ‘not only during the years of our married life but through the
many years of confidential friendship which preceded, all my published writings were our joint
production, her share in them constantly increasing as years advanced . . . The most valuable ideas
and features in these joint productions, those which have been most fruitful of important results
and have contributed most to the success and reputation of the works themselves, originated with
her, and were purely emanations from her mind, my part in them being no greater than in any of
the thoughts which I found in previous authors and made my own only by incorporating them
with my system of thought’ (CW 1, p. 250).
177 Carlyle and Carlyle, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (vol. 7), p. 173. Roebuck
later recalled that Mill was ‘as a child’ with women (The Life and Letters of John Arthur Roebuck,
p. 28). His own relationship with Mill broke over Taylor (p. 39). The Autobiography recalled that
‘mine was not an education of love but of fear’ (CW 1, p. 52). This would doubtless have a bearing
on his later views of familial equality.
178 The Amberley Papers (vol. 1), p. 371. In 1836 he shed considerable weight, much of his hair, and
gained a facial twitch never thereafter lost, ‘the fruit of the Taylor-Platonica affair’, in Carlyle’s
words. See Carlyle and Carlyle, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (vol. 8),
p. 327.
179 Bruce Mazlish, James & John Stuart Mill. Mill thought his father’s chief deficiency respecting his
children was lack of tenderness (CW 1, p. 53).
she was beautiful, graceful, self-possessed and an excellent conversational-
ist possessed of what Carlyle, never one to compliment readily, called ‘the
clearest insight’. Their relationship, ‘one of strong affection and confiden-
tial intimacy, entirely apart from sensuality’, was to Mill ‘the most valuable
friendship in my life . . . the honour and chief blessing of my existence’,
and ‘the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope
to effect hereafter, for human improvement’.180 She was not the source of
Mill’s feminism, he having ‘from early boyhood’ held ‘strong convictions’
respecting male and female equality.181 But Mill greatly admired her ‘com-
plete emancipation from every kind of superstition’ and her ‘earnest protest
against many things which are still part of the established constitution of
society’, particularly injustice.182 She was ‘the profoundest and most far-
sighted and clear-sighted thinker I have ever known, as well as the most
consummate in practical wisdom’.183 Mill wrote in 1833 that he was ‘often
in a state almost of scepticism, and have no theory of Human Life at all, or
seem to have conflicting theories, or a theory which does not amount to a
Belief ’, adding that this was ‘only a recent state, and as I well know, a pass-
ing one’.184 Harriet Taylor, more than anyone else, would help him to pass
from scepticism to belief. Her chief impact (‘and that of which I earliest
reaped the full benefit’) was upon Mill’s ‘ideal standard of character’ and his
sense of ‘the highest worth of a human being’.185 She helped him realise that
poetry and the feelings needed to play a key role in the self-formation of
character.186 The crucial chapter ‘On the Probable Futurity of the Labour-
ing Classes’ in the rapidly composed Principles was ‘entirely due’ to her.187
The Autobiography described Taylor as thus assisting Mill in renouncing
‘extreme Benthamism’ and articulating ‘the only substantial changes of
opinion that were yet to come, related to politics’, which consisted ‘in a
greater approximation, so far as regards the ultimate prospects of humanity,
to a qualified Socialism’, and secondly, ‘a shifting of my political ideal from
180 CW 1, pp. 193, 617.
181 Possibly following Bentham, who had supported female enfranchisement. Britton disagrees (John
Stuart Mill, p. 37). But it has been claimed that Taylor’s views on marriage, influenced by Owenism,
were ‘much in advance of Mill’s’ (Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England, p. 40). Mill had
opposed his father’s opposition to votes for women from the early 1820s (CW 1, p. 106).
182 CW 1, pp. 252, 195. 183 Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, p. 193.
184 CW 12, p. 154. 185 CW 1, pp. 622, 198 (deleted passages from Autobiography).
186 To Capaldi, she helped him ‘understand the connection between the rights of women and auton-
omy, the basic notion in Mill’s social philosophy’, and shaped, though she did not provide, Mill’s
concept of autonomy (John Stuart Mill. A Biography, pp. 338, 189, 252).
187 CW 1, p. 255. It has now been reprinted as hers (Jacobs, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill).
The Principles was written over some 18 months between 1845–7, with a haste some critics have
faulted (e.g. Cannan, A History of the Theories of Production and Distribution in English Political
Economy, pp. 390–1) and which even Mill seemed to concede (CW 1, p. 242).
pure democracy . . . to the modified form of it’, as expressed in the Consid-
erations on Representative Government.188 If it was popularly supposed that
‘John Stuart Mill . . . reconciled political economy with humanity’, Taylor
was crucial in providing the humanity in the equation.189
Contemporary observers of this relationship as well as subsequent com-
mentators have however questioned Mill’s assessment of Harriet Taylor.
Some acknowledge her admirable qualities, but few have upheld his evalu-
ations of her intelligence, foresight and moral depth. His deferential habit
of referring to her in the third person in letters still provokes a slight cringe
amongst readers, as does his constant self-doubt about his worthiness for
her.190 Contemporaries ridiculed Mill as having ‘no great faith in a God’
but ‘unbounded confidence in a goddess’.191 An extreme judgment was that
‘Mill’s hallucination as to his wife’s genius deprived him of all authority
wherever that came in’.192 Carlyle with habitual disdain and probably some
jealousy soon nicknamed Taylor ‘Platonica’,193 and said that ‘Mill admired
her because she was kind to him’. His friend Charles Gavan Duffy called her
‘a shrewd woman, with a taste for coquetry’, but found her ideas (doubtless
referring to feminism) ‘altogether absurd and insupportable’.194 Jane Welsh
Carlyle thought her ‘engrossed with a dangerous passion’.195 No feminist
either, Alexander Bain, who knew both well, was similarly sceptical about
Mill’s claims about her character, and played down her influence.196 Later
writers have spoken of Mill’s ‘perhaps over-generous’ account of her role
in his life.197 Packe described her ‘astounding, almost hypnotic control of
Mill’s mind’.198 Borchard emphasised not only Mill’s submissiveness, but
the degree to which he became virtually Taylor’s amanuensis, he Dumont
and she Bentham.199 ‘Once Harriet had established her ascendancy over
Mill’s mind’, Kamm asserted, ‘she remained the final judge and arbiter of
188 CW 1, pp. 199, 239. This undermines Capaldi’s claim that Taylor in no way ‘significantly altered’
Mill’s thinking (John Stuart Mill, p. 189).
189 McCarthy, The Story of Gladstone’s Life, p. 117. This interpretation thus broadly agrees with
Hamburger, John Stuart Mill On Liberty and Control, p. 27.
190 E.g., the dream recounted in CW 14, p. 476. 191 Quoted in CW 14, p. xxiii.
192 Supposedly uttered by Goldwin Smith, and quoted in Garnett, The Life of William James Fox,
p. 97.
193 Carlyle emphasised Mill’s susceptibility, Packe notes, probably because Mill failed to adopt his
opinions (The Life of John Stuart Mill, p. 182). Harriet Taylor clearly had some caustic things to say
about Carlyle at this point (CW 1, p. 183), and offered a more critical judgement of him to Mill
than the latter had yet reached.
194 The Amberley Papers (vol. 1), p. 63; Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle, p. 168.
195 Carlyle and Carlyle, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (vol. 8), p. 14.
196 Bain, John Stuart Mill, pp. 172–3. 197 CW 2, p. lxii.
198 Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, p. 315. 199 Borchard, John Stuart Mill the Man, p. 99.
his actions and his words.’200 Harriet Martineau, too, thought him ‘much
improved’ after her death, and lamented ‘the weakness he showed through-
out that long scene of his life’.201 No matter now, we might reflect: leave
the poor man’s private life in peace. In his own view meeting Taylor, after
a loveless youth, was the best thing that ever happened to Mill. On her
death in 1858 he wrote, simply, ‘My wife, the companion of all my feel-
ings, the prompter of all my best thoughts, the guide of all my actions, is
gone!’ ‘I seem to have cared for things or persons, events, opinions on the
future of the world, only because she cared for them’, he reflected shortly
afterwards.202 Does it really matter, then, if Mill could not distinguish
between his idealised version of Taylor and the ‘real woman’, in Borchard’s
terms?203 For she brought him happiness and inspired in him (and caused
him to inspire others to pursue) nobility of character: what more can one
wish?
Little of this, indeed, would be worth mentioning here were it not for
the fact that Harriet Taylor has been blamed (or rarely, praised) for bending
Mill’s opinions, chiefly leftwards, from the period of her initial influence
onwards.204 On her death in 1858, Mill wrote that ‘the nobleness of her
public objects, which never stopped short of perfect distributive justice as
the final aim’, implied ‘a state of society entirely communist in practice
and spirit, whether also in institutions or not’.205 Believing that selfishness
might eventually be greatly reduced, she helped tone down many of the
objections to communism in the first edition of the Principles.206 Friedrich
Hayek in 1951 began the trend towards asserting that Mill’s subsequent
flirtation with socialism was largely Taylor’s doing.207 Packe strongly rein-
forced this case, alleging that she found Mill’s social ideal ‘too bourgeois
in tone’.208 She made Mill delete ‘all his objections against Socialism and
Communism’ and ‘demanded a complete reversal of his economic treatise
in its most essential feature’. She also objected ‘strongly and totally’ to a
passage in the first edition suggesting that security in the necessaries of life
was an overrated source of happiness, though Mill retorted that it had been
her ‘proposition’ in the first place (and then made up for his complaint by
200 Kamm, Mill in Love, p. 83.
201 Martineau, The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau (vol. 5), p. 117.
202 CW 15, pp. 574, 577. 203 Borchard, John Stuart Mill the Man, p. 47.
204 To Pappe this is the ‘crucial question’ in the whole intellectual relationship (John Stuart Mill and
the Harriet Taylor Myth, p. 30).
205 CW 15, p. 601. 206 For details, see CW 14, pp. 8, 11.
207 But Hayek also felt that the Autobiography in some passages attributed ideas to Taylor which Mill
had probably derived from the Saint-Simonians and Comte (Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet
Taylor, p. 297).
208 Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, p. 306.
writing that ‘by thinking sufficiently I should probably come to think the
same – as is almost always the case, I believe always when we think long
enough’).209 By the third edition of 1852 she had ‘finally won the day’.210
Borchard, too, agreed that ‘the strong impetus given by his books towards
socialism and the present welfare state must certainly be attributed more
to Harriet than to Mill himself ’, adding that consequently ‘Mill’s Political
Economy did more than any other single book to bring about socialism in
England’.211 Mill’s modern editors, notably John Robson, accept that after
1848 ‘Mill, now very much under the influence of his wife in this respect,
moves into the position of overt, if cautious, sympathy as expressed in the
third edition of the Principles – a phase which in the Autobiography Mill
said would class them both “under the general designation of Socialists”’.
By contrast, they continue, Mill exhibited ‘much greater reserve’ in his
final study of the subject, the unfinished ‘Chapters on Socialism’.212 Most
recently, Richard Reeves has written that Taylor ‘unquestionably sharpened
Mill’s socialism between 1849 and 1852’.213
Though a few writers have taken a different tack on this issue,214 there
is certainly a case to be answered in the assertion that Taylor’s influence
on Mill deflected him from his ‘natural’ trajectory of intellectual develop-
ment. Pappe has denied that this took place early on, insisting that Mill’s
hostility to conformism emerged from his intellectual background, while
Mill himself tells us that the idea of ‘internal culture’ had gained its ‘proper
place among the prime necessities of human well being’ by the time of
his 1826 mental crisis.215 Evidence indicates that Mill resisted some of the
proposed changes to the Principles in 1849.216 Still, the shadow of suspicion
has drifted over some of Mill’s ‘co-authored’ texts from 1846 onwards.217
209 CW 14, pp. 8–9. The subject here, however, is the issue of incentives, not the finer nuances of
utilitarianism.
210 Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, pp. 313–14.
211 Borchard, John Stuart Mill the Man, p. 99. This perspective was later supplemented by Himmelfarb
(On Liberty and Liberalism, pp. 130–1), but denied by van Holthoon, who sees no evidence that
Taylor was more of a ‘socialist’ than Mill (The Road to Utopia, p. 79).
212 CW 4, pp. xxxix–xl. 213 Reeves, John Stuart Mill. Victorian Firebrand, p. 212.
214 Notably Pappe, John Stuart Mill and the Harriet Taylor Myth. A balanced assessment is Robson’s
The Improvement of Mankind, pp. 50–68. Ryan, too, argues that in Mill’s thought ‘nothing crucial
hangs on the extent of Harriet’s influence’ (J.S. Mill, p. 127), and that where that influence can be
clearly traced, as in the later feminist writings, it is essentially positive (p. 154).
215 Pappe, John Stuart Mill and the Harriet Taylor Myth, p. 15; CW 1, pp. 146–7.
216 For details, see CW 14, p. 9. The issue is incentives to labour. Mill wrote that if he deleted ‘the
majority would not exert themselves for anything beyond this & unless they did nobody else would
&c’, then ‘there is nothing to be said against Communism at all – one would only have to turn
round & advocate it’, which he seemed unwilling to do.
217 ‘This, like all my newspaper articles on similar subjects, and most of my articles on all subjects,
was a joint production with my wife,’ Mill noted in 1851 (CW 25, p. 1183). For details see CW 22,
p. lxxx.
Some have suggested that vindicating their relationship was a key motive
for Mill writing his (or their) Autobiography, and that Taylor carefully
scrutinised the compliments paid her there.218 More worrying still is Mill’s
proclamation that he would never publish anything he thought contrary
to her opinions.219
Yet there are many twists in these allegations of undue influence. Mill
insisted that his wife’s share in On Liberty, generally regarded as his least
socialistic major work, was the greatest in all their chief collective endeav-
ours. Evidence exists that she encouraged Mill to develop as his central
concept, which would then underpin much of his mature thought, the
idea of ‘self-dependence’. In an essay on toleration (particularly respecting
existing marriage norms) written by Taylor around 1832, at the point at
which she was acutely aware of the pressure to conform respecting her
relationship with Mill, she stated that the antidote to the ‘phantom power’
of ‘the opinion of Society’ was to ‘to make all strong enough to stand alone;
and whoever has once known the pleasure of self-dependance, will be in
no danger of relapsing into subserviency’. To tolerate was to ‘abstain from
unjust interference’.220 Some at least of On Liberty, then, may have been
suggested by Taylor precisely at the moment when Mill’s own rejection of
Benthamism might have driven him in a much more paternalist direction,
even if Mill was also centrally responding to necessitarianism, which had
troubled him since the mid 1820s.221 Packe moreover argues that her ongo-
ing work on the oppression of women was increasingly ‘sharply reflected’ in
Mill’s work, that indeed he ‘incorporated it as a vital part of the population
problem’, and that ‘it became the fundamental issue of his entire social
philosophy’. This perspective now produced, in Packe’s view, ‘the most
evangelical of Mill’s convictions, and the basis of his claim to be considered
a progressive, original sociologist’.222 In this, the strongest such suggestion,
the wedding of feminism to Malthusianism was effectively Taylor’s doing,
and possibly also the proposal that the former solved the latter, with the
218 CW 14, p. xxiv. Mill in fact asked his wife to write the resumé of their relationship for the
Autobiography (CW 14, p. 166), after she had asked that any account should portray, with ‘genuine
truth & simplicity’, its ‘strong affection, intimacy of friendship, and no impropriety’. These issues
are treated in Carlisle, John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character.
219 His words were: ‘even if there were no other reason than the certainty I feel that I never should
long continue of an opinion different from yours on a subject which you have fully considered’
(CW 14, p. 11).
220 Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, pp. 275–6; reprinted in Jacobs, The Complete Works of
Harriet Taylor Mill, p. 138.
221 Mill wrote of the ‘increasing multitude of dwarfs’ in his 1832 essay ‘On Genius’. Capaldi reaches
a similar conclusion (John Stuart Mill, p. xiv). On Taylor’s influence at this point, see also Rees,
‘A Phase in the Development of Mill’s Ideas on Liberty’.
extension of women’s rights producing intentionally smaller families. This
provided Mill with the synthesis, we will see, which underpinned much of
his later writing. As this last allegation is central to this book, it needs to
be assessed carefully. For if this is the case, then, Harriet Taylor ironically
helped preserve Mill for the liberal camp, and feminism became the basis
for much of Mill’s subsequent liberalism.
One or other variants on this argument, referred to hereafter, for brevity,
as ‘henpecked’, are now widely accepted and usually assume that Mill’s
own ‘essential’ views existed throughout the period of this influence, what-
ever he actually wrote. Once Taylor’s influence had been removed, so
henpecked infers, the ‘true Mill’ re-emerged from the murky shadows of
fellow-travellership into the bright sunshine of his own self-made auton-
omy, notably in the ‘Chapters on Socialism’. (And yet, as we will see, the
very late Mill, c. 1870–2, became still more radical.) But why should we
take Mill’s word for so much else, but not his own description of the essen-
tial intellectual integrity of his relationship with her? Quite another view
might be taken of this relationship, which places a different emphasis on
the changes in Mill’s views which Taylor’s influence assisted. The possibil-
ity that she helped Mill to overcome aspects of his own philosophical and
political upbringing which he wished to surpass, that the influence was not
as such undue, but quite as appropriate as any other, that she represented
in a sense his own utopian half, and a full-blooded Carlylean hero, is vir-
tually never considered in this interpretation. But in 1854, for instance, he
regretted revealingly in his diary that his powers had not ‘kept pace with
the continual elevation of my standing point and change of my bearings
towards all the great subjects of thought’, adding that ‘the explanation is
that I owe the enlargement of my ideas and feelings to her influence, and
that she could not in the same degree give me powers of execution’.223
For Mill, indeed, came to see Harriet Taylor as embodying many female
strengths he himself lacked, as an ‘artist’, epitomising the poetic spirit, as
John Robson put it, by contrast to his own ‘scientist’.224 A bit later Mill
223 CW 27, pp. 655–6.
224 Where, loosely, the artist defines the normative end, conceived partly as achieved through the art
of government, while the scientist describes the empirical means thereto, or in this case, a higher
utility realised partly by following the laws of political economy, insofar as the production of wealth
formed the initial basis for this vision, in turn chiefly subdivided into the treatment of production
and of distribution. See Robson, ‘Artist and Scientist: Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill’ and The
Improvement of Mankind, p. 63. To Robson Mill regarded politics and economics as subordinate
to sociology, and all three to ethics, which lent a unity to Mill’s thought: this would make Taylor
the unifier par excellence (Improvement, p. x). This is undoubtedly linked to the discussion of the
‘Arts of Life’ introduced in the 1851 edition of the Logic, which corresponds to the revisions of
the Principles going on at the same time.
reflected, doubtless also autobiographically, that ‘many of the most original
thoughts of male writers came to them from the suggestion and prompting
of some woman’.225 In Parliament, pleading, on the first occasion such
a motion was ever introduced, for female enfranchisement, he praised
women’s ability to translate moral conscience into a sense of political
duty, and was here doubtless inspired by Taylor.226 He recognised that
society had driven women to have special competency in areas where men
might manifestly lack the requisite skills: respecting Poor Law reform, for
instance, he commented in 1869 that as ‘mere visitors, it is to them we in
great part owe the discovery of the enormities by which the public have
been sickened, and which has escaped the watchfulness of men specially
selected as fit to be inspectors of poorhouses. The fittest person to manage
a workhouse is the person who best knows how to manage a house.’ In
1870 he added that men were often ‘more mentally indolent than women’
and ‘far too ready to believe that they have done everything, or that there is
nothing to be done’. The ‘stronger active impulses of women’ were needed
to rouse men’s consciences and feelings, and rectifying ‘the great physical
and moral evils of society’ was more likely occur if ‘women had a share in
planning’ the process.227
Women, accordingly, had a special role to play in the latest stage of
the progress of modernity: their greater moral sympathy and their skills
at household management meant that achieving their social and politi-
cal rights was indispensable to improvement. This would be the central
argument of The Subjection of Women, but in fact its assumptions under-
lie much of what Mill wrote from 1848 onwards. Feminism accordingly
was not something simply tacked onto Mill’s liberalism: it represented the
development of his general theory of progress, with the family becoming
the fount idea of both liberty and equality in the wider society (or not).
If his own deeply personal intellectual odyssey resulted even in part from
being ‘henpecked’, Mill himself would have responded, well might more
men come under the greater influence of more (good) women. Harriet
225 CW 27, p. 663. He also said in Parliament that ‘[M]any a woman already influences greatly the
political conduct of the men connected with her, and sometimes, by force of will, actually governs
it; but she is never supposed to have anything to do with it; the man whom she influences, and
perhaps misleads, is alone responsible’ (CW 28, p. 157).
226 ‘Women are not usually inferior in tenderness of conscience to men. Make the woman a moral
agent in these matters: show that you expect from her a political conscience: and when she has
learnt to understand the transcendent importance of these things, she will know why it is wrong
to sacrifice political convictions to personal interest or vanity; she will understand that political
integrity is not a foolish personal crotchet, which a man is bound, for the sake of his family, to give
up, but a solemn duty’ (CW 28, p. 158).
227 CW 29, pp. 377, 387. See the discussion by Mendus in ‘The Marriage of True Minds’.
Taylor ‘humanised’ Mill by making him a much more complete person-
ality than he would have been otherwise: this is the substance of his own
claim and the evidence does not seem to refute it.
self-dependence: the critique of blind paternalism

This section will consider more carefully what Mill said about paternalism
and how this has been interpreted by later writers. We will see below that
Mill would come to justify, with some reservations, despotic rule over less
civilised peoples, and to suggest that a modified Saint-Simonian model
suited some circumstances. This was unequivocally his most paternalist
stance. On various occasions, however, Mill firmly rejected paternalist
policies within advanced societies. As with Mill’s remarks about negative
liberty, it is not implausible to take this as a leitmotif of his thought in
general by quoting selectively enough. (But we will in due course reject the
suggestion.) A key question here is thus just what he meant to include by
the term, for as we will see it did not comprise many forms of intervention
which he favoured, including some which later writers have unhesitatingly
called paternalist.
Mill’s earliest comments on the subject date from the late 1830s onwards,
when he became increasingly worried about both paternalist and protec-
tionist trends in the labour movement. Chartism, he thought, had created
‘an impression that rulers are bound both in duty & in prudence to take
more charge, than they have lately been wont to do, of the interests both
temporal & spiritual of the poor’.228 Mill tackled the issue at length in
reviewing what has been described as ‘the then-fashionable handbook of
benevolent paternalism’,229 Arthur Helps’s The Claims of Labour (1845).
Helps, a friend of Carlyle’s, called for a ‘social government’ in which ‘Cap-
tains of Industry’ assumed the responsibilities of the old aristocracy.230 Mill
thought such arguments tended ‘to rivet firmly in the minds of the labour-
ing people the persuasion that it is the business of others to take care of their
condition, without any self control on their own part – & that whatever
is possessed by other people, more than they possess, is a wrong to them,
or at least a kind of stewardship, of which an account is to be rendered
to them’. He agreed nonetheless that it was ‘highly necessary as well as
right, to shew sympathy in all that is good of the new tendencies’.231 But
Helps’s ideal of a utopia of high wages, Mill thought, was plausible only
228 CW 14, p. 544. 229 CW 4, p. xxvi.

230 Helps, The Claims of Labour, p. 34. He did not mention Malthus. 231 CW, 13, pp. 640–4.
when combined with restrictions on marriage and ‘such severe penalties
on illegitimate births, as it would hardly be possible to enforce under a
social system in which all grown persons are, nominally at least, their own
masters’. Yet without such provisions, he added, ‘the millennium promised
would, in little more than a generation, sink the people of any country
in Europe to one level of poverty’.232 This was in part a dig at Carlyle
and authoritarian Saint-Simonism, using Helps to get at Past and Present,
which Mill evidently did not want to confront head on.
These statements seemingly represent Mill’s definitive rejection of pater-
nalism as an institutionalised welfare system and philosophical principle.
Mill’s editors stress that he thought that ‘[P]aternal care implies paternal
authority’, and contend that even after 1848, ‘on the essential core of the
argument against paternalism, there is no reason to believe that Mill’s posi-
tion altered greatly’.233 We will later have occasion to contest this view, or
at least what it appears to describe in terms of the scope of appropriate
state activity. But do Mill’s objections against Helps challenge ‘paternal
authority’ as such, or only its exercise when dependency and lessened
self-reliance increased? And what was ‘good’ in the ‘new tendencies’? In
1845 Mill emphasised chiefly the Malthusian issue, where he clearly felt
that collective self-restraint was the working classes’ best answer. This is
what ‘self-control’, one of his many euphemisms for birth control, prob-
ably principally meant here. Mill agreed that ‘a fair day’s wages for a fair
day’s work’ was a just goal (this probably responds to Carlyle too).234 He
objected, however, to the suggestion that the wealthy should ‘take care that
the labouring people are well off ’, especially where over-population was
not stressed. It was, Mill agreed, ‘quite possible to impose, as a moral or a
legal obligation, upon the higher classes, that they shall be answerable for
the well-doing and well-being of the lower’. But this required ‘as a counter-
vailing element, absolute power, or something approaching to it, in those
who are bound to afford this support, over those entitled to receive it’,
which had never previously existed ‘without immediate degradation to the
character of the dependent class’. This seemingly laid paternalism to rest
for good: guaranteeing subsistence came at the unacceptable price of Car-
lylean political authoritarianism and the euthanasia of individual initiative
(to Mill a logical consequence). Immediately after this passage, however,
Mill wrote that in parts of Austria and Germany things were ‘not carried
quite so far as this’. Here indeed paternal care was still ‘connected with
232 CW 4, p. 375. 233 CW 4, pp. xxvii–viii.
234 This was a leading Chartist slogan, which Carlyle described in Past and Present as ‘as just a demand
as Governed men ever made of Governing’ (p. 18).
paternal authority’, with ‘severe restrictions on marriage’ prohibiting any-
one from marrying ‘unless he satisfies the authorities that he has a rational
prospect of being able to support a family’.235 Yet, crucially, it is unclear
here whether Mill, in 1845, thought this to be an unacceptable degree of
regimentation, or its consequences to be intolerably degrading.
As the Irish Famine instigated another outpouring of poor relief schemes,
Mill wrote Comte in 1847 that systems of ‘government charity’ aiming to
give the poor money, shorter hours of work, and education meant ‘gov-
erning in paternal fashion’, and often forgot that ‘well-being is attained
not just by being passive; that generally what one does for people serves
them only if it supports what they do for themselves’.236 His most exten-
sive discussion of the subject then appeared in the Principles (first edition,
1848). Here ‘habitual prudence’ and education were commended, and the
argument focussed again upon legal restraints on population, foreshad-
owing On Liberty’s account of familial duty. Mill now also outlined for
the first time at length his theory of modern independence, in the ‘Futu-
rity’ chapter, which had not, we recall, been in his first draft. The section
entitled ‘The theory of dependence and protection is no longer appli-
cable to the condition of modern society’ juxtaposed this theory to that
of ‘self-dependence’. In the former account, ‘the lot of the poor, in all
things which affect them collectively, should be regulated for them, not
by them. They should not be required or encouraged to think for them-
selves, or give to their own reflection or forecast an influential voice in
the determination of their destiny’. Here the higher classes were supposed
‘to think for them, and to take the responsibility of their lot . . . The rich
should be in loco parentis to the poor, guiding and restraining them like
children. Of spontaneous action on their part there should be no need.
They should be called on for nothing but to do their day’s work, and to be
moral and religious.’ These beliefs would be ‘provided for them by their
superiors, who should see them properly taught it, and should do all that
is necessary to ensure their being, in return for labour and attachment,
properly fed, clothed, housed, spiritually edified, and innocently amused’.
235 CW 4, pp. 372–4. Malthusianism was important here, too. Marriage restrictions existed in this
period in Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria, Saxony and the Duchy of Holstein, but not Prussia. In
some areas those receiving poor relief could not marry; in others proof of an adequate food supply
was required. See Beck, The Origins of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia, pp. 14–15, 26.
236 CMC, pp. 383–4. He was particularly dismissive of the ‘almost universal’ attitude of the rich to
adopt, as he put it in 1865, ‘a kind of patronising and protective sympathy for the poor, such as
shepherds had for their flocks – only that was conditional upon the flock always behaving like
sheep. But if the sheep tried to have a voice in their own affairs, he was afraid that a good many
shepherds would be willing to call in the wolves’ (CW 28, p. 32 [1865]).
This extreme, archaic (also Carlylean) paternalism, however, Mill rejected.
The upper classes had never ‘performed a part even distantly resembling
the one assigned to them in this theory’. The latter was a mere idealisation
dreamt up by a few philanthropists; by and large all ‘privileged and pow-
erful classes’ had ‘as such . . . used their power in the interest of their own
selfishness’.237
‘Aristocratic paternalism’, as Michael Levin terms it, was thus finished.238
In advanced countries, at least, Mill thought, ‘it may be pronounced cer-
tain, that the patriarchal or paternal system of government’ was one to
which the working classes would ‘not again be subject’. They were increas-
ingly too educated, too mobile, too critical of their notional superiors,
‘becoming less and less dependent, and their minds less and less acquies-
cent in the degree of dependence which remains’. Exhortation or guidance
offered them in future must ‘be tendered to them as equals, and accepted by
them with their eyes open. The prospect of the future depends on the degree
in which they can be made rational beings.’ They would then embrace a
much more egalitarian ideal ‘in which the bond that attaches human beings
to one another, must be disinterested admiration and sympathy for personal
qualities, or gratitude for unselfish services, and not the emotions of protec-
tors towards dependents, or of dependents towards protectors’.239 ‘Blind’,
or servile, paternalism, then, was dead. But were other, more enlightening
types still viable, which might not increase dependency, and might assist
other ends? And how was consensus on such ends to be reached?
Here we need to distinguish between individual sovereignty, or auton-
omy, and its extension into collective freedom from servitude, which
required greater social equality. In 1848 Mill plumped for two kinds of
equality. The first was economic: it was ‘of the utmost possible importance’
that aggregate produce ‘should increase relatively to the number’ who
shared it. The second was social: ‘deferential awe’ was becoming ‘more
and more intolerable’ to the labouring classes, who increasingly sought
self-government. The same reasons which made it ‘no longer necessary
that the poor should depend on the rich’ also made it ‘equally unnec-
essary that women should depend on men’. Given the progress of such
ideas, Mill concluded, it was ‘not to be expected that the division of the
human race into two hereditary classes, employers and employed, can be
permanently maintained’. But an advanced society could not return to
autarkic agricultural independence, dispersing ‘mankind over the earth in
237 CW 3, pp. 758–60.

238 Levin, The Condition of England Question, pp. 105–6. 239 CW 3, p. 761–3.
single families, each ruled internally, as families now are, by a patriarchal
despot, and having scarcely any community of interest, or necessary mental
communion, with other human beings’. The aim of ‘improvement’ was
‘not solely to place human beings in a condition in which they will be
able to do without one another, but to enable them to work with or for
one another in relations not involving dependence’. Hitherto those who
lived by their labour had had only the choice ‘of labouring either each for
himself alone, or for a master’. Now, however, the ‘civilizing and improving
influences of association, and the efficiency and economy of production on
a large scale’, could be ‘obtained without dividing the producers into two
parties with hostile interests and feelings, the many who do the work being
mere servants under the command of the one who supplies the funds, and
having no interest of their own in the enterprise except to earn their wages
with as little labour as possible’.240
Here, then, we have the mature statement of Mill’s belief that self-
dependence defined as collective independence would increasingly result
primarily from collaborative, and particularly cooperative, labour, espe-
cially in industry, and in the eventual supersession of the wage-labour
system. For agricultural societies, such as Ireland and India, as we will
see, he adopted a different solution. What Mill was ‘obliged to call the
new conception of human improvement and happiness – that they do not
consist in being passively ministered to, but in active self-development’,
required both cooperation and ‘the intelligent co-operation of women’.241
Crucially, the concept of ‘self-dependence’ was not yoked to individuality
or ‘autonomy’ in the abstract, as such, but now possessed collective as well
as feminist dimensions. What Mill later termed the ‘first article of my polit-
ical creed . . . the emancipation of the dependent classes – more freedom,
more equality, and more responsibility of each person for himself ’ now had a
much more collective and social focus.242 This passage needs reiteration,
then. For we are now beginning to see Mill emerge as a philosopher of
equality as well as of liberty.
Let us now turn to Mill’s best-known account of paternalism, in On
Liberty. Mill’s subject here was to expound upon what he had elsewhere
described as the ‘modern spirit of liberty . . . the love of individual inde-
pendence; the claim for freedom of action, with as little interference as is
compatible with the necessities of society, from any authority other than
the conscience of the individual’. Once, the state’s interference with ‘the
240 CW 3, pp. 758, 764–5, 767–9.

241 CW 29, p. 375 [1869]. 242 CW 28, p. 23 [1865] (emphasis added).
private concerns of the individual’ had been the key issue.243 Now, it was
the individual’s relation to society, and the best means of fostering ‘individ-
uality’, which included ‘spontaneity’, ‘variety’, ‘originality’, ‘vigour’ and the
Humboldtian principle of ‘human development in its richest diversity’.244
This argument as we have seen has been perceived as unreservedly anti-
paternalist, and as justifying interference in behaviour only when others
are harmed. Doing so because it would be ‘better’ for the individuals con-
cerned, would make them happier, or because others thought ‘it would be
wise or even right’, is rejected.245 Mill’s ‘liberty principle’, in this view, is
‘anti-paternalist’, with very few exceptions, because it ‘denies that a person’s
own good is sufficient ground for the curtailment of their liberty’.246 As
we have seen, it is easy to spin out a negative liberty narrative respect-
ing Mill on the basis of selective quotation. Mill stated explicitly that
any individual ‘of ripe years’ was entitled to do with ‘his life for his own
243 CW 20, pp. 274, 383–4.

244 Von Humboldt’s The Sphere and Duties of Government needs some introduction here as it has rarely
been studied in detail. It claimed that man’s highest end was ‘the highest and most harmonious
development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole’ (p. 11). It warned that any ‘solicitude
of the state for the positive welfare of its citizens’ (excepting minors, lunatics and idiots) was harmful
because it created uniformity and weakened individuality. Thus ‘the entire efforts of the State to
elevate the positive welfare of the nation; of its solicitude for the population of the country, and
the subsistence of its inhabitants, whether manifested directly in such institutions as poor-laws, or
indirectly, in the encouragement of agriculture, industry, and commerce’ were ‘positively hurtful
in their consequences, and wholly irreconcilable with a true system of polity’ (p. 21), and the
state should chiefly ensure ‘mutual security and protection against foreign enemies’ (p. 44), and
avoid efforts to reform morals through sumptuary laws and the like (p. 113). It also described the
restraint of ‘sensualism’, while partly desirable, as lying beyond the means of the state. Humboldt’s
concern with the ‘due limits of State agency’ (p. 4), however, must be contrasted with Mill’s focus
upon ‘social’ tyranny. Humboldt also resisted all attempts to regulate marriage by law (pp. 33–4),
and upheld a less restrictive freedom of bequest and inheritance than Mill contemplated (p. 139),
arguing that the state should not aim either to preserve fortunes or break them up (pp. 141–2).
But he recognised a parental duty ‘to put their children in a condition (partly by personal care
for their physical and moral well-being, and partly by providing them with the necessary means)
to choose a plan of life for themselves’ (p. 177), and insisted that the ‘State must see that the
parents strictly fulfil their duty towards their children’ (p. 181). He also outlined something like
Mill’s ‘harm’ principle, arguing that ‘we cannot conceive the injustice of any actions which only
create offence, and especially as regards religion and morals. He who utters or performs anything
calculated to wound the conscience and moral sense of others, may indeed act immorally; but, so
long as he is not chargeable with obtrusiveness in these respects, he violates no right’ (pp. 121–2).
Thus ‘where rights are infringed on by such actions, it is clearly the duty of the State to restrict
them, and compel the agents to repair the injury they have inflicted. But . . . these actions do no
violence to right except when, they deprive another of a part of his freedom or possessions without,
or against, his will’ (p. 131).
245 CW 18, p. 224. See generally Arneson, ‘Mill versus Paternalism’.
246 Archard, ‘Freedom Not To Be Free: The Case of the Slavery Contract in Mill’s On Liberty’, p. 453.
On the pedigree of parts of this concept, see Tierney, ‘Dominion of Self and Natural Rights before
Locke and After’.
benefit’ what he chose to do.247 He did not add ‘of mature judgement’ or
‘following sound advice’ or even ‘all other things being equal’. Granting
people freedom of choice implies allowing them to make bad decisions,
though this fits awkwardly with the proviso, ‘for his own benefit’. But
they also gain the conscious, risk-taking pleasure of so doing, and another
benefit, that of learning from the pain of the results, both of which help
build moral autonomy, which remains an uncontentious goal regardless of
one’s politics.248 But if the option is meddling in self-regarding behaviour
merely to increase happiness (from a utilitarian viewpoint), we must pre-
fer the course of freedom-maximisation.249 Actions were usually to be left
unimpeded since, largely following Bentham, coercive interference often
implied greater harm than self-regarding actions produced.250 At its most
elementary level, then, the harm principle denies that we should obstruct
any exercise of self-regarding freedom, and thus implies rejecting ‘all forms
of despotism and paternalism’.251
Or so it would appear. For Mill does here provide four key instances
where paternal interference seems justified. The first is that we may prevent
someone from crossing an unsafe bridge without infringing their liberty,
for ‘liberty consists in doing what one desires, and he does not desire to fall
into the river’. This is sometimes called a ‘samaritan’ intervention, because
we are only helping people to do what they already want, not preventing
them from doing something, much less making them do what they do
not want to do. Hence there is no true coercion here.252 Secondly, Mill
247 CW 18, p. 277.

248 As Berger has written, we presuppose in applying the liberty principle that ‘the agent have the
capacity of acting autonomously’ – but this includes the freedom to make mistakes based upon
irrational choices (Happiness, Justice, and Freedom, p. 270). There is also a tacit argument here that
if we treat people as adults they will act like adults, or rise to the level of responsibility we impute
to them, notably by extending the same treatment to us. This runs parallel (for a time, anyway) to
the argument that the more freedom one is given, the more freedom one wants.
249 Raz, The Morality of Freedom, pp. 413–14; Regan, ‘Justifications for Paternalism’, p. 190. Regan
rejects the idea that freedom can here be treated as a component of happiness, citing the case of
happy soldiers, nuns and so on (p. 192). Social unity, thus, by contrast, might be seen to be such a
component.
250 Bentham terms punishment ‘unprofitable’ when its evil is greater than the nature of the offence.
See the discussion in Rees, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, pp. 35–50 and Long, Bentham on Liberty,
pp. 106–18. Bentham’s formulation of the issue had been that the law ought to permit such acts by
which ‘no damage would be done to the community upon the whole; that is, either no damage at
all, or none but what promises to be compensated by at least equal benefit’ (The Works of Jeremy
Bentham, vol. 2, p. 506). Thus acts whose mischief was not ‘extra-regarding’, and which had no
‘assignable person or persons for its object’, were no cause for alarm and were ‘cases unmeet for
punishment’ either because they were groundless, or punishment would be inefficient, unprofitable
or needless (Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, p. 151).
251 Capaldi, ‘John Stuart Mill’s Defense of Liberal Culture’, pp. 96–7.
252 CW 18, p. 294. LaSelva, ‘“A Single Truth”’, thus denies that interference in the bridge case is
paternalist at all, because the individual is not forced to comply with it.
proscribes selling ourselves into slavery, on the grounds that we cannot ‘be
free not to be free’. Thirdly, we may interfere with certain types of non-
self-regarding activity, such as drunkenness and brothel-keeping, where
we agree such behaviour harms others. Mill was very uneasy about when
and how this should be done, however, as well as about the existing con-
sensus on such questions. He simply sits on the fence respecting most of
these issues, while (mostly) tilting towards presumptive non-interference.
Finally, we may promote various goods or prevent evils in the public,
non-self-regarding domain, by taxation, conscription, jury duty and the
like. Here there were ‘many positive acts for the benefit of others’ which
people could ‘rightfully be compelled to perform’. These included giving
evidence in court, contributing to defence costs, or ‘any other joint work
necessary to the interest of the society of which he enjoys the protec-
tion’, as well as ‘performing certain acts of individual beneficence, such
as saving a fellow-creature’s life, or interposing to protect the defenceless
against ill-usage, things which whenever it is obviously a man’s duty to do,
he may rightfully be made responsible to society for not doing’.253 This
is an entirely different form of paternalism (if this is what it is) where
social duties are given pre-eminence. The domain to which it applies is
potentially quite large. Here, we will see, general utility and expediency
might trump liberty on many occasions. Some critics accordingly have
found such injunctions to be ‘quite at variance’ with the wider liberty
principle.254 For here, Mill confessed, the question was ‘not about restrain-
ing the actions of individuals, but about helping them . . . for their benefit,
instead of leaving it to be done by themselves, individually, or in voluntary
combination’.255
An extraordinarily rich literature has grown up around the harm prin-
ciple, interrogating its general dependence on utility (or not);256 whether
it is derived from rules; the degree to which it hinged on duties;257 how
far it addresses ‘interests’ (or ‘vital interests’) rather than ‘concerns’ or
253 CW 18, pp. 224–5. Mill thought it ‘a serious question whether a person who can save another’s life
& does not do it even without any hope of reward, ought not to be amenable to the criminal law’
(CW 16, p. 1319 [1867]). There is, as in the bridge case, a presumptive immediacy in this assertion
of mandatory samaritanism.
254 Journal of the Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights, no. 54 (15 May 1885), 73.
255 CW 18, p. 305.
256 For a rejection of the view that Mill generally provided a utilitarian idea of intervention,
see Honderich, ‘The Worth of J.S. Mill On Liberty’. See also Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty,
pp. 173–206, Friedman. ‘A New Exploration of Mill’s Essay On Liberty’, Wollheim, ‘John Stuart
Mill and Isaiah Berlin’, Strasser, ‘Mill and the Utility of Liberty’ and Ten, ‘Mill’s Defence of
Liberty’.
257 In which Mill broadly followed Bentham’s distinction between duties of prudence, referring to the
self, and those of probity, referring to others. Here see Kilcullen, ‘Mill on Duty and Liberty’.
‘effects’, ‘rights’ or ‘happiness’;258 whether ‘harm’ entails ‘damage’, ‘injury’,
‘hurt’, ‘pain’, ‘offence’, ‘nuisance’; how profound, direct or wounding such
effects had to be to constitute ‘harm’, and whether failing to help others
fell into this category;259 whether offending people’s beliefs, as opposed
to obstructing their freedom, makes (speech) acts non-self-regarding;260
to what extent it involves or can be defined in terms of ‘exploitation’;261
whether such rights, interests, etc., had to be already defined, possibly
in law, or were ideal, in other words, rights which individuals ought to
possess;262 when punishment should be confined to moral coercion, and
when legal constraint was justified; whether Mill attempted to promote
universalistic norms (against the beliefs of particular religions, for exam-
ple), or whether morals varied greatly between nations, and such variations
were to be permitted to stand;263 whether we should take into account
people’s changing needs, ideals and aspirations over time, and subsequent
alterations in their identity;264 its linkage to Mill’s conception of auton-
omy, self-realisation and individuality;265 whether we should distinguish
between ‘cooperative paternalism’, in which mutual love and respect for
nurturing equality plays a major role, and ‘conflictual paternalism’, where
long-term domination remains an aim;266 whether Mill chiefly construed
liberty as absence of coercion, or viewed it as something more positive, as
the self-cultivation of ‘originality’, ‘genius’, ‘spontaneity’, etc., possibly in
Aristotelian or other terms;267 how far the purported rationality of individ-
uals’ consent enters into justifications of coercion; and finally (but this list
is not exhaustive), whether paternalism construed as promoting the good
might in some or even many circumstances be justified.268
258 A good start on this issue is Rees, ‘A Re-reading of Mill on Liberty’, Williams, ‘Mill’s Principle
of Liberty’, Brown, ‘Mill on Harm to Others’ Interests’ and Thomas, ‘Rights, Consequences, and
Mill on Liberty’ and Gray, Mill On Liberty, pp. 48–57.
259 See, here, e.g., Lyons, ‘Liberty and Harm to Others’. Devlin’s well-known account says it is ‘chiefly
physical harm’ that Mill has in mind (The Enforcement of Morals, p. 104). Feinberg also suggests
that a restriction to ‘harm or death’ would provide a more ‘precise and defensible’ version of the
harm principle (Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty, p. 61).
260 As in Sabbatarian legislation. This inference is rejected by, e.g., Wollheim, ‘John Stuart Mill and
the Limits of State Action’, pp. 9–10.
261 See Feinberg, ‘Noncoercive Exploitation’.
262 For example, as defined by utility: a point insisted on by Honderich, ‘The Worth of J.S. Mill On
Liberty’, pp. 466–7.
263 See Wollheim, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Limits of State Action’, pp. 6–7, on this point.
264 See Regan, ‘Paternalism, Freedom, Identity, and Commitment’.
265 A useful start here is Smith, ‘The Logic of J.S. Mill on Freedom’.
266 See Douglas, ‘Cooperative Paternalism versus Conflictful Paternalism’, where the former type of
‘reciprocal altruism’ is offered as an alternative to ‘state paternalism’.
267 A good summary of many of these issues is presented in Halliday, ‘Some Recent Interpretations of
John Stuart Mill’, Ten, ‘Mill and Liberty’ and Collini, ‘Liberalism and the Legacy of Mill’.
268 For a review of this argument, see Brock, ‘Paternalism and Promoting the Good’.
Emerging from this debate, numerous definitions of both moral and
legal paternalism have emerged to explain Mill’s position.269 Paternalism
has been variously conceived as ‘interference with a person’s liberty of action
justified by reasons referring exclusively to the welfare, good, happiness,
needs, interests or values of the person being coerced’ (Dworkin);270 as
‘state coercion to protect individuals from self-inflicted harm or, in its
extreme version, to guide them, whether they like it or not, toward their
own good’ (Feinberg);271 as ‘the usurpation of one person’s choice of their
own good by another person’ (Archard);272 as the ‘protection of people
against themselves’ (Hart);273 as the ‘attempt to regulate the citizen for
his own good’ (Spahr);274 as the use of compulsion for an agent’s own
good (Berger, McCloskey, Murphy, Husak);275 as implementing policies
‘with restrictions on a person’s liberty which are carried out against his
will’ (Arneson);276 and as ‘any interference with the individual’s liberty
269 Historical approaches to the concept include Thornton, The Habit of Authority, which broadly
takes the concept to mean government ‘for the people’, and Roberts, Paternalism in Victorian
England, which stresses that most paternalists believed ‘the poor should be self-reliant . . . and
should not be dependent on government’ (p. 42), and settles upon four assumptions as common
to paternalist writers in this period: that society should be authoritarian, hierarchic, organic and
pluralistic (pp. 2–3). The doctrine that ‘property has its duties as well as its rights’ is held here to
be its central tenet (p. 4). For purposes of brevity the moral/legal distinction is not developed here.
270 Dworkin, ‘Paternalism’, in Dworkin, ed. Mill On Liberty: Critical Essays, p. 62. Dworkin’s views are
treated in Young, ‘John Stuart Mill, Ronald Dworkin, and Paternalism’ and Wilkinson, ‘Dworkin
on Paternalism and Well-Being’.
271 Joel Feinberg, ‘Legal Paternalism’, p. 3. Feinberg distinguishes between legal paternalism (preventing
harm to someone by interfering with their freedom), legal moralism (preventing inherently immoral
conduct) and moralistic legal paternalism (preventing moral harm to someone) (The Moral Limits
of the Criminal Law, vol 1, pp. 12–13). These are in addition to the harm principle (preventing
harm to others from an individual’s conduct) and the offence principle (preventing serious offence
to others), and to stronger versions of the same principle which substitute ‘bring about a benefit’
for ‘preventing harm’. Dworkin discusses this typology in ‘Moral Paternalism’, and also contrasts
volitional well-being, when we are improved by getting what we want, and critical well-being, when
this is amended to being improved by getting what we ought to want. He then further distinguishes
between an additive view about what increases the value of a person’s life, where we do not need to
consult an individual’s opinions in judging the value of their lives, and a constitutive view, where no
part of an individual’s life is valuable which has not been endorsed by that individual (Foundations
of Liberal Equality, pp. 50–1). Feinberg has also broadly defended paternalist legislation (defined
as ‘the protection of people against themselves’) and includes most departures from laissez-faire as
falling into this category. This expansion out of the moral domain leaves plenty of scope to describe
Mill as a paternalist, as we will see, despite a proscription from interfering in wholly self-regarding
conduct.
272 Archard, ‘Paternalism Defined’, where, crucially, ‘choice or opportunity to choose is denied or
diminished’ (p. 36).
273 Hart, ‘Paternalism and the Enforcement of Morality’, p. 62. Hart here objects to the ‘fantastic’
lengths to which Mill’s objections to paternalism stretch.
274 Described as the ‘basic theme of On Liberty’ in Spahr, ‘Mill on Paternalism in its Place’, p. 162.
275 Berger, Happiness, Justice, and Freedom, p. 175; McCloskey, John Stuart Mill, p. 107; Murphy,
‘Incompetence and Paternalism’, p. 465; Husak, ‘Legal Paternalism’, p. 388.
276 Arneson, ‘Mill versus Paternalism’, p. 484. Or: ‘depriving a person of liberty against his will for his
own good’ (Arneson, ‘Democracy and Liberty in Mill’s Theory of Government’, p. 55).
of self-regarding actions’ (Riley).277 In a well-known account, John Gray
defines ‘legal paternalism’ as justifying ‘state coercion to protect individuals
from self-inflicted harm or . . . induce individuals to act in ways beneficial to
themselves’, adding that the ‘anti-paternalist implication of Mill’s principle’
means that we cannot ‘legitimately interfere with the fully voluntary choice
of a mature rational agent concerning matters which affect only or primarily
his own interests’. This commits Mill only to a ‘weak form of paternalism’
aiming ‘to prevent harmful self-regarding conduct when it is clearly not
the result of considered rational deliberation’.278 In particular, protecting
an individual’s interests, construed over a longer time frame, cannot be
grounds for such interference.279 Other writers, however, have expanded
on the number of instances where paternalism might be justified.280 Many
have remained unhappy, however, about the apparent fragility of Mill’s
central premise. Even friends like John Morley lamented that the book’s
weakness lay ‘in the want of definition for self-regarding acts’.281 And some
have thus subsequently condemned Mill’s efforts as ultimately constituting
a ‘remarkable failure’.282
Yet Mill’s distinction has remained vital to modern liberalism. Those
who have tried to work with Mill’s principle have tended to divide in
particular over three issues; first, whether paternalism chiefly involves pre-
venting individuals from harming themselves; secondly, whether it entails
preventing immorality whose ‘harm’ is asserted in moral norms but may
be less palpable (e.g. in the bedroom and the public house);283 and thirdly,
whether, in positively promoting goods a population collectively or in part
require or should want, obstructing freedom may or may not be an issue.
277 Riley, Guidebook, p. 196. Riley contends that such acts strictly speaking are without harm, since
the latter implies ‘perceptible injury suffered against one’s wishes’.
278 See Berger’s discussion of this point (Happiness, Justice, and Freedom, pp. 263–4), and Gray, Mill on
Liberty, pp. 90–2. Ten follows a similar line (Mill On Liberty, pp. 109–117), as does Joel Feinberg
(‘Legal Paternalism’, pp. 12–15).
279 Gray, Mill On Liberty, pp. 90–5.
280 Hodson, e.g., offers six circumstances in which paternalism might be justified: in cases of ignorance,
emotional stress, compulsion and undue influence, mental illness, non-rationality and serious harm
(‘The Principle of Paternalism’).
281 Hirst, Early Life and Letters of John Morley (vol. 1), p. 276.
282 In Honderich’s words; ‘The Worth of J.S. Mill On Liberty’, p. 468. To John Gray, Mill’s project
was ‘bound to fail’, and disintegrated ‘into a sort of muddled and unwitting value-pluralism’ (‘Mill
and Other Liberalisms’, p. 126).
283 The concept of ‘moral legal paternalism’ has been developed to describe defences of the state’s efforts
‘to make persons better off morally’ or, in Devlin’s well-known phrase, to secure ‘the enforcement of
morals’. These assumptions may rest on the argument that a society requires a stable moral system
to avoid disintegration, and that if a majority believe an act to be immoral society is justified
and perhaps even compelled to prohibit it. See Husak, ‘Legal Paternalism’, p. 409; Devlin, The
Enforcement of Morals.
In the two former instances, in turn, many of Mill’s interpreters,
despite disagreements, have focussed on two related issues: consent and
competency.284 Most, like Dworkin, have insisted that lack of consent
always involves coercive restriction of liberty. Here the Roman maxim
volenti non fit injuria (to one who has consented no wrong is done) is com-
monly deployed.285 Many, like Feinberg, see Mill as permitting intervention
where self-harm is not consciously voluntary. Here paternalism implies
‘coercing someone against his will or without his consent’286 (though
the review of Helps just examined, where paternalism is described as at
least having been previously consensual to some degree, hardly supports
this view).287 Such exclusions permit Mill to be termed a resolute anti-
paternalist without much difficulty. But the concepts of consent and com-
petency are not, of course, even remotely unproblematic. If Mill rejected
interference to prevent self harm ‘even when his decision is fully volun-
tary or totally unimpaired’, but accepted it where ‘a defect in his decision
to engage in the self-harming activity’ existed, how do we define this
‘defect’?288 Does ignorance make one ‘defective’ in this regard? Consent,
too, may be gained post facto (e.g. in a common example in the Mill
revival of the late twentieth century, mandatory seat-belt legislation). But
other problems remain. How do we draw a line between when we require
tacit or active consent? Is citizenship alone sufficient to imply the latter?
What happens when majorities consent but minorities do not? And in a
highly manipulative world, is not consent which is manufactured or sim-
ply bought, contrived, artificial and consequently inauthentic?289 A similar
284 See generally Murphy, ‘Incompetence and Paternalism’.

285 See Dahl, ‘Paternalism and Rational Desire’.
286 Arneson, ‘Democracy and Liberty in Mill’s Theory of Government’, p. 45; Feinberg, The Moral
Limits of the Criminal Law (vol. 3), pp. 98–142, 316–43, and ‘Legal Paternalism’, pp. 110–11. Those
who disagree here, and argue that paternalistic intervention need not entail coercion, include
Kleinig, Paternalism, p. 7; Gert and Culver, ‘Paternalistic Behaviour’ (instancing a doctor who
gives an unconscious patient a blood transfusion without knowing their ethical objections to
such treatment). On consent see also Carter, ‘Justifying Paternalism’, where ‘coercive interference’
is a key attribute of paternalist intervention, but ‘subsequent consent’ also counts as ‘consent’,
and generally the rich and extensive discussion in VanDeVeer’s Paternalistic Intervention. Waithe,
among others, implies that all paternalism involves interference without consent (‘Why Mill Was
for Paternalism’, p. 101).
287 In pre- or non-democratic regimes, exchanges of welfare guarantees for obedience and loyalty often
define much of the paternal relationship between rich and poor, and can certainly be described as
broadly consensual and non-coercive on both sides (think of the fifth of the one million strong
population of ancient Rome who as citizens received free bread, or many modern welfare systems).
Mill’s objection here is thus chiefly based upon the violation of an autonomy principle, not upon
coercion as such.
288 Ten, Mill On Liberty, p. 110. See also Lindley, Autonomy, pp. 110–12, for a summary of this view.
289 A number of these issues are addressed in Herzog, Happy Slaves. A Critique of Consent Theory.
range of problems arises with the concept of coercion, too. It can plausibly
be argued that all law involves coercion, since all social order rests on the
threat of punishment, and that in democracy the consent of majorities
habitually rests upon the coercion of minorities. We may wish to minimise
coercion, thus, but we cannot even in principle imagine it disappearing.
Indeed we may want to increase some (less malevolent) types in order to
minimise others.
Broadly speaking, nonetheless, Mill’s interpreters agree that he implied
that we may intervene in behaviour proportionately to an individual’s com-
petency to judge outcomes. But the bridge case may present a more sub-
stantial ‘competency’ wedge in Mill’s general principle, indeed a bridge too
far. We may be restrained because we do not wish to fall into the water,
and this is not really ‘coerced’ constraint. But the binge drinker does not
desire liver failure, or the junkie to die of an overdose, either. We may
claim that we would gain consent if ‘those coerced or manipulated were
rational or fully informed or both’.290 But defining ‘competency’ is difficult
at the best of times: one person’s irrationality may be another’s common
sense. How wide is the range of cases, then, where we do not foresee
harm to ourselves which others might? There is no point in consenting to
things which harm us, if we are unaware of the consequences: this simply
indicates diminished responsibility on our part. (Where the consequences
are abundantly evident, as in tobacco use, self-harm in adults is evidently
permissible on this principle.) How does immediate harm differ from long-
term potential harm (the bridge, e.g., versus tobacco, drugs, alcohol), if
the principle that we do not wish to harm ourselves remains the same?
We clearly may regulate children or others ‘incapable of being acted upon
by rational consideration of distant motives’. But should adults suffering
from this deficiency be ignored, since ‘society has itself to blame for the
consequences’ if it has failed to educated them properly?291 Few might,
owing to lack of education, actually be the best judges of their own interest
on many occasions, much less the interest of society or humanity over a
lengthy period of time.292 Few may really possess ‘freedom to choose’, in
Berlin’s phrase, for some life-plans are markedly superior to others, and not
all make each person ‘more valuable to himself ’ and thus ‘capable of being
290 Lively, ‘Paternalism’, p. 151. To Hodson, thus, paternalist interventions are justifiable only if the
person assisted ‘would be supportive of the paternalistic intervention if they were not encumbered’
by coercion, irrationality, etc. We cannot, in other words, assist others in ways which they would
themselves disapprove of: to do so would move us from a ‘weak’ paternalism Mill was willing to
defend, to a ‘strong’ view which he was not (Lively, ‘Paternalism’, pp. 61–8).
291 CW 18, p. 282. 292 See Hollis, ‘The Social Liberty Game’, pp. 33–4.
more valuable to others’.293 But then surely society has the duty to raise
the educational hurdles (occasionally, at the very least, if not regularly) in
order to minimise such failures of judgement, rather than simply letting
standards slide inexorably, as they will in any mass democracy, to the low-
est common denominator? The broad principle remains, however, that the
more we are incompetent judges of the consequences of our actions, the
more justifiable impediment and/or guidance becomes.
A strong/weak or hard/soft distinction focussing on coercion and com-
petency has served as a means of meeting some of these objections and
accounting more accurately for Mill’s intentions. ‘Hard’ paternalism can
describe non-consensual interference in the conduct of mature adults who
supposedly know their own interests best, to protect them, against their
will, from the harmful consequences of their voluntary actions, or where
someone’s choice is not really their own (whatever this means). ‘Soft’ pater-
nalism applies to cases where consent exists.294 To C. L. Ten, Mill supports
only a weak paternalism in which we may ‘prevent a person from harm-
ing himself only when there is a defect in his decision to engage in the
self-harming activity’. On Liberty in particular appears to defend hard or
strong paternalism only in the extreme instance of selling oneself into
slavery.295 But some have also seen this as another wedge in Mill’s larger
argument. For if we have no right to alienate our freedom here, why accept
other ‘freedom-abridging’ contracts (in Archard’s term) (‘wage-slavery’,
marriage, for women, at the time),296 if here too we ‘abrogate’ our liberty,
or cause ‘major and not easily reversed harm’,297 or where our servitude
may be as arduous as slavery itself? Marriage is clearly a key example here.
Poor relief remains a perennial problem too.298 (Shades of the National
Charity Company!) But these analogies may not be appropriate: such con-
tracts are supposedly or notionally voluntarily entered into and fall well
short of slavery. This is particularly true in the economic domain. Did Mill
293 CW 18, p. 266; Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, pp. 205–6. See further Ladenson, ‘Mill’s Conception
of Individuality’.
294 See generally Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (vol. 3) and Dworkin, ‘Paternalism’,
pp. 105–12.
295 Ten, Mill On Liberty, pp. 110, 113–17; Feinberg, ‘Legal Paternalism’, p. 124; Samuel LaSelva, ‘Selling
Oneself into Slavery’.
296 Archard, ‘Freedom Not To Be Free’, p. 464. The Subjection of Women described the wife as ‘the actual
bondservant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so
called’ (CW 21, p. 284). Surely Mill and Taylor hinted that On Liberty’s dictum on self-enslavement
should apply here.
297 Murphy’s phrase, in ‘Incompetence and Paternalism’, p. 483.
298 A workhouse, e.g., might provide food coercively by forcing individuals to reside in it to receive
relief, while outdoor relief – money, for example – would provide subsistence non-coercively. But
in both cases consent might be given, if less freely in the former instance.
intend to imply that capitalist exploitation could be coercive and harmful,
even if it fell outside the rubric of the harm principle? Indisputably.299 The
Principles described freedom of contract respecting children as ‘but another
word for freedom of coercion’. But Mill also claimed that the situation was
not analogous for female factory labourers, who were not (he thought)
‘slaves and drudges; precisely because they cannot easily be compelled to
work and earn wages in factories against their will’.300 In prosperous times,
perhaps, some modern readers might grudgingly respond, but what about
in a recession? Freedom to choose starvation is an awkward freedom. Yet
in the same work Mill also stated more realistically that the ‘generality of
labourers in this and most other countries, have as little choice of occupa-
tion or freedom of locomotion, are practically as dependent on fixed rules
and on the will of others, as they could be on any system short of actual
slavery’.301 Still ‘short of ’, we note. But hardly consensual, except in a very
fatalistic sense, where the (very unpleasant) workhouse is the alternative.
There are clearly degrees of voluntariness or consent from the very free to
the virtually coerced. It seems then that it must be the (near or potentially)
absolute abrogation of self-dominion in slavery, compared to other con-
tracts, which is the real issue for Mill: freedom to engage in lesser forms of
self-harm is not usually similarly limited.
If, however, paternalism to promote liberty or enhance autonomy is the
crux of the slavery instance, then the principle may point in quite another
direction. For a third form of interference aims at increasing our well-
being and prospects for self-fulfilment as well as strengthening our sense
of public moral duty (which of course also underpins both freedom and
autonomy).302 Here utilitarianism may minimally indicate interference
in most social-regarding activities, at least wherever increasing happiness
outweighs the pain of coercion. Paternalism here might broadly include
any act which regulates behaviour to prevent harm or promote good.
Substantial assistance from the state or fellow-citizens may be required
where our own efforts are inadequate to the task either because we cannot
imagine amending our behaviour to improve it (the education issue), or
when we cannot alter our behaviour when we wish to, or are incapable
of doing so even when we wish to.303 (Indeed, as Hollis has insisted,
299 For a discussion of the uses of ‘exploitation’ see Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law
(vol. 4), pp. 176–276.
300 CW 3, pp. 952–3. 301 CW 2, p. 209.
302 Regan, ‘Justifications for Paternalism’, pp. 192–3. To Dworkin preserving a wider range of freedoms
for the individual is the sole justification for paternalism. Stafford defines a paternalist as someone
committed to improving the lives of their fellow citizens (John Stuart Mill, p. 99).
303 Thus demanding what Smith has termed an ‘Owenite social manipulation’, which appears ‘ironi-
cally, as a positive condition of freedom’ (‘The Logic of J.S. Mill on Freedom’, p. 243).
where freedom is defined in terms of attaining virtue many forms of
intervention which make people more virtuous might be counselled.)304
In a democratically elected government all such acts are presumptively
consensual, even if we do not vote for the government enacting them, for
these are the rules by which democracy operates. Here, then, it may be
wise to ascertain what educated (more competent) opinion indicates, and
accede to it. Following others may paradoxically enhance our autonomy by
giving us a better outcome. Such paternalism might also be altruistic insofar
as or in the degree to which it does not demand unquestioning obedience
and dependency as the price of benevolence. Subject to the provision that
neither state power nor individual dependency are unduly increased, the
state might here play a powerful role in developing autonomy-promoting
paternalism. Here what is often termed positive liberty comes fully into
play.
These principles clearly apply to a wide range of behaviour. We will
see that Mill largely exempted economic activity from being subject to
the harm principle. The Principles, as we will see, defined a domain of
authoritative intervention where the state required or prohibited certain
forms of behaviour, with a view to determining the limits of state action.305
States may tax or conscript us, or incarcerate us in the workhouse as the
price for receiving poor relief, and we may bankrupt others through fierce
competition, without ‘harm’ taking place. Gray concedes that the Prin-
ciples’ further discussion of ‘non-authoritative’ state activity, where mere
advice or guidance are offered without any compulsion, has ‘nothing to
do with harm prevention’ and represents no inconsistency for Mill.306 A
key question, however, is when ‘authoritative’ intervention might infringe
the liberty principle, and in particular whether taxation falls under this
rubric. Some later individualist writers thought that Mill’s idea of ‘taking
money from one man, and using it for the benefit of others’ was ‘not con-
sistent’ with his theory of liberty, no more right being evident than ‘Robin
Hood had to levy black mail on fat abbots for the good of the poor’.307
Others proclaimed that the expediency doctrine ‘opens the floodgates and
leaves no barrier to the onrushing tide of government interference’, and
that ‘Mill’s fundamental principle of taxation . . . is based on Socialistic
assumptions . . . is intended to carry out Socialistic ends, and stands or falls
304 Hollis, ‘J.S. Mill’s Political Philosophy of Mind’.

305 On this point see Wollheim, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Limits of State Action’.
306 Gray, Mill On Liberty, pp. 62–3.
307 Journal of the Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights, no. 54 (15 Nov. 1885), p. 74.
Voluntary taxation became a theme in both anarchism and individualist liberalism in this period.
with Socialism’.308 Much revenue-raising might be covered by the com-
petency argument, and be excused by routine tacit consent, though taxes
on alcohol and tobacco use clearly restrict liberty of moral action. A few
later writers have tentatively suggested that Mill thought some taxes might
infringe liberty in tacitly supporting a principle of ‘no enforced charity’,
where ‘if a person’s conduct threatens no harm to nonconsenting others,
restricting his liberty to carry out that conduct in order to force him to
act for the benefit of others is never justified’.309 But there is little evidence
for Mill supporting this reasoning. In an important discussion, Gerald
Dworkin takes up the case of mandatory social security contributions.310
Joel Feinberg terms this only a ‘possible’ paternalistic rationale because it is
manifestly in everyone’s interest that each person have an adequate retire-
ment pension, rather than specifically each person’s.311 Yet this is a very fine
line indeed: my failure to provide myself with a pension clearly harms me
as well as the taxpayer who must accordingly supplement my welfare, and
a self- versus non-self-regarding distinction is virtually impossible to draw.
Again we must carefully distinguish between what Mill argued and what
may be inferred from his positions, or where we might choose to disagree
with these.
A key problem in the debate over paternalism, then, has been the lack of
a clear distinction between paternalism respecting self-regarding and social-
regarding acts. An insistence that an autonomy ideal dominates the former
has produced no juxtaposition to policies in the latter domain which have
a bearing on autonomy. We will see, however, that for Mill the state and
the public had extraordinarily powerful roles to play in promoting progress
as such, particularly in redistributing resources, where liberty was evidently
trumped on a massive scale by equality, and competency (expertise) would
likely play a much larger role than in judgements of minor harm. Here too,
while Mill wished to avoid ‘hard’ paternalism where possible, the issues
were very different. For here we are much more concerned with what we
ought to want than what we want at this moment, and we are much
more concerned with the social than the individual damage which results
when we fail to act. On Liberty was not, admittedly, concerned with one
other great end of progress, promoting social equality through collective
independence, except in a very remote sense. But Mill had not abandoned
this ideal at all; to the contrary. In not addressing it directly, however, he
was not obliged to introduce a range of paternalist measures which, we
308 The Personal Rights Journal, no. 133 (May 1893), p. 35.
309 Arneson, ‘Paternalism, Utility, and Fairness’, p. 83. 310 Dworkin, ‘Paternalism’, p. 109.
311 Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (vol. 3), p. 18.
will shortly see, he felt this end required. For this reason, then, On Liberty
appears uniquely to represent an anti-paternalist standpoint, because Mill
presumes that most of the types of intervention to promote well-being
(welfare-promoting paternalism) have been dealt with elsewhere. But how
can we gain consent to radical plans for avoiding future evils which may
involve considerable immediate as well as long-term financial and other
costs, and whose complexity bewilders the majority?
conclusion
This brief discussion of paternalism indicates divisions over whether auton-
omy or self-determination is presumptively undermined by most forms of
intervention; or whether, to the contrary, individual well-being (liberty,
happiness, equality, security and autonomy) may be promoted by pater-
nalistic intervention.312 Whether we conceive autonomy as being promoted
more by negative or positive liberty thus dictates to a substantial degree
our opinion of the value of paternalism. There is, however, no consensus
as to whether Mill was only mildly or perhaps resolutely anti-paternalist,
and considerable disagreement as to what paternalism means in the first
instance. Most writing on this subject in both moral philosophy and prac-
tical ethics has been distinguished by a notable anti-paternalist bias, par-
ticularly from the viewpoint of a defence of moral autonomy, as well as
of a particularly anti-statist variety of liberalism.313 Most interpreters of
Mill’s supposed anti-paternalism, however, address only the domain of
self-regarding moral activity.314 It is often thought that Mill rejected ‘state’
paternalism in principle (children, the mentally infirm, animals and ‘bar-
barians’ excepted, or those generally in a weaker contractual situation), and
assumed that individuals were generally the best judges of their own inter-
est except where competency issues arise.315 Here the presence or absence
312 Good summaries of these positions are given in Brock, ‘Paternalism and Autonomy’ and Scoccia,
‘Paternalism and Respect for Autonomy’.
313 Husak, ‘Paternalism and Autonomy’ and Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law
(vol. 4), pp. 318–38. An exception is VanDeVeer, Paternalistic Intervention, which attempts to
reconcile autonomy with justifiable paternalism, while maintaining that respect for autonomy,
or a right of self-direction, must always be satisfied. Feinberg also holds that the right of self-
determination in the event of a conflict ‘takes precedence even over his own good’ (The Moral
Limits of the Criminal Law (vol. 3), p. 61).
314 E.g., Donner, The Liberal Self, p. 170.
315 Habibi writes that establishing ‘state paternalism, even to a small degree, opens the door to
interference with people’s freedom to decide for themselves what is good. Mill saw state paternalism
as unnecessary because he had faith that various elites would somehow assume positions of influence
and leadership’ (John Stuart Mill and the Ethic of Growth, p. 233). Skinner warns that we should be
of coercion has usually been seen as definitive of paternalism. Defining
coercion has often turned here on whether express or tacit consent to
interference – ‘free choice’ – has been (or is later) obtained by the person
concerned, where ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ labels refer to broadly non-consensual
as opposed to more voluntary types. Paternalism is usually thus conceived
negatively, as restricting liberty.
Such criteria do not apply to the second main form of the idea, positive
paternalism, whose aim is promoting the social-regarding goods of all. This
domain includes authoritative state intervention in the areas of social policy
(e.g. poor relief, possibly marriage laws), or political policy (constitutional
design, the franchise), and potentially many other areas pertaining to the
common good (the environment, long-term economic and social goals,
like promoting equality). As we will now see, Mill provides us with a much
more extensive range of interventions when we consider his writings as a
whole than On Liberty alone indicates. On Liberty thus gives us a rather
limited and somewhat misleading account of how Mill wished society
to move forward, and what agencies (individuals, elites, governments) he
thought should play a role in promoting progress. Therein may lie some
of its elegance. But this has produced a very inadequate sense of what Mill
thought the goals of public activity should consist of, and how states and
societies could and should ensure future progress. We need to assess more
carefully now how Mill conceived of these goals, and of the legitimate
boundaries of the state’s activity.
wary here of the reductionist definition of the ‘state’ to encompass only the established apparatus
of government: other agencies may, particularly where moral rather than legal pressure is involved,
be equally or even more important in promoting paternalism (‘A Genealogy of the Modern State’,
p. 361).
chapter 1
Intervention, progress and the state –

domestic and foreign
mill and domestic reform

It was suggested at the outset here that Mill, having begun life as a Ben-
thamite and Ricardian, adopted by 1848 a more interventionist stance
vis-à-vis the possibility of both governmental and other forms of institu-
tional involvement in economic affairs. Some have contended that this drift
towards interference became even more marked in the mid 1860s, as Mill
came to engage more directly with practical problems in British politics.1
This chapter will consider the full range of Mill’s statements about the
appropriate scope of governmental activity in both domestic and foreign
affairs, including his views on taxation and inheritance, poor relief, educa-
tion, health and safety and several themes not usually included under this
rubric, such as his proposals to restrict the franchise. We will then examine
whether such principles were applied to overseas contexts. Treating Mill’s
applications as one seamless theory, we will see, permits us to see that he
drew upon his Indian and Irish experience to write about England, and
vice versa, and ultimately drew conclusions about Britain’s road forward
from his writings about non-British societies.
The scope of government

Let us first briefly examine Mill’s general statements about the relation-
ship between governments and economies.2 At the tender age of nineteen,
in 1825, Mill denied being ‘one of those who set up liberty as an idol to
be worshipped’, and said he was ‘willing to go farther than most peo-
ple in regulating and controlling when there is a special advantage to be
gained by regulation and control’.3 But there is little evidence that he
1 E.g., Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism, p. 52.
2 A good start here is Wollheim, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Limits of State Action’, and Kurer, ‘John
Stuart Mill on Government Intervention’.
3 CW 26, p. 321 [1825].
61
intended this as a broadly heretical statement, though it may have had
Malthusian undertones. As a young radical Mill naturally opposed unnec-
essarily powerful states. His rejection of statist centralisation of functions
was evident in a series of articles published at the time of the French
Revolution of 1830. In France, he noted, educational establishments were
directly superintended by the government, as were many public works
which in England were ‘executed by voluntary associations of individuals,
with all the power and patronage annexed to them’. This gave the French
police ‘powers over individual security and freedom of action . . . utterly
irreconcileable with good government’. For Mill securities for good gov-
ernment were ‘not enough’. It was ‘also requisite to have as little of it
as possible: the Government ought to do nothing for the people, which
the people can, with any sort of convenience, do for themselves, either
singly or in smaller associations’.4 Two years later he noted again that the
government should both ‘abstain from robbing the people for its own ben-
efit, or for the benefit of landholders and great capitalists’, and ‘leave the
question between them and their employers to be adjusted between them
and their employers’. How much, he asserted, ‘of the great concerns of
society may or may not be brought within the functions of government,
when government shall be something very different from what it is, it
would be premature for us to decide’. But at present the less governments
regulated ‘contracts between man and man the better for society; and the
more strictly they confine themselves to the mere protection of person
and property from force or fraud, the better they know their proper sta-
tions, and the more good, or rather the less intolerable evil they produce’.5
Mill was little concerned here with the possibility of coercive exploitation,
or of any grievous flaw in capitalist contractualism as such, even though
Saint-Simonism had already begun to infect his thinking. Negative liberty
was thus clearly the preferred option at this time: Mill was bred a good
Smithian.
The Principles, where Mill’s new theory of modern ‘self-dependence’
heralded his description of the appropriate sphere of state activity, restated
his views on intervention. In Book Five, ‘On the Influence of Government’,
Mill distinguished between authoritative interference, which prevented
individuals from engaging in some actions, or prescribed them to engage
in others; and non-authoritative intervention, a ‘course so seldom resorted
to by governments, and of which such important use might be made’,
‘that of giving advice, and promulgating information’, or when, ‘leaving
4 CW 22, p. 185. 5 CW 23, pp. 124, 185, 384.
Intervention, progress and the state 63
individuals free to use their own means of pursuing any object of general
interest, the government, not meddling with them, but not trusting the
object solely to their care, establishes, side by side with their arrangements,
an agency of its own for a like purpose’. This distinction made considerable
‘interference’ possible so long as governmental powers were not unduly
augmented. Mill also stated that at any one time there was hardly ‘anything
really important to the general interest’ which it might ‘not be desirable, or
even necessary, that the government should take upon itself, not because
private individuals cannot effectually perform it, but because they will
not’.6 As McCloskey has expressed it, ‘the drastic nature of some of these
qualifications’ might well demonstrate ‘principles of a radically different
kind from those usually associated with liberalism’.7
Gray in particular has insisted that Mill’s ‘harm principle’ was intended
to restrict the sphere of authoritative interference, but has no bearing on
other forms of intervention, particularly those involving taxation. He also
hints at an inconsistency between a wide sphere of state activity delineated
here, and the later description of the harm principle. But a failure to delin-
eate Mill’s strategy for social development and to explain how legislation
was intended to provide certain ends weakens this argument.8 The Prin-
ciples insisted that ‘Laisser-faire . . . should be the general practice: every
departure from it, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil’,
and that ‘as a general rule, the business of life is better performed when
those who have an immediate interest in it are left to take their own course,
uncontrolled either by the mandate of the law or by the meddling of any
6 CW 3, pp. 937, 970. Much of this argument consciously parallels Smith’s treatment of these issues
in the Wealth of Nations.
7 McCloskey, ‘Mill’s Liberalism’, 153. Earlier commentators noted that ‘the list of exceptions to laissez-
faire grew in successive editions of the book from comparatively small dimensions in the 1847 [sic]
edition’ (Somervell, English Thought in the Nineteenth Century, p. 96).
8 Gray, Mill On Liberty, pp. 61–2. To Gray the ‘principle of legal paternalism’ justifies ‘state coercion
to protect individuals from self-inflicted harm or (more stringently) to induce individuals to act in
ways beneficial to themselves’ (pp. 90–1). But Gray’s examples exclude most of those discussed here
and focus almost entirely upon On Liberty. He acknowledges that ‘Mill plainly supports coercion in
respect of the payment of taxes, and a number of forms of compulsory public service, where it would
be fanciful to suppose that any individual’s non-compliance would have any perceptible harmful
effect on anyone’ (p. 101). But he does not extend the range of such ‘public goods’ as far as Mill does,
hardly mentioning socialism and disregarding inheritance entirely. He concludes that Mill believed
that expanding ‘government interference in social life, while “not such as to involve infringement of
liberty”, may effectively stifle liberty when it is carried beyond a certain real, if necessarily imprecise
point’, and that ‘nothing in the Doctrine of Liberty prevents the state from going beyond the task
of harm-prevention and seeking to benefit its citizens or men in general, providing such welfarist
activities involve no coercive or “authoritative” limitations on liberty’, terming this ‘principle of state
non-interference in social affairs’ to be an ‘independent and distinct principle, not the Principle of
Liberty or any part of Mill’s Doctrine of Liberty’ (p. 124).
public functionary’. The chief exception to this rule concerned ‘anything
which it is desirable should be done for the general interests of mankind
or of future generations, or for the present interests of those members
of the community who require external aid’, and which was unprofitable
for ‘individuals or associations for undertaking it’. This type of activity
was ‘a suitable thing to be undertaken by government’. In Chapter 11, ‘Of
the Grounds and Limits of the Laisser-Faire or Non-interference Princi-
ple’, Mill treated major departures from the principle of ‘restricting to
the narrowest compass the intervention of a public authority in the busi-
ness of the community’.9 We will see, however, that his account here was
somewhat disingenuous: some other areas of policy treated in Book 5,
notably respecting taxation and inheritance, constituted enormous (and
possibly non-consensual) potential shifts in public policy, though they too
might be understood as exceptions in defence of the interests of future
generations. Moreover, in later editions, Mill did not add issues taken
up elsewhere, notably in the Considerations, particularly respecting fran-
chise restrictions, which we will need to assess here under the rubric of
(again, possibly non-consensual) state interference. And his views on the
land, detailed in the next chapter, were also not treated as ‘interference’,
though again they clearly implied substantial alterations in public policy.
In the political climate of 1848 and following, Mill did not want to portray
himself as an advocate of ‘big government’. Yet he saw many ‘very large
and conspicuous exceptions’ to the proposition that individuals were the
best judges of their own interest. Consumers were not universally, if they
were generally, the best judges of the material commodities produced for
their use.10 Public intervention might help to express the wishes of those
concerned, for instance in reducing the hours of labour, not therefore
overruling their interest, but giving it collective effect through legislation.
Here Mill, whilst not recommending the measure, simply stated that if
workers wanted to reduce their working hours they would have to agree
9 CW 3, pp. 945–6, 970, 944.

10 CW 3, p. 947. Some later critics asked whether Mill thought the state should ‘provide for the stupid
people’, including undertaking ‘the function of advising citizens what is, and what is not a good
article’, and asked whether ‘if the state is only to interfere when the inability of the consumer to judge
the article is tolerably universal, why should not the state take in hand the work now performed
by lawyers, physicians, and chemists? How many of the public are “competent judges” of law or
physic? . . . according to Mill’s doctrine, the state should provide and supply to the people their
art, their literature, their theology, their science, and their dramatic entertainment, and a hundred
other wants of which they, and many educated people even, are incapable of judging the merits or
demerits’ (Smith, Liberty and Liberalism, p. 468). Smith even thought that the view that the state
should undertake to satisfy wants ‘in anticipation, in order to prevent the crimes which the wants
might lead to’ was ‘Mill’s doctrine’ (p. 491).
collectively to do so.11 This was collective paternalism– legislative action
for collective self-improvement – of a non-coercive type, justified by Mill
on loosely utilitarian grounds, that it was better to work nine hours than
ten per day. And in fact such examples might proliferate rather than lessen
as society progressed.12 This implies again that we must clarify the concept
of ‘interference’ we apply to Mill’s own examples.
The most blunt defences of liberty as such in the Principles are those
favouring free trade, and, anticipating On Liberty, the basic assumption
of the benefits and right of individual freedom. The ‘general rule of free
trade’13 was of course a governing principle throughout Mill’s political
economy. Mill remained ‘rootedly hostile’14 to protectionism on economic
grounds, as well as political, for he feared its alliance to nationalism would
undermine the broadly civilising effects commerce induced.15 Thus he
declined to support the distressed silk-weaving industry because it pro-
moted monopoly.16 He did recognise exceptions to this rule; a governmen-
tal subsidy or protecting duty for ten or twenty years to nurture an infant
industry might be ‘a good calculation for the future interests’ of a country
(e.g. a colony or young nation). But Mill did not regard this as support-
ing ‘the fabric of Protectionist doctrine’, writing in 1866 that he had only
countenanced protective duties for ‘the purpose of enabling the protected
branch of industry, in a very moderate time, to become independent of
protection’.17 And even here, by the late 1860s, he was beginning to doubt
whether ‘protectionism, once introduced, is in danger of perpetuating itself
through the private interests it enlists in its favour’, writing that ‘I therefore
now prefer some other mode of public aid to new industries, though in
itself less appropriate’.18
Respecting self-regarding activity, Mill’s account of individual liberty in
the Principles strikingly anticipated On Liberty. Here, possibly adopting
an image of Tocqueville’s, he described ‘a circle around every individual
human being’ which no government should overstep, as a ‘part of the
life of every person who has come to years of discretion, within which
the individuality of that person ought to reign uncontrolled either by
any other individual or by the public collectively’. This ‘space in human
existence thus entrenched around, and sacred from authoritative intrusion’,
he asserted, ‘no one who professes the smallest regard to human freedom
or dignity will call in question’. It ought to comprise, Mill insisted, ‘all
11 CW 3, pp. 956–8. 12 CW 3, p. 951. But employers might treat such a move as ‘coercive’.
13 CW 3, p. 917. 14 CW 13, p. 659 [1845].
15 Notably in Germany in mid century (CW 13, p. 687). 16 E.g., CW 4, p. 129.
17 CW 16, pp. 1043–44 [1865], 1150. 18 CW 17, p. 1598.
that part which concerns only the life, whether inward or outward, of the
individual, and does not affect the interests of others, or affects them only
through the moral influence of example’.19 Here, then, we clearly have the
‘self-regarding’ ideal central to On Liberty outlined, and the domain of
‘inward consciousness’ and ‘personal’ external conduct deemed sacrosanct.
This is a powerful image, but, we will see, potentially a misleading
one as well. For respecting social interests, Mill clearly positioned himself
between the two camps, and concluded that ‘the admitted functions of
government embrace a much wider field than can easily be included within
the ring-fence of any restrictive definition’. It was, he thought, ‘hardly
possible to find any ground of justification common to them all, except
the comprehensive one of general expediency; nor to limit the interference
of government by any universal rule, save the simple and vague one, that
it should never be admitted but when the case of expediency is strong’.
He acknowledged that all legal engagements fell potentially under this
category, including labour and marital contracts.20 He would later write,
too (in 1863), that Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics had taken ‘hostility to
government agency beyond reasonable bounds’, whereas he himself had
‘attempted to strike a more correct balance between the considerations on
both sides in the concluding chapter of my Political Economy’.21 In fact
this was a considerable understatement. Expediency could be ‘strong’ on
many occasions, and where redistributing property was concerned, we will
see that Mill’s agenda took him much further away from laissez-faire than is
usually conceded. Mill was willing to contemplate ‘prohibitory regulation’
which could ‘be made to recommend itself to the general conscience’, or
where ‘persons of ordinary good intentions either believe already, or can be
induced to believe, that the thing prohibited is a thing which they ought
not to wish to do’. He also permitted ‘governmental interferences which
do not restrain individual free agency’, noting that when ‘a government
provides means for fulfilling a certain end, leaving individuals free to
avail themselves of different means if in their opinion preferable, there
is no infringement of liberty, no irksome or degrading restraint’. All this
discussion, he emphasised, related to retaining ‘that originality of mind and
individuality of character, which are the only source of any real progress’.
19 CW 3, p. 938. Cf. Tocqueville, Democracy in America (vol. 2), p. 306: ‘around every man a fatal circle
is traced’. Thanks to Michael Levin for suggesting this connection.
20 CW 3, pp. 804–5, 802. Some critics found the expediency argument afforded ‘no sufficient ground
upon which to base a theory of State function’ (Frank Evershed, in Wilson et al., Individualism and
the Land Question, p. 93).
21 CW 15, p. 888.
Even if governments could monopolise ‘the most eminent intellectual
capacity and active talent of the nation’, this would only sap ‘the active
energies; labour, contrivance, judgment, self-control’ of the majority. It
would produce a ‘people among whom there is no habit of spontaneous
action for a collective interest – who look habitually to their government to
command or prompt them in all matters of joint concern – who expect to
have everything done for them, except what can be made an affair of mere
habit and routine – [who] have their faculties only half developed’. This,
we have seen, was the thrust of the case against Carlyle, and even more,
Comte. A clearer statement of the potential for ‘despotism, by arming with
intellectual superiority as an additional weapon, those who have already
the legal power’, and thus of the evils of paternalism, we could not hope
to have.22 Nothing, Mill wrote elsewhere, could be ‘more fatal to liberty
than a well-organised and capable bureaucracy leading a people who, by
failing actively to manage their collective interests, have no real grasp of
social affairs’.23 Bureaucracies always degenerated into ‘pedantocracies’, and
where they were the governing power, to bear down upon the individuality
even of their ‘more distinguished members’.24
Yet Mill became increasingly aware that, as he wrote in 1868, the ‘special
danger of democratic institutions’ was ‘the absence of skilled administra-
tion’. Indeed ‘the great political problem of the future’ was combining
‘democratic institutions with skilled administration’.25 This required bal-
ancing two principles: the fact that, for managing details, local bodies gen-
erally had an advantage, while ‘in comprehension of the principles even of
purely local management, the superiority of the central government, when
rightly constituted, ought to be prodigious’.26 In the essay, ‘Centralisa-
tion’ (1862), Mill considered the reaction of contemporary French political
economists against the comparative over-centralisation of the preceding
epoch. After On Liberty and the relevant sections of the Principles, this was
to be his most extensive discussion of the scope of state activity, the ‘non-
intervention theory’ and the problem of ‘the evils of over-government’.
The previous decade, he stressed, had increasingly taught the French that
‘liberty is a more precious thing than equality . . . that a people are not and
cannot be free, unless they have learnt to dare and do for themselves . . . in
the practice of daily life: that a government which is allowed to meddle in
everything, let its forms be never so free, is at all times little different from
a despotism’. Mill here confronted, in the ideas of Dupont-White, author
22 CW 3, pp. 938–943. 23 CW 15, p. 556. Original in French; my translation.

24 CW 19, p. 439. 25 CW 28, p. 291. 26 CW 19, p. 543.
of L’Individu et L’État and La Centralisation, the theory that the scope
of state activity necessarily increased as civilisation became more complex,
because the growing possibility of destructive selfish action rendered the
state alone capable of arbitrating between individuals on behalf of the pub-
lic interest. Dupont-White’s argument was that while the state had long
not concerned itself with the majority, increasing civilisation ‘changes this
state of things – relieves man from the power of man, and brings him under
that of the law’. Did the state not then have, he asked, ‘necessarily a wider
range of action, when it is expected to protect the slave, the wife, the child,
the debtor, instead of leaving them to the will and pleasure of masters,
husbands, fathers, and creditors’? The state alone had freed the majority
from its despotic rulers in earlier stages of society: ‘The State alone could
have done it, and on the State rests the duty of doing it, wherever it still
remains to be done.’ Mill here bluntly concluded: ‘All this is admitted, and
forms no part of the debateable ground. The power here claimed for the
State is within its acknowledged functions.’27
But exceptions existed. In the British West Indies, for example, state
protection had not been required after slavery had been abolished. This
illustrated ‘a tendency, the reverse of that which he alleges; the dimin-
ished need of State action as institutions improve’, and ‘an example, from
how much minute supervision, from how many cares and labours for the
protection and general benefit of the less favoured classes, the State can
exempt itself by doing them complete justice once for all; how much of the
energy and forethought of society in behalf of individuals, is only needed
because it does not choose to set free their own’. Dupont-White had gone
too far. Yet so, it appeared, had most of Mill’s English contemporaries,
but in the other direction. Nearly all English thinkers, said Mill, did not
believe that the state should ‘concern itself with natural inequalities’. Such
writers apparently considered ‘nothing as an abuse of natural superiority,
except force or fraud’. If these were abstained from, ‘they hold it good that
the strong should be allowed to reap the full advantage of their strength.
It is only thus, they think, that all the members of the community are
incited to exert their strength, and to cultivate it.’ Yet, Mill insisted, this
view represented ‘much of the reason of the case; yet not all of it; for in
racing for a prize, the stimulus to exertion on the part of the competitors is
only at its highest when all start fair, that is, when natural inequalities are
compensated by artificial weights’. But in ‘the race of life’, he added, ‘all do
not start fair; and that unless the State does something to strengthen the
27 CW 19, pp. 583, 589.
weaker side, the unfairness becomes utterly crushing and dispiriting’.28 In
1867 he would reiterate that he did ‘not think it indisputable that the phys-
ically strongest must necessarily be dominant over the physically weaker in
civilized society’. Indeed it was ‘the fundamental purpose of civilization to
redress as much as possible all such natural inequalities’, and its success here
was ‘one of the best tests of civilization’.29 Mill had thus moved far from
his earlier plea on behalf of the supremacy of negative liberty: moral ends
could become grounds for intervention in support of ‘general expediency’.
Some English writers had also argued that in competitive struggles gen-
erated by markets, markets should alone dictate the outcome, an argument
Mill called ‘true for the most part’. But Mill conceded Dupont-White’s
case – and it is an important admission – that ‘growing numbers’ of excep-
tions existed, and that restrictions on contractual relations regarding hours
of labour, the minimum age of labour, safety and many other issues had
occurred. Dupont-White’s brief for the expanded scope of the state was
not thus denied by Mill, whose chief concern was that it had not been
demonstrated adequately how ‘a people under a centralised government
may be free’. But this was not an argument against the widening scope
of state interference in advanced societies; this Mill accepted, with the
proviso that increasing legislation did not entail augmenting the scope of
executive power. By this means interference could be ‘useful and inevitable
as improvement proceeds’ provided it did not ‘weaken the stimulus to
individual effort’. Mill concluded, then, with a major concession, granting
that:
new legislation is often necessitated, by the progress of society, to protect from
injury either individuals or the public: not only through the rising-up of new
economical and social phenomena [but] also because the more enlarged scale on
which operations are carried on, involves evils and dangers which on a smaller
scale it was allowable to overlook . . . As respects such new laws, and as much new
agency as is needed to ensure their observance, the function of the State naturally
does widen with the advance of civilisation.30
The last word, however, was to be given to the voluntary spirit. ‘Though
the progress of civilisation is constantly requiring new things to be done’,
Mill added, ‘it also multiplies the cases in which individuals or associations
are able and willing to do them gratuitously.’ Much of the state’s initiatives
at lower levels of civilisation, providing roads, canals, irrigation and so
on, might later be ‘better done by voluntary associations, or by the public
28 CW 19, pp. 590–1. 29 CW 16, p. 1261. 30 CW 19, p. 600–2 (italics added).

indiscriminately’.31 Mill still worried that any government with augmented
powers would require qualities of leadership which, in democracies, rarely
emerged: this was Tocqueville’s lesson. And he remained anxious as to
how far governmental initiatives might sap individual energies, activity
and mental attitude. The issue, as usual for Mill, was getting the balance
right between competing principles. But he had made a crucial concession:
intervention to support principles of justice was necessarily increasing, even
if this could be exercised by many competent bodies, not only the state.32
Taxation and inheritance

In the Principles Mill followed Adam Smith in seeing taxation as a lead-
ing function of government, and quoted Smith on the precept that taxes
should be assessed ‘as nearly as possible in proportion to [the] respective
abilities’ of citizens.33 Such taxation should be imposed on incomes above
those required to purchase the ‘mere necessaries’ of life.34 While he dis-
allowed claims based on larger family size, Mill upheld Bentham’s ideal
of not taxing ‘an income ordinarily sufficient to provide a moderately
numerous labouring family’, with a fixed (not graduated) percentage being
levied on amounts above this. Intestate estates would also be claimed by
the state, again partially following Bentham.35 Mill thus opposed using
income tax to redistribute wealth on the grounds that it would interfere
with incentives.36 In broader terms, however, the state had an important
redistributive function. In 1861 Mill asserted that he thought it ‘fair and
31 CW 19, pp. 603–4.
32 This is ignored in most accounts of his idea of progress, e.g., Harris, ‘John Stuart Mill’s Theory of
Progress’, which treats the Principles as offering Mill’s final statement on the subject.
33 CW 3, p. 805.
34 CW 6, p. 1477 [1868]. Incomes below £150 were exempted until 1853, when the limit was lowered
to £100. Average wages in this period rose from c. £28 in 1850 to c. £52 in 1900.
35 CW 3, p. 809. Bentham wanted inheritances given to immediate relatives to remain untaxed, but
to fall to the state where near relations were unavailable and that bequests be limited to half of
the value of existing properties (Jeremy Bentham: The Economic Writings, vol. 1, pp. 283–7). He
relied mainly on the advancement of commerce to disperse riches more equally (Rosen, Jeremy
Bentham and Representative Democracy, p. 218). As with other issues, Mill’s policies had clearly
been discussed at length with Harriet Taylor. Indeed, a jointly written manuscript on women’s
rights, unfortunately undated, but in Mill’s handwriting, contains a passage proposing two policies
germane to the Principles:
The property of intestates to belong to the state, which then undertakes the education, and setting
out in life, of all descendants not otherwise provided for.
No one to acquire by gift or bequest more than a limited amount. (The Complete Works of Harriet
Taylor Mill, p. 50).
36 CW 3, pp. 810–11. But as Hollander indicates, he gave some ground to the marginal utility in later
years (The Economics of John Stuart Mill, vol. 2, p. 859–60).
reasonable that the general policy of the State should favour the diffusion
rather than the concentration of wealth’.37 This, we will see, was to become
a leading theme of his mature political thought.
Particularly controversial here were Mill’s proposals respecting ‘a consid-
erable tax on legacies and inheritances’, which were partially intended as a
means of repaying the national debt.38 He proposed a national appraisal of
land values, and then a periodic assessment to ascertain how far rents had
risen through ‘spontaneous increase’ as opposed to investments of capital
and labour. Here, again, Mill insisted, ‘the state should use the instrument
of taxation as a means of mitigating the inequalities of wealth’. This social
policy aim was not trumped by the liberty principle, but was dictated by
general expediency. But there were here competing principles, namely the
benefits of greater social equality, as opposed to the need to reward effort.
Mill did not wish ‘to relieve the prodigal at the expense of the prudent’.
But neither did he ‘attach any importance, in a wealthy country, to the
objection made against taxes on legacies and inheritances, that they are
taxes on capital’. This was his argument against taxing higher incomes at
a higher rate of tax: it was ‘not the fortunes which are earned, but those
which are unearned, that it is for the public good to place under limitation’.
Taxes on savings were thus rejected. But those on luxuries ‘which have most
connexion with vanity, and least with positive enjoyment’, like ‘the more
costly qualities of all kinds of personal equipment and ornament’,39 were
applauded. The work ethic, which valued exertion, was to be cultivated;
frivolous consumption was not. The chief target here was doubtless the
landed aristocracy. We begin here, then, to see the contours of Mill’s ideal
of radical meritocracy emerging.
The ‘earned’ principle was to be particularly important where inheri-
tance was concerned. From the late 1820s onwards Mill’s ideas on bequests
became increasingly radical, doubtless driven in part by Saint-Simonism.
Without a more precise definition of exactly what Mill intended in this
area, however, we cannot fathom the substantive redistributive aims of
his ultimate ideal. Like the Saint-Simonians, whose proposal to abolish
inheritance he initially found startling, Mill in 1848 treated ‘large fortunes
acquired by gift or inheritance’ as ‘fit subjects for regulation on grounds
of general expediency’. Here ‘a possible mode of restraining the accumula-
tion of large fortunes in the hands of those who have not earned them by
37 CW 5, p. 569.
38 CW 3, p. 877. In 1871 he suggested that if the land were nationalised, the compensation necessarily
paid might well derive chiefly from this tax (CW 17, p. 1848).
39 CW 3, pp. 820, 823, 810–11, 870.
exertion’ was limiting ‘the amount which any one person should be permit-
ted to acquire by gift, bequest, or inheritance’. It was, Mill wrote slightly
later, ‘part of a good government to provide, that, as far as more paramount
considerations permit, . . . inequality of opportunities shall be remedied’,
and this justified graduated inheritance taxes.40 Individuals might accu-
mulate wealth unrestrictedly during their lives, and leave property in their
wills as they pleased. But there was one crucial proviso: no one should
inherit a substantial fortune they had not themselves earned. This reflected
a prudential as well as moralistic outlook on Mill’s part. ‘In order to
give the children that fair chance of a desirable existence, to which they
are entitled’, he reflected, ‘it is generally necessary that they should not be
brought up from childhood in habits of luxury which they will not have
the means of indulging in after-life’. Rich parents might here be perceived
to have a duty to give more to their children in order to sustain such stan-
dards. But this was a claim ‘likely to be stretched further than its reasons
warrant’, and Mill thought it ‘really no grievance to any man, that for the
means of marrying and of supporting a family, he has to depend on his
own exertions’. This, then, in 1848, defined the limits of just inheritance:
sufficient to support a single individual without the need to work, but not
more.41
It has been argued that this strategy was not intended to benefit the
poor as such, and probably would not have benefited them greatly. If the
contrast here is between a ‘welfarist’ mentality and one which stressed self-
reliance, too, then Mill can plausibly be enlisted in the latter camp.42 It
is difficult, however, not to construe this in part as a Malthusian strategy,
given the premium it offers to celibacy, or at least birth restriction.43 After
a ‘reasonable’ provision had been made in all such cases, Mill argued, the
community might ‘rightfully appropriate’ any surplus for ‘general purposes’
by a graduated inheritance tax, for it was ‘eminently desirable’ to ‘counteract
the tendency of inherited property to collect in large masses’, and limiting
bequests was ‘the most eligible’ means of doing so.44 ‘Wealth which could
40 CW 3, pp. 810–11; CW 16, p. 339; CW 5, p. 491 [1852].

41 But the question as to whether this was to be defined by the level of class expectation is left open.
42 Kurer, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Welfare State’.
43 Mill had also included a note in 1848, thereafter excised, which read that, respecting low wages,
‘the question of population is treated chiefly as a labourer’s question, the principle contended for
includes not only the labouring classes, but all persons, except the few who being able to give to
their offspring the means of independent support during the whole of life, do not leave them to
swell the competition for employment’ (CW 2, p. 372). The implications of deleting this passage
are explored below.
44 CW 2, pp. 222–5; CW 3, pp. 811–12; CW 5, p. 491. In 1865 ‘most eligible’ was changed to ‘a possible’: a
change of heart or of focus? It has been alleged that Mill regarded all attacks on bequest as ‘violations
of property’ (Hughes, ‘Mill’s Treatment of Women, Workers, and Private Property’, 537).
no longer be employed in over-enriching a few’, Mill stressed, ‘would either
be devoted to objects of public usefulness, or if bestowed on individuals,
would be distributed among a larger number’. Enormous fortunes ‘which
no one needs for any personal purpose but ostentation or improper power’
would ‘become much less numerous’, and there would be many more
‘persons in easy circumstances, with the advantages of leisure, and all the
real enjoyments which wealth can give, except those of vanity’. This class
might then ‘in a much more beneficial manner than at present’ be able
to offer ‘the services which a nation having leisured classes is entitled to
expect from them, either by their direct exertions or by the tone they give
to the feelings and tastes of the public’. Moreover, a ‘large portion also
of the accumulations of successful industry would probably be devoted to
public uses, either by direct bequests to the State, or by the endowment of
institutions’.45
This discussion implies a substantially greater degree of intervention
to promote social equality than is usually associated with Mill.46 We can
now readily see, however, how later Victorian individualists thought Mill’s
taxation policies to be socialistic, in aiming to reduce both inequality of
opportunity and of outcomes.47 Mill regarded ideas of freedom of property
as analogous to freedom for the pike: they were death to the minnow,
and most people were minnows. The apparent paradox that freedoms
given to all individuals cannot possibly injure the whole of society is thus
answered: we do not possess the same means to make the best use of
them, and the wealthy, Mill thought, were invariably prone to abusing
their power. Accounts of Mill’s approach to equality which ignore these
dimensions are likely to go seriously astray.48 And indeed in 1871, as we
will see, Mill would extend this strategy still further by proposing to make
even inheriting ‘moderate’ independence impossible. All those who shirked
labour, the idle rich as well as the idle poor, would be brought to book.
Though there are republican, puritanical and socialist elements in this
strategy, this approach, not, as we will see, ‘socialism’, as such, presented
Mill’s ‘acknowledged principle of justice’ and the core element of the ideal
society.49 These measures, as Berger has noted, Mill rightly thought were
45 CW 2, p. 226.
46 E.g., Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, p. 216. Kurer (‘John Stuart Mill and the Welfare State’, 714) here
misquotes Mill in order to suggest that Mill repudiated the welfarist argument that he did not
believe that taxation should be employed ‘as a means of mitigating the inequalities of wealth’ (citing
CW 3, p. 810). In fact Mill is here only discussing the use of a graduated property tax to achieve this.
47 See the discussion in Kurer, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Welfare State’. Green, amongst other later
Victorian writers, rejected restrictions on inheritance (Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation,
p. 222).
48 E.g., Lakoff, Equality in Political Philosophy, pp. 129–43, esp. 133–4. 49 CW 1, pp. 238–9.
‘radically redistributive’.50 Bain recorded that Mill indeed thought they
would ‘pull down all large fortunes in two generations’, and accordingly
anticipated a serious adverse reaction to his ideas. This never occurred
because they were largely ignored, and by the mid 1880s, overshadowed
by even more dramatic socialist proposals by others.51 Mill did not feel,
however, that such restrictions would have an overly deleterious effect
upon incentives to produce, writing that while doubtless ‘persons have
occasionally exerted themselves more strenuously to acquire a fortune from
the hope of founding a family in perpetuity . . . the mischiefs to society of
such perpetuities outweigh the value of this incentive to exertion, and
the incentives in the case of those who have the opportunity of making
large fortunes are strong enough without it’. But Mill did tinker with
these ideas, adding in 1865, for instance, that there were ‘strong grounds’
for leaving the power of bequeathing ‘to one person the whole of the
funds actually engaged in a single enterprise’ where the owner’s capital
was actually used ‘in carrying on any of the operations of industry’, and
that maintaining an ‘ancestral mansion’ fell into the same category.52 ‘Class
distinctions should be abolished were it possible to do so’, Mill would
later insist, though he realised that this would be an uphill battle, the
English ‘of all ranks and classes’ being ‘at bottom, in all their feelings,
aristocrats’ who had ‘some conception of liberty, & set some value on
it’, but found ‘the very idea of equality . . . strange & offensive’.53 A few
subsequent writers have acknowledged the radical nature of these late
shifts in Mill’s thought.54 But most have failed utterly to address their
central role in Mill’s agenda, and the fact that they represent fundamental
interventions not mentioned in On Liberty. They are not scrutinised in
detail in any accounts of Mill’s treatment of paternalism.55 But promoting
50 Berger, Happiness, Justice, and Freedom, p. 174.
51 Bain, John Stuart Mill, p. 89. Mill’s first biographer claimed that his ideas on the land, workers and
women’s rights, the Jamaica massacre and the like had ‘created something like a panic among the
believers in the comfortable doctrine, to them, that capital should rule the roost and make all things
pleasant to itself ’ (Marston, The Life of John Stuart Mill, p. 1).
52 CW 2, pp. 223, 225. But he did not explain the economic advantages of the latter example, which
seems to contradict the general principle, even if this is not personal wealth as such. Tacitly, at least,
this was an attack upon the idea that unproductive consumption was economically beneficial, and
perhaps indeed – as in Smith – upon the concept of unproductive labour as such. Hence the principle
was not to be applied to inherited capital used for running a corporation. For this line of thought,
see Blaug, Ricardian Economics, p. 177, and generally my ‘The Reaction to Political Radicalism and
the Popularization of Political Economy in Early 19th Century Britain’, pp. 119–36. Some writers
thought Mill actually supported primogeniture in this passage (e.g., Constable, Radicalism and Its
Stupidities, p. 75).
53 CW 28, p. 30; CW 15, p. 553. 54 Stafford, John Stuart Mill, p. 128, is amongst these.
55 Cowling, for example, wrote that Mill thought that inheritance laws ‘which hamper free exchange
of property should be altered’ (Mill and Liberalism, p. 45). Donner presumes that Mill thought
progress by regulating inheritance so stringently is clearly extraordinarily
paternalist, whether it is coercive or (democratically) consensual.56 And,
it might be added, there has been no insinuation of undue influence by
Harriet Taylor in the framing of Mill’s views on inheritance. This is the
‘real’, not the henpecked, Mill.
We see here then that the state has as one basic aim rectifying social and
economic inequalities. But how far was Mill willing to go down the road
towards equality? Bain complained that Mill seemed ‘to intimate that the
children even of the wealthy should be thrown upon their own exertions
for the difference between a bare individual maintenance and what would
be requisite to support a family’, while in the next section contemplating
‘a great multiplication of families in easy circumstances, with the advan-
tage of leisure, and all the real enjoyments which wealth can give, except
those of vanity’. The first case, he thought, ‘would be met by from two to
five hundred a year; the second supposes from one to two thousand’.
‘The whole speculation’, he thought, ‘seems to me inadequately worked
out.’57 Bain failed to appreciate, however, that Mill thought that the greater
equality induced by restrictions upon inheritance would assist this afflu-
ence. Many more individuals might possess leisure in their own lives, but if
they married this would be the result of their own labour, not that of their
ancestors.58 The trick again was to balance two principles. Unequal prop-
erty would ‘arise from unequal industry, frugality, perseverance, talents,
and to a certain extent even opportunities’, which were ‘inseparable from
the principle of private property’. But one could still fix ‘a limit to what
any one may acquire by the mere favour of others, without any exercise of
his faculties’, and require ‘that if he desires any further accession of fortune,
he shall work for it’. This is, to some degree, a marginal utility calculation.
Mill thought that ‘the difference to the happiness of the possessor between
a moderate independence and five times as much, is insignificant when
weighed against the enjoyment that might be given, and the permanent
benefits diffused, by some other disposal of the four-fifths’.59 A maximum
that ‘inheritance might even be done away with’ (The Liberal Self, p. 203). Hamburger, even more
surprisingly, notes only Mill’s ‘objection to the inheritance of great wealth’ (John Stuart Mill on
Liberty and Control, p. 142). Martin sees Mill’s views as less controversial than the view taken here
(John Stuart Mill and the Land Question, p. 32).
56 Richard Ely proposed in 1894 that inheritance be restricted to $50,000 per child (equivalent to
perhaps $1 million today), and noted that the Illinois Bar Association had endorsed a bill setting
the limit at $500,000 (Socialism, p. 311).
57 Bain, John Stuart Mill, p. 89; see CW 2, pp. 225–6.
58 That this functioned as another incentive to reduce population is also evident.
59 CW 2, p. 225. For the argument that this strategy was skewed in favour of the middle classes, see
West, ‘J.S. Mill’s Redistribution Policy’.
imposed on inheritance would thus allow each to ensure that none of their
offspring burdened the state, and yet ‘not to lavish it in enriching some one
individual, beyond a certain maximum, which should be fixed sufficiently
high to afford the means of comfortable independence’.60 But what did
‘moderate’ and ‘comfortable’ actually mean? Without a definition, these
terms are practically meaningless. Yet most commentators on Mill have
simply repeated them without inquiring what they imply.61
Poor relief
The viability of the Elizabethan Poor Law, as modified by the 1834 Amend-
ment Act, greatly concerned most political economists at this time. Mill
was no exception. But he was no marked humanitarian in this regard; sen-
timental pity for the poor never oozes from his writings. Relief ‘might be
afforded to the labouring classes from the pressure of their own excessive
competition for employment’. But the harsh conditions of the workhouse,
where food was given in exchange for labour, also limited indigence.62
Mill agreed with Nassau Senior in 1830 that the system did not function
adequately. As the married poor received more than those who deferred
marriage, indeed, it tended to perpetuate poverty and larger families. But
Mill did not believe that the propertied had a duty ‘to distribute their sur-
plus among the poor’, and consequently upheld, amongst other measures,
‘a national scheme of self-supporting’ emigration.63 He also considered it
60 CW 2, p. 225. Mueller claims that Mill’s position on inheritance became ‘almost indistinguishable
from that of the Saint-Simonians’ (John Stuart Mill and French Thought, pp. 78, 84), a view followed
by Raeder (John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity, p. 104). While Saint-Simon himself
had not challenged inheritance as such, the Saint-Simonians wished to abolish inheritance entirely,
which Mill did not. See The Doctrine of Saint-Simon, p. 86.
61 But this is admittedly complicated. If ‘comfortable independence’ meant only enough for one person
to subsist without labour, but not enough to support a family, with middle class expectations, Mill
might have implied savings/inheritance of perhaps £500,000–£1,000,000 today (to produce an
income of £50,000+; fluctuating interest rates make a more exact calculation impossible). His own
income at its peak was £2,000 (c. £200,000 per year in today’s terms, taking Mill’s income to be
about double a minimal ‘upper class’ income for this period, and £100,000 to represent the same
for the upper middle class today); this would be produced on a return of 5 per cent on a £40,000
investment (c. £4 million today) (the rate of interest in 1848 fluctuated from about 6–8 per cent). A
skilled artisan made about £100 p.a. in this period, an Indian Civil Service officer c. £300. About 1–2
per cent of the population had incomes greater than £150 p.a., and about 70 per cent had incomes
of £50–100 p.a. On the other hand it was estimated in 1854 that a gentleman needed £400 a year
to live on, or about a fifth of Mill’s final salary; middle class salaries were c. £300–1,000 at this
time. This would require a fortune of £8,000 to return 5 per cent p.a. Clearly there are also several
contemporary meanings of the term ‘independence’. Malthus had used ‘independence’ in relation
to the marriages of the poor to mean ‘not supported by parish assistance’ (An Essay on the Principle
of Population, p. 83). This implies, again, an idea of autonomy as ‘supported by one’s own labour’.
62 CW 22, pp. 271–2. 63 CW 22, p. 216; CW 14, pp. 50–1; CW 16, p. 1230.
‘highly desirable, that the certainty of subsistence should be held out by
law to the destitute able-bodied, rather than that their relief should depend
on voluntary charity’, believing this far superior to voluntary charity.64 In
the mid 1840s, when, Mill reflected, ‘everybody is all agog to do something
for the poor’, he feared that public debate would reinforce the poor’s ‘faith
that it is other people’s business to take care of them’.65 And, as we have
seen, the remedies he most favoured himself were now those which were
least popular. Yet he was scarcely able to say so in public.
Consequently Mill found himself in a difficult position. He regretted
the labourers’ growing belief ‘whatever is possessed by other people, more
than they possess’, was ‘a wrong to them, or at least a kind of stewardship,
of which an account is to be rendered to them’. He wrote privately in 1844
that it was ‘very necessary to make a stand against this sort of spirit’, but
at the same time ‘highly necessary as well as right, to shew sympathy in all
that is good of the new tendencies’. All manner of ‘propositions of things
to be done for the poor either by the Government, the millowners, the
landowners, or the rich in general’ he rejected as ‘absurd when looked to
as things of great or permanent efficacy’. By contrast, Mill concluded, ‘the
greater part of the good they can do is indirect, & consists in stimulating &
guiding the energy & prudence of the people themselves’.66 The Principles
considered public charity as amongst the ‘very large class of cases, in which
those acts of individuals with which the government claims to interfere are
not done by those individuals for their own interest, but for the interest
of other people’. Mill here insisted that the problem was ‘how to give
the greatest amount of needful help, with the smallest encouragement to
undue reliance on it’. And the only way to do this, he thought, was to
ensure that ‘the condition of those who are supported by legal charity
can be kept considerably less desirable than the condition of those who
find support for themselves’.67 Here we see once again the harsh face of
Benthamite Malthusianism. Relief should be offered only in exchange for
labour which was ‘at least as irksome and severe as that of the least fortunate
among the independent labourers’. Relief should moreover be confined to
necessaries, with ‘indulgences, even those which happily the very poorest
class of labourers, when in full employment, are able occasionally to allow
themselves’ being ‘rigidly withheld’.68 Clearly such measures were intended
to force individuals to seek employment outside the workhouse, which
would improve their lives at least by providing some indulgences. They
64 CW 3, p. 962. 65 CW 13, pp. 640–1.

66 CW 13, pp. 643–5. 67 CW 3, p. 960–1. 68 CW 6, p. 204.
were also intended to improve their own moral behaviour. Here if the
main question was ‘whether it is better that they should receive this help
exclusively from individuals, and therefore uncertainly and casually, or by
systematic arrangements, in which society acts through its organ, the state’,
Mill came down unequivocally on the latter side.69 A clearer statement
of strong, coercive domestic paternalism would be hard to find: rational
adults in a mature society are coerced in order to force themselves to help
themselves, and this in a fairly brutal manner (and the more unpleasant
aspects of this regimen can hardly be excused as consensual, even if the
principle of relief might as such be so classed). Mill’s views did not alter
on this issue: On Liberty enforced labour on the poor if they would not
support their families.
If Mill thus disdainfully dismissed the ‘pseudo-philanthropy’ then in
vogue,70 an extraordinarily important letter to a leading Benthamite and
old and much-admired friend, the factory, Poor Law and sanitary reformer
Edwin Chadwick,71 reveals his own hopes more than any other document
from this period. Here Mill wrote that ‘the present poor law is the best
possible, as a mere poor law; that any nearer approach to abstract justice
is not to be had in a poor law, & must wait for a revision of social
arrangements more fundamental than poor laws’. But he added ‘I think
it likely that society will ultimately take the increase of the human race
under a more direct controul than is consistent with present ideas; in which
case an unlimited “droit au travail” for all who are born, as well as many
other things, would not be the chimeras which they seem to be in the
present state of opinion & feeling’.72 This indicates that his own hopes
lay with a dramatic alteration in social policy respecting birth control,
possibly linked, as we will see, to extending the Poor Law, which embodied
a primitive right to work, to a generalised, state-supported right to labour.
Mill would join these issues again in later discussions of the Poor Law.
In 1850 he considered – again privately – the lessons learned since 1848,
particularly in Ireland and France, and concluded that ‘when productive
employment can be claimed by every one from the public as a right, it
can only be rendered undesirable by being made virtually slave labour’.
Mill threw down the gauntlet. ‘I therefore deprecate the enforcement of
such a right’, he wrote, ‘until society is prepared to adopt the other side
of the alternative, that of making the production & distribution of wealth
69 CW 3, p. 960. 70 CW 13, p. 655. 71 See CW 16, p. 1432.
72 CW 32, p. 75 [tentatively dated September 1848]. One of Chadwick’s most important conclusions
respecting the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was its implications for forcing the poor to make
more prudent marriage plans (Finer, The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick, p. 48).
a public concern. I think it probable that to this . . . the world will come,
but not without other great changes – certainly not in a society composed
like the present, of rich & poor; in which the direction of industry by a
public authority would be only substituting a combination of rich men,
armed with coercive power, for the competition of individual capitalists’.
The other ‘great changes’ implied here were clearly regulating births, for, as
the letter continued, even if existing schemes ended indigence, they would
only ‘push off to another generation the necessity of adopting a sounder
morality on the subject of overpopulation’. This, however, ‘even if it were
not necessary to prevent the evils of poverty, would equally be requisite
in order to put an end to the slavery to which the existing state of things
condemns women’. The latter was ‘a greater object, in my estimation, both
in itself & in its tendencies, than the mere physical existence either of
women or men’. Mill concluded that separating the sexes in workhouses
was in fact ‘an essential part of the moral training’ which ‘the reception of
public relief affords an opportunity of administering’.73 Many years later he
reiterated for the young and able-bodied ‘the workhouse should be a place
of discomfort’ with none ‘able to enjoy all the advantages of self-support
while receiving support from others’, and he would still ‘separate married
people if young and able-bodied’ though not if old – plenty of coercion
here, then. His chief complaint about the Poor Law, in fact, was that local
boards were much less reliable than central authorities, who should be
given more supervisory powers.74 On poor relief, then, we see clearly that
Mill inherited the paternal side of Benthamite Malthusianism. But Mill
also gave up being a Benthamite: such measures were only ad interim:
they would be superseded in the long run by the abolition of poverty.75
A culture of dependency benefitted no one, the poor perhaps least of
all.
Franchise regulations
Commentators on Mill’s politics recognise that having begun as a radical
democrat he moved in his later years to wed democracy to the need for
educated and experienced opinion.76 Accounts of Mill’s attitude towards
the scope of state activity do not usually examine his proposals, late in life,
73 CW 14, pp. 44–5. 74 CW 28, pp. 358, 312, 324.

75 For the wider context of this argument see Jones, The End of Poverty? A Historical Debate.
76 These shifts are usefully summarised in Krouse, ‘Two Concepts of Democratic Representation:
James and John Stuart Mill’. See generally Kent, Brains and Numbers and Burns, ‘J.S. Mill and
Democracy, 1829–61’.
for restricting the franchise for the indigent and illiterate, while extending
it to women.77 Ignoring such examples of course makes Mill’s approach
to the state appear much more limited.78 But this example indicates an
enormous and potentially deeply unpopular responsibility tacitly taken up
by government, and represents a substantial shift in Mill’s view on state
activity, which was not acknowledged as such in editions of the Principles
published after the Considerations.
Mill had of course always contended, as he put it in 1832, that ideally,
in systems of popular representation, government must be through the
‘most judicious persons whom the people can find . . . Government must
be performed by the few, for the benefit of the many’. Governments
needed to reflect not ‘the will of the people, but the good of the people’.79
The people themselves, however, often mistook the two. As early as 1835,
thus, Mill had discussed franchise limitations, indicating that immorality
(being seen drunk in public during the past year), absence of educational
qualifications, conviction of a crime, and/or the receipt of poor relief, might
justify such exclusions.80
Mill’s anxieties about this issue, fuelled in part by Tocquevillian fears, led
him to try to steer a middle course between populism and the ‘pedantocracy’
of bureaucratic rule. He fiercely opposed ‘all merely class representation’
in principle, but even more ‘all class subordination’. The working classes,
he thought, though their ‘better part’ possessed ‘greater mental honesty, &
amenability to reason . . . compared with the average of either the higher
or middle’, would nonetheless likely be ‘corruptible by the flattery which
is always addressed to power’.81 It was ‘chimerical’ to hope to outnumber
the commercial classes, but their influence was in any case by and large
77 This forms no part of the argument of, for instance, Hamburger’s John Stuart Mill on Liberty and
Control, surprisingly. The chief study of this issue is Thompson, John Stuart Mill and Representative
Government.
78 Arneson, however, explicitly describes Mill’s strategy in the Considerations as ‘paternalist’, by contrast
to On Liberty, in the sense of ‘coercing someone against his will or without his consent’. He here
also considers other restrictions on the assembly proposed by Mill as being in the same vein, such
as confining the drafting of legislation to commissions of experts, ensuring that assemblies do not
administer laws themselves, and limiting powers of the direct recall of legislators by the electorate.
These limitations on majority rule he regards as ‘directly at odds with the doctrine of On Liberty’
(‘Democracy and Liberty in Mill’s Theory of Government’). Some feel Mill is not a democrat by
this point (e.g. Stafford, John Stuart Mill, pp. 115–16).
79 CW 23, pp. 489, 502.
80 CW 18, pp. 31–2. He later proposed that a test of ‘moral worth’ on the principle that a ‘person who
can read, but cannot write or calculate, is not as good as a person who can do both’, might measure
potential electors (CW 19, pp. 323–4).
81 CW 16, pp. 1252, 1103. Mill and Taylor both may have been less favourable to Chartism because of its
lukewarm support for female enfranchisement. See the discussion in Gleadle, The Early Feminists,
pp. 82–4.
not an evil.82 This confidence ebbed eventually too. By 1855 Mill asserted
that ‘any public matter whatever, under the management of the middle
classes, would be as grossly, if not more grossly mismanaged than public
affairs are now’.83 Reflecting in 1857 that he had ‘not seen any method
proposed by which persons of educated minds can be sifted from the rest
of the community’, Mill concluded that it would be best ‘to give votes to a
limited number of what are called liberal professions, on the presumption
(often a very false one) that every member of these professions must be
an educated person’. But as ‘nearly all the recognized professions have as
such, interests & partialities opposed to the public good’, Mill conceded
that ‘the members of Parliament whom they would elect if organized apart
would, I apprehend, be much more likely to represent their sentiments &
objects as professional, than as educated men’. Thus it would be preferable
to impose an educational test upon all electors which would ‘exclude the
wholly uneducated’, whom, Mill acknowledged, ‘would be found I believe
much greater than is supposed’.84
By 1859 Mill thought that this ‘ground for resisting the democracy of
mere numbers’ combined ‘two broad principles – that every one is entitled
to some voice in the representation, and that every intelligent person is
entitled to a more potential voice’.85 He supported this in part with the
unpopular argument that voting was not as such a right, there being ‘no
such thing in morals as a right to power over others; and the electoral
suffrage is that power’.86 (For this reason, again, the liberty principle did
not apply.) Instead the suffrage was a trust, and ‘honest or self-restraining
government’ was impossible ‘unless each individual participant feels himself
a trustee for all his fellow citizens and for posterity. Certainly no Athenian
voter thought otherwise.’87 There could scarcely be a sterner ‘obligation
to be dutifully fulfilled’ as ‘a return to the civilisation to which he owes
not only all the security and peace, all the highest enjoyments of his life,
but also the possibility of attaining refinement and moral elevation’.88 Mill
would go on to reject the secret ballot, which he had earlier supported, on
similar grounds. Republicanism was a clear inspiration in Mill’s defences of
82 CW 18, p. 200 [1840].

83 CW 14, p. 495. James Mill’s concerns with the ‘sinister interests’ of any group were doubtless reflected
here (Essays on Government, Jurisprudence, Liberty of the Press, and Law of Nations, pp. 24–6). But
he also praised the ‘most wise and most virtuous class of the community, the middle rank’ (ibid.,
pp. 31–2).
84 CW 15, p. 543 [1857].
85 CW 15, p. 588. This is sometimes described as a Platonist position; see Urbinati’s discussion, however,
in Mill on Democracy, pp. 47–8.
86 CW 19, pp. 323–4. 87 CW 15, p. 608. 88 CW 16, p. 1340.
these premises.89 ‘Character’ implied a strong belief in citizenship and its
duties. Society had in turn a mandate to encourage such ideals, and could
act paternally to do so. Liberty did not encourage political dependence any
more than moral or personal dependence.
This then was Mill’s position when he published the Considerations
on Representative Government (1861). Here he not only adopted Thomas
Hare’s scheme for proportional representation, but also proposed limiting
the franchise by imposing tests for reading, writing, arithmetic, history and
geography, as well as excluding all those who could not pay a head tax or
who had received poor relief in the previous five years, the latter having ‘no
claim to the privilege’ of helping themselves to public funds.90 Literacy and
poor relief statistics indicate that this might have excluded about one-half of
potential adult voters.91 This seems to square with Mill’s intent, for he was
prepared in 1865 ‘to support a measure which would give to the labouring
classes a clear half of the national representation’, hoping thereby to let in
‘a powerful influence from those who are the great sufferers by whatever
evil is done or is left uncorrected at home & who have no personal or
class interests or feelings concerned either in oppressing dependencies, or
in doing or conniving at wrong to foreign countries’.92 Whether this made
Mill more of an ‘elitist’ than a ‘democrat’ depends on definitions. Certainly
it enhanced his plea for governmental intervention in either case, and for
the continuing importance of a professional civil service, even above, in
some vital respects, legislatures.93 Certainly he wished governments to
balance moral, political and economic claims. Governments also had the
aim of defining and promoting higher forms of utility, and here educated
professionals had to be given greater sway than mere numbers would
89 As Jones emphasises (‘John Stuart Mill as a Moralist’, 292–3).

90 CW 19, pp. 470–2. In 1858 Holyoake had proposed an ‘intelligence franchise’, with ‘Political
Economy and English Constitutional History’ as the subjects for the examination (Joseph McCabe,
Life and Letters of George Jacob Holyoake, vol. 2, pp. 8–9). Mill’s own Principles were supposed to
comprise the political economy syllabus.
91 Exactly how many is difficult to calculate. About two-thirds of men and half of women were literate
in this period. How many would be excluded would depend upon the difficulty of the test imposed.
The population of England, Wales and Scotland in 1861 was about 23.2 million, of whom about
15 million were adults. Approximately 6.7 million received poor relief at this time. 16 per cent of
all adults became eligible to vote in 1867, producing an electorate of about 2.5 million. It might
very roughly be estimated, thus, that between 50–60 per cent of the eligible population would be
excluded by Mill’s preferred measures at this time, though this would of course be steadily reduced
through education, as well as increasing prosperity and a falling birth rate.
92 CW 16, pp. 1032, 1209.
93 A point emphasised by Burns, ‘J.S. Mill and Democracy’, 275, who also stresses that Mill distrusted
professional politicians and was sceptical about payment of MPs as a consequence (290).
assign them.94 But we must recall, too, that these arguments were offered
before universal enfranchisement, not afterwards. They were not proposed
as restrictions on what were widely regarded as existing rights, but as
halfway measures on the road to achieving those rights. Taking votes once
extended away, though still defensible on these grounds, would have been
a very different form of proposal, and clearly inexpedient.
Yet eventually, of course, the progress of both education and prosperity
would bring the franchise to most adults. And Mill had also taken up
the cause of female enfranchisement and would become the first MP to
introduce a bill supporting it in Parliament. He wrote in 1869 that the
‘emancipation of women, & co-operative production, are . . . the two great
changes that will regenerate society’, but that while ‘the latter of these may
grow up without much help from the action of Parliaments & Congresses,
the former cannot’.95 This was, effectively, the most important priority for
government in Mill’s view, and the greatest injustice which governments
might rectify.
Education
Education lay at the heart of Mill’s vision of social improvement. The
‘unlimited possibility of improving the moral and intellectual attributes of
mankind by education’ had been his father’s most valuable doctrine, and
in this his son followed him, aiming at ‘the regeneration of mankind not
from any direct action on those sentiments but from educated intellect
enlightening the selfish feelings, and expecting that the well-to-do would
eventually see the advantages of educating the poor’.96 Mill also claimed
an extensive right of public intervention in education, in the belief that,
after religion, government played the key role in forming character. He was
later assumed to have begun the compulsory education movement.97 Yet
here too his views remain controversial, particularly because he opposed
94 See also Ryan, ‘Two Concepts of Politics & Democracy’, and the discussion in Thompson, John
Stuart Mill and Representative Government, pp. 56–63.
95 CW 17, p. 1535.
96 CW 1, pp. 110, 112. Mill later recorded that ‘while the higher and richer classes held the power of
government, the instruction and improvement of the mass of the people was contrary to the self
interest of those classes, because necessarily tending to raise up dissatisfaction with their monopoly:
but if the democracy obtained a share in the supreme power, and still more if they obtained the
predominant share, it would become the interest of the opulent classes to promote their education,
in order to guard them from really mischievous errors and especially to ward off unjust violations
of property’ (CW 1, pp. 178–9).
97 Jus (18 March 1887), 8–9.
governments becoming the chief educator.98 While visiting France in 1820
Mill had noticed that educational institutions there were ‘essentially in
the power of government’, which had the ‘watch over’ private boarding
schools, and could ‘prevent any thing from being taught there more than
they please’.99 The issue came to the fore only with the debate over com-
mencing a national education system in Britain in the mid 1840s. Mill later
recalled, however, that he already believed that the rules of the market could
not apply in such instances, writing in the Autobiography that he had ‘urged
strongly the importance of having a provision for education, not depen-
dent on the mere demand of the market, that is, on the knowledge and
discernment of ordinary parents, but calculated to establish and keep up a
higher standard of instruction than is likely to be spontaneously demanded
by the buyers of the article’.100 The vast majority of what existed already
he described in 1834 as merely ‘an organized system of charlatanerie for
imposing upon the ignorance of the parents’.101 There was now an ‘abso-
lute necessity for national education’, for labourers, Mill thought, quoting
Victor Cousin, were no longer content to tread in ‘the paths wherein their
fathers trod’.102
Here, then, competency was crucial. The Principles termed education
the first of the ‘large exceptions to laisser-faire’, amongst ‘cases in which
the consumer is an incompetent judge of the commodity’. This was ‘pecu-
liarly true of those things which are chiefly useful as tending to raise the
character of human beings’. The ‘uncultivated’ were not ‘competent judges
of cultivation’, since those ‘who most need to be made wiser and better,
usually desire it least, and if they desired it, would be incapable of finding
the way to it by their own lights’. Parents had accordingly a duty to develop
their children’s mental capacities, and the state could step in if they failed
to do so.103 A clearer statement justifying autonomy-driven paternalism, or
what Mill termed ‘help towards doing without help’,104 cannot be imag-
ined. Incompetence is a key element in any theory of paternalism, and
Mill clearly took it as his rationale here. Its implications, thought through,
are radical. A ‘well-intentioned and tolerably civilized government’ could
98 The chief study of the subject is Garforth, Educative Democracy. See also Roellinger, Jr., ‘Mill on
Education’, West, ‘Liberty and Education’ and Gardner, ‘Liberty and Compulsory Education’.
99 CW 26, p. 15. 100 CW 1, p. 190. 101 CW 21, p. 65. 102 CW 23, p. 729.
103 School attendance became a parental obligation in 1876. Further legislation in the 1880s strength-
ened the state’s duties to act where parents failed to meet such obligations (Shanley, Feminism,
Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, p. 153).
104 CW 3, p. 949. ‘So broad a license to intervene’ Hollis calls ‘surprising’ (‘The Social Liberty Game’,
p. 35).
rightly seek ‘to possess a degree of cultivation above the average of the com-
munity which it rules’ (my italics) and thus offer a ‘better education and
better instruction to the people, than the greater number of them would
spontaneously demand’. From this flowed a legal obligation, Mill thought,
to provide primary education for all, and for free for those who could
not afford it. But there was also an economic argument: the ‘intelligence
of the workman’ was ‘a most important element in the productiveness
of labour’, and ‘endowing with brains those who now have only hands’
was a key means of improving it.105 It was, moreover, also ‘part of a good
government to provide, that, as far as more paramount considerations per-
mit, the inequality of opportunities shall be remedied’. Educating the poor
‘so far as necessary by the guidance and co-operation of the state’ could
obviate ‘the major part of the disabilities attendant on poverty’.106 But
the existing system, Mill insisted, resulted in everyone being ‘wretchedly
ill-taught’, because bad teachers were appointed rather than good, because
‘those whose duty it was to look after the teaching left it to take care of
itself’, and because parents ‘did not take the trouble to ascertain whether
their children were taught anything or nothing’.107
Education, then, was far too important to be left to the whim of the
majority. And there is no indication here that Mill did not expect that
the government should periodically move the educational goalposts by
aiming at still higher standards of average intellectual attainment as the
latter rose. But the government could claim no monopoly here, and could
exert neither ‘authority nor influence to induce the people to resort to
its teachers in preference to others’, nor confer ‘peculiar advantages on
those who have been instructed by them’.108 Governments, however, could
rightly control endowed establishments, which were national property,
after some years had elapsed from their formation, ‘beyond which the
foresight of an individual cannot reasonably be supposed to extend’.109 In
general, Mill argued, parents ‘should be required to have their children
taught certain things, being left free to select the teachers’, with the quality
of teaching ‘being ensured by a government inspection of schools & by
a real & searching examination of pupils’. A government department,
perhaps attached to the Privy Council, would control funding of such
supervision, but it did ‘not follow that the teachers need be appointed or
directly controlled by any public office’. Here, rather, the ‘control might
rest in a school committee chosen from the locality itself, perhaps by a
105 CW 2, pp. 182–3. 106 CW 3, p. 811. 107 CW 28, p. 323. 108 CW 3, p. 949.
109 CW 4, p. 205. Later critics termed this an ‘embodiment of socialist principles’ (Donisthorpe,
Individualism, p. 124).
mixed system of election & nomination & entrusted with considerable
latitude as to all details’.110 Local school boards should include workers as
well as women.111 The chief means of enforcing the system would be by
public examination of all children. Mill suggested that an early age be fixed
‘at which every child must be examined, to ascertain if he (or she) is able
to read’. If they could not, the father, unless he had a reasonable excuse,
‘might be subjected to a moderate fine, to be worked out, if necessary, by his
labour, and the child might be put to school at his expense’. Examinations
would cover ‘a gradually extending range of subjects, so as to make the
universal acquisition, and what is more, retention, of a certain minimum
of general knowledge, virtually compulsory’.112
In the first instance Mill thus aimed at a practical education which
would train the masses ‘to cultivate common sense; to qualify them for
forming a sound practical judgment of the circumstances by which they
are surrounded’. Yet there were clear Malthusian implications evident here.
‘An education directed to diffuse good sense among the people, with such
knowledge as would qualify them to judge of the tendencies of their actions’
would, Mill thought, ‘be certain, even without any direct inculcation, to
raise up a public opinion by which intemperance and improvidence of every
kind would be held discreditable, and the improvidence which overstocks
the labour market would be severely condemned, as an offence against
the common weal’. But Mill did not think that it was possible ‘to trust
to education alone’ to ‘keep the increase of population within proper
limits’. Education was simply ‘not compatible with extreme poverty’. It
was ‘impossible effectually to teach an indigent population’, and little
‘improvement in the habits and requirements of the mass of unskilled
day-labourers’ could be expected ‘unless means can be contrived of raising
the entire body to a state of tolerable comfort, and maintaining them in it
until a new generation grows up’.113 The object of moral education might
be to temper the will, and to inculcate a sense of right and wrong, and
of appropriate desires and aversions.114 But to expect the poor majority to
achieve these unaided was misguided. If, however, education were given
sufficient priority, Mill thought there was no reason why ‘an amount of
mental culture sufficient to give an intelligent interest’ in art, poetry, history
110 CW 16, pp. 1347–8; CW 23, p. 210. 111 CW 29, p. 401.

112 CW 18, p. 303. Bernard Bosanquet asserted that the ‘proposal of universal State-enacted examina-
tions by way of enforcing the parental duty of educating children, to the exclusion of the task of
providing education by public authority, in which Mill sees danger to individuality’ opened the
‘prospect of a Chinese type of society’ (The Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 67).
113 CW 2, p. 375. 114 CW 9, p. 453.
and the like ‘should not be the inheritance of every one born in a civilized
country’.115
Given allegations that Mill did not think that individuals should seek to
subsume their private interests under the public good, it is worth stressing
his view of the moral ends of education. Mill believed the ‘power of
education’ to be ‘almost boundless: there is not one natural inclination
which it is not strong enough to coerce, and, if needful, to destroy by
disuse’. Amongst other things, it was greatly ‘favourable to the spirit of
independence’.116 But the ‘very pivot & turning point of that education’,
he wrote Harriet in 1849, was providing ‘a moral sense – a feeling of duty, or
conscience, or principle, or whatever name one gives it – a feeling that one
ought to do, & wish for, what is for the greatest good of all concerned’.117
‘Great improvements in Education’, he insisted, were ‘the only thing to
which I should look for permanent good’ (provided ‘bad religion’ was
excluded).118 Mill did not want either rich or poor to ‘be taught other
people’s opinions, but to be induced and enabled to think for themselves’,
and he did not feel that the ‘miserable pretence of education’ which the
‘higher and middle classes’ received, formed ‘minds fit to undertake the
guidance of other minds, or to exercise a beneficient influence over them
by personal contact’.119 The ‘only means’, he lamented in 1854, of forming
‘a far better ideal of human society’ lay in ‘universal Education’. But the
problem remained, as in Marx’s theses on Feuerbach: ‘who will educate the
educators?’120
Mill treated the issue of the ultimate aims of education most closely
in his writings on utilitarianism. The System of Logic (1843) stated that
promoting happiness ‘should be itself the end of all actions, or even of
all rules of action’. This required cultivating ‘an ideal nobleness of will
and conduct’, which ‘should be to individual human beings an end, to
which the specific pursuit either of their own happiness or of that of others
(except so far as included in that idea) should, in any case of conflict, give
way’.121 Utilitarianism (1861) stressed that ‘laws and social arrangements’
should render the happiness or interest ‘of every individual, as nearly as
possible in harmony with the interest of the whole’. Education and opinion,
thus, which had ‘so vast a power over human character’, were to ‘establish
115 CW 10, p. 216. 116 CW 10, p. 409; CW 3, p. 949. 117 CW 14, p. 22 [1849].
118 CW 14, p. 45. Mill remained adamant, in fact, that theology should not be taught in any school
(CW 16, p. 1092).
119 CW 14, p. 80.
120 CW 27, p. 645. It was Owen’s necessitarianism which provoked Marx’s comment.
121 CW 8, p. 952.
in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his
own happiness and the good of the whole’. Mill hoped that ‘a direct
impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the
habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill
a large and prominent place in every human being’s sentient existence’. The
idea of a ‘general cultivation of nobleness of character’ meant combining
‘private affections, and a sincere interest in the public good’, with nobility
being defined by a willingness of ‘resigning entirely one’s own portion of
happiness, or chances of it’ when required, ‘the readiness to make such
a sacrifice’ being ‘the highest virtue which can be found in man’.122 The
allegation, first suggested by Frederic Harrison and then pressed in earnest
by Himmelfarb, that ‘Mill rejected the notion of a collective good’ and
that “altruism” for Mill . . . did not mean the surrendering or subsuming of
the private good’ is thus clearly a misapprehension, in effect a Benthamite
misreading of Mill.123 Education aimed, as Mill put it in his Inaugural
Address at the University of St Andrews, precisely to raise individuals
above ‘the commonest types of character among us’. This was ‘that of a
man all whose ambition is self-regarding; who has no higher purpose in
life than to enrich or raise in the world himself and his family’, who ‘never
dreams of making the good of his fellow-creatures or of his country an
habitual object’, but who ‘would scruple to use any very illegitimate means
for attaining his self-interested objects’. Education, in brief, aimed to teach
people to ‘love virtue, and feel it an object in itself,’ by portraying ‘the
absence of noble aims and endeavours, as not merely blameable but also
degrading’, and cultivating ‘a feeling of the miserable smallness of mere
self in the face of this great universe, of the collective mass of our fellow
creatures, in the face of past history and of the indefinite future’.124
Miscellaneous issues respecting state intervention

We now turn to a variety of practical issues faced by Mill in which the
question of state involvement, interference or supervision arose. A number
of these were outlined in chapter 5 of On Liberty, respecting applications
of the harm principle. Mill here repeated that respecting such questions as
122 CW 10, pp. 217–18.

123 Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, pp. 211–15. Mill accused Adam Sedgwick of lumping together ‘the
principle of utility – which is a theory of right and wrong – with the theory, if there be such a
theory, of the universal selfishness of mankind’ (CW 10, p. 71), which seems precisely the error
here.
124 CW 21, pp. 253–4.
‘what amount of public control is admissible for the prevention of fraud
by adulteration; how far sanitary precautions, or arrangements to pro-
tect workpeople employed in dangerous occupations, should be enforced
on employers’, it was ‘in principle undeniable’ that ‘they may be legiti-
mately controlled for these ends’. ‘Free trade’ as such did not dictate the
terms by which this was to be accomplished.125 While justifying taxes on
‘vice’ in general, Mill here prevaricated on the issues of state regulation
of prostitution, gambling and alcohol. In the 1820s he had complained
that exertions to suppress gambling houses were ‘not by any means so
active as they ought to be’.126 Now he seemed less sure. He pointed out
the inconsistencies between punishing ‘the procurer, but not the fornica-
tor, the gambling-house keeper, but not the gambler’, but without settling
on a clear principle.127 In offering evidence before Parliament during the
controversy over the Contagious Diseases Acts, however, Mill objected to
licensing brothels as tolerating a ‘vicious indulgence’ because they facili-
tated fornication rather than ‘remedying the consequences’ which might
result. Mill thought it possible to ‘draw a line between attacking evils when
they occur, in order to remedy them as far as we are able, and making
arrangements beforehand which will enable the objectionable practices to
be carried on without incurring the danger of the evil’. He also argued that
if women were inspected for venereal diseases, as the acts mandated, men
should be as well, adding that he preferred that neither was subject to such
‘espionage’. But he had no objection to allowing the state to prevent pros-
titution by minors.128 Drunkenness, he agreed in 1865, was ‘the bane of the
working classes’, but he nonetheless ‘did not think that it was right because
some persons abused a benefit that others should be deprived of it’. He
relied ‘mainly on moral means, such as education, for improving the habits
of the working classes’. Yet public houses could be regulated, and it was
‘much better to tax stimulants than necessary articles’.129 Sunday closing he
opposed unequivocally: excluding people ‘from what is regarded as hurtful
indulgence, without giving them any other’ was much inferior to providing
the means of ‘obtaining indulgences, amusements, recreations . . . which if
possible may be beneficial, and which certainly cannot be noxious’.130
Mill was of course generally reluctant to counsel interference in economic
matters. But throughout his life the question of the appropriate scope
of governmental activity was raised continuously, and he often followed
the trend of public opinion away from laissez-faire. Respecting factory
125 CW 18, p. 293. 126 CW 22, p. 79. 127 CW 18, pp. 296–7.
128 CW 21, pp. 353, 362–3, 366–9. 129 CW 28, pp. 26, 31. 130 CW 28, p. 191; CW 15, p. 512.
reform, for instance, Mill in 1832 approved restricting child labour in
manufactories below the age of fifteen, and married female labour as well.131
This was ‘precisely the kind of case in which the government ought to
interfere’, because ‘the private immediate interest of each individual’ (i.e.
in not conforming to voluntary restrictions, while benefitting from others’
conforming) was ‘necessarily in opposition to the general interest, unless a
universal compact among all individuals is made and enforced’. And here
‘the only power which can promulgate and guarantee a compact among all
the labouring people of the community, is the government; and the only
mode in which it can do so is by a law’.132 Mill would later argue that
it was disastrous to leave ‘children, without legal protection, to the mere
discretion of any kind of parents and any kind of employers of labour’,
and condemned the inefficacy of existing regulations.133 In Parliament he
supported both the Hours of Labour Regulation Bill and the Artisans’ and
Labourers’ Dwelling Bill.134 Respecting the expediency of government loans
to improve working class housing, Mill was inclined to reject proposals
which would ‘injure the independence of the working classes or encourage
their improvidence’. He saw this as ‘one of a class of cases in which people
require artificial help, to enable them afterwards to help themselves’, or
what we have termed autonomy-promoting paternalism. In this instance,
the ‘taste for better house accommodation has still to be created: & until
it is created, private speculation will not find its account in supplying
that improved accommodation. The aid of Gov[ernmen]t is often useful,
& sometimes necessary, to start improved systems which once started
are able to keep themselves going without further help.’ Loans for peasant
proprietors or emigration, he thought, should be treated in the same way.135
The gradual drift towards greater intervention throughout this period
brought out in Mill a corresponding inclination for rational management,
even when this implied greater centralisation. Health administration was
a good case in point. Why, Mill asked in 1867, should there be one set of
managers for asylums, and another for dispensaries, while asylums were
provided according to districts defined by Poor Law Boards, and dispen-
saries by parishes and unions? ‘Kindred institutions’ should ‘be managed
in a certain degree on the same principles’, and it was a ‘sound rule that the
administration of the same kind of things ought to be, as far as possible, on
a large scale, and under the same management’. A Central Board ‘would
be under the eye of the public, who would know and think more about
131 CW 23, p. 399. 132 CW 22, pp. 400–1.

133 CW 17, pp. 1568, 1585 [1869]. 134 CW 28, p. 238. 135 CW 16, pp. 1155–6.
it than about local Boards’, and ‘would act under a much greater sense of
responsibility’. Again in 1867 he upheld as ‘indisputable’ the ‘value of large
bodies representing large constituencies, as compared with small bodies
representing small districts’, now considering managing epidemics which
began in one district but might easily spread. To the objection that this
was ‘a step on the road to centralization’, Mill responded that ‘if the estab-
lishment of such an intermediate body be denied, the denial of it would be
a far greater step towards centralization. The powers which such a body is
best qualified to exercise have become indispensable. They will therefore be
necessarily assumed by a purely Government Board, without any elected
body at all – by the Poor Law Board.’136 The same criterion applied gener-
ally to municipal reform. As an MP Mill spent much of 1866 questioning
witnesses respecting the superiority of a single metropolitan government
over the existing vestry and local board administrations.137 Given its size,
Mill admitted, London should have municipal administrations modelled
on parliamentary constituencies, as well as a single governing body dealing
with questions affecting the whole city. Much money, he thought, could
be saved by consolidation into larger districts.138
On occasion these considerations drove Mill to examine the question
as to whether specific services were better provided privately or by gov-
ernment. One such instance was public gardens. These, he wrote Herbert
Spencer in 1859, should be the property of towns ‘in order that they may
be free to all without payment’. Of baths, on the other hand, he thought
differently, arguing that ‘in order to foster the taste for them, and render
them ultimately a profitable private speculation, I should not object to
their being experimentally provided by public authority’, and adding that
these ‘cases exemplify the difference there is between us in degree, though
I think not in principle, respecting the limits of government interference’.139
In other cases, however, a ‘natural monopoly’ existed where the state pos-
sessed stronger rights. Water supply was a clear instance where ‘a practical
monopoly is unavoidable; and the possession of the monopoly by individ-
uals constitutes not freedom but slavery; it delivers over the public to the
mercy of those individuals’.140 London, he thought, thus ought to have a
single provider of water and of gas, supervised by government, or better
still, in the case of water, run directly by local government. Joint-stock
136 CW 28, pp. 137, 143. 137 See CW 31, pp. 389ff.; CW 1, p. 276.
138 CW 28, pp. 275, 293–5. 139 CW 15, p. 609.
140 CW 5, p. 434. The case is discussed in Schwartz, ‘John Stuart Mill and Laissez-Faire: London
Water’.
companies, or what we today call corporations – Mill’s acute sense of ‘sinis-
ter interest’ was again to the fore – were liable to ‘be corrupt or negligent’ in
such affairs and even more irresponsible than government.141 Railways, too,
were ‘inevitably a monopoly’ whose fares the state could rightfully limit,
and which the state might well own, leaving their management in private
hands.142 Similar cases were making roads and bridges, paving, lighting,
and cleaning streets, and sewerage. In all these instances, Mill thought, it
was not necessarily the government’s duty to provide the service, but rather
to ensure its efficient performance through supervision.
Such instances tended to multiply. As Mill wrote in 1868, ‘the statesman-
ship of the country has much more to do nowadays than merely to abolish
bad institutions’. It had ‘to make good laws for a state of society which never
existed in the world before’. It had ‘to deal with a richer, a more struggling,
and a more overcrowded society than our ancestors could have formed
any conception of ’, and thus, ‘from the necessities of the case, a hundred
evils have sprung up along with it, which philanthropists are toiling after,
with some, but with very imperfect, success’.143 And, curiously, a family
friend also reported that Mill thought that ‘no pictures ought to be kept
by individuals but national works of art should be given up to the nation
for the public to enjoy & in the same way men with parks ought to admit
the public; they might keep a bit round the house for private; but the rest
should be open’.144 Thus Mill broadly counselled a substantial amount of
economic intervention and public ownership and/or management, while
wishing to ensure as much expert supervision as possible, and as much local
control. And he clearly had a very lively sense of a distinct public interest.
Thus far we have seen that Mill advanced a large number of exceptions to
the general rule of non-interference in domestic matters, so many indeed as
to constitute what McCloskey terms ‘a very substantial modification of the
non-interference thesis’.145 It is nonetheless a moot point as to how far each
or all of these constitutes a ‘paternalist’ intervention. With respect to sani-
tary laws, for instance, Ryan has stressed that Mill differed from Whewell
in believing that the issue was not regulating people’s own interests, but
the impact of their behaviour on ‘the interest of other people’, the ‘proper
object of sanitary laws’ being ‘not to compel people to take care of their
own health, but to prevent them from endangering that of others’.146 This
141 CW 5, pp. 434–5; CW 3, pp. 955–6.

142 CW 5, p. 690; CW 3, p. 956. Most of his own investments were in railway stock, which in retirement
brought him some £500 p.a.
143 CW 28, p. 321. 144 The Amberley Papers (vol. 1), p. 374.
145 McCloskey, ‘Mill’s Liberalism’, 155. 146 Ryan, J.S. Mill, p. 147; CW 10, pp. 197–8.
issue was therefore non-self-regarding as such, and Mill therefore perceived
this as a specifically non-paternalist form of interference. Yet such cases
clearly had an important knock-on effect on individual well-being, even if
this was a secondary consideration. The self-regarding concept, again, was
elastic.
Let us now examine how such principles were applied outside of
England.
foreign intervention: india and ireland

This section will consider what parallels Mill thought might exist between
the scope of government appropriate to Britain, and that which applied to
government abroad, especially in India and Ireland.147 The former was in
this period part of the empire, while Ireland was considered as integral to
Britain, at least until the prospect of independence became more serious in
the 1860s. In the case of some forms of dependency, we will see, Mill justified
an unreservedly despotic form of paternalism. In others, he modified this
doctrine. Some have termed his general approach to this issue ‘political
paternalism’.148
Mill’s chief statement of the general principles of interference in the
affairs of other states came in his 1859 article, ‘A Few Words on Non-
Intervention’.149 He had, beforehand, occasionally commented on the
issue, arguing in 1837, for instance, that despite Russia’s detrimental influ-
ence, the ‘impolicy of involving one country in hostilities for the interests
of other nations’ should be condemned, even when this meant abandon-
ing ‘the interests of any independent people to the power of this barbarous
despotism’. In 1837 he reiterated, respecting Spain, that anyone rebelling
against an established government, ‘unless he has so plainly the majority
with him that he succeeds almost without a struggle, acts under a terrible
responsibility’. Discussing France the same year he declared it ‘an invio-
lable principle that an enslaved people should be left to work out their own
deliverance’. But he added that ‘if unaided, they shall also be unhindered.
If free nations look on inactive, despots must do so too . . . If freedom
147 On Mill’s general views of empire, see Sullivan, ‘Liberalism and Imperialism’. There are parallels
here between national and individual autonomy which we lack the space to explore here. Nations,
for example, commonly prefer ruling themselves badly to being ruled by others. My Imperial
Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 takes up some of these issues.
148 Kleinig, Paternalism, pp. 169–75.
149 For recent commentary see Pitts, A Turn to Empire, pp. 123–64. Older studies include Miller, ‘John
Stuart Mill’s Theory of International Relations’.
cannot be established by foreign force, it does not, therefore, follow, that
by foreign force it should be allowed to be crushed.’150
There was one other area in which Mill privately suggested expanding
public activity in the international order. In 1870 he thought that the
prospect of ending war between states could only be realised ‘as war between
individuals has been checked in civilised societies – by the creation of a
police & an impartial umpire to settle quarrels’. This required in turn,
he thought, that ‘all courageous & right feeling men sh[oul]d be ready to
suffer in protecting the weak in politics as they ought to be in civil life’, a
prospect he did not seem to think would soon occur.151 This was probably
a late legacy of his youthful engagement with Saint-Simonism.
Mill’s earlier discussion of similar issues, as in 1859, referring to the Suez
Canal, often turned upon the issue of the level of civilisation of the nations
involved. Mill thought it a ‘grave error’ to presume that ‘the same inter-
national customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain
between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations
and barbarians’. The latter were, he insisted, incapable of reciprocity or
‘observing any rules’. It would thus ‘be for their benefit that they should
be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners’, for independence and
nationality were simply likely to be ‘impediments’. Barbarians thus had ‘no
rights as a nation’, except ‘to such treatment as may, at the earliest possible
period, fit them for becoming one’. Civilised countries with barbarous
neighbours often found themselves, Mill contended, ‘obliged to conquer
them, or to assert so much authority over them, and so break their spirit,
that they gradually sink into a state of dependence upon itself’. This he
described as ‘the history of the relations of the British Government with the
native States of India’, which often involved exchanging one despotism for
another. Annexations of civilised peoples, however, could not be excused
on the basis of conquest. But asking ‘whether one country is justified in
helping the people of another in a struggle against their government for
free institutions’, Mill now distinguished between cases where rule was by
foreigners or by local despots. If the former, he insisted that the ‘only test
possessing any real value, of a people’s having become fit for popular insti-
tutions, is that they, or a sufficient portion of them to prevail in the contest,
are willing to brave labour and danger for their liberation’. If the latter, a
‘people the most attached to freedom, the most capable of defending and
of making a good use of free institutions’, might ‘be unable to contend
successfully for them against the military strength of another nation much
150 CW 31, pp. 347, 365, 374. 151 CW 17, p. 1761.
more powerful’. Here assisting ‘a people thus kept down, is not to disturb
the balance of forces on which the permanent maintenance of freedom in a
country depends, but to redress that balance when it is already unfairly and
violently disturbed’, and could therefore be excused.152 Mill also justified
interference in the liberty of independent countries against foreign tyrants
in 1865.153 The instance of American slavery he seems to have viewed as
analogous, for he argued in 1861 that this was ‘a case for a crusade of all civ-
ilized humanity’ to prevent ‘barbarizing the world more and more’.154 But
he did not sympathise with China’s lengthy resistance to Britain’s imposi-
tion of the opium trade, dismissing out of hand the ‘ridiculous appeals to
humanity and Christianity in favour of ruffians, & to international law in
favour of people who recognize no laws of war at all’.155 And in On Liberty
he blithely defended under the rubric of general freedom of exchange the
opium trade.156
Mill’s account of civilisation was thus central to his treatment of such
cases.157 His 1836 essay, ‘Civilization’, distinguished between ‘savage life’,
where there was ‘no commerce, no manufactures, no agriculture, or next to
none’, and civilised countries ‘rich in the fruits of agriculture, commerce,
and manufactures’. The latter possessed the means of maintaining peace
amongst themselves by the arbitration of differences of interest by law
rather than individual strength.158 Nations on the road from savagery to
civilisation needed, the Principles argued, to be ‘inspired with new wants
and desires, even if not of a very elevated kind, provided that their gratifi-
cation can be a motive to steady and regular bodily and mental exertion’.159
Their position on this road also required their physical condition and
external life to improve, their mental faculties to unfold, and a ‘higher
spiritual culture’ to emerge, such that ‘the national mind’ became ‘wiser,
nobler, more humane, or more refined, and that more numerous or more
admirable individual examples of genius, talent, or heroism are mani-
festing themselves’.160 Like ancient Athens, whose passion for conquest
Mill described as ‘most beneficial’ for the ‘permanent improvement for
mankind’ by allowing ‘intellect’ to assert ‘its superiority, even in a military
sense, over brute force’, modern empires thus had their justification.161
152 CW 21, pp. 118–23. 153 CW 16, p. 1033.

154 CW 15, p. 738; CW 15, p. 752. George Grote described him as ‘violent against the South’ on the
issue (Mrs Grote, The Personal Life of George Grote, p. 264).
155 CW 15, p. 528. 156 CW 18, p. 293.
157 See generally Levin, Mill on Civilization and Barbarism and, for a summary of recent views,
Marwah, ‘Complicating Barbarism and Civilization’.
158 CW 18, p. 120. 159 CW 2, p. 104. 160 CW 20, p. 374. 161 CW 11, p. 321.
In two key texts Mill stated clearly that uncivilised nations could be
ruled despotically by the more advanced.162 On Liberty defined the liberty
principle as ‘meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their
faculties’. Those ‘still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must
be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury’.
‘[B]ackward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as
in its nonage’ were of this type. Thus, he famously declared:
Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided
the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that
end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to
the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal
discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an
Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one. But as soon as
mankind have attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement
by conviction or persuasion . . . compulsion, either in the direct form or in that
of pains and penalties for non-compliance, is no longer admissible as a means to
their own good, and justifiable only for the security of others.163
This curt apology for despotism was supplemented by passages in the
Considerations.164 Here Mill described the proper functions of government
as ‘much more extensive in a backward than in an advanced state’.165 A
‘rude people’ might still not forego private conflicts and embrace a rule of
law, and might perjure themselves in court rather than expose themselves
to greater risk (‘like the Hindoos’), or shelter criminals, or ignore a murder
in the street ‘because it is the business of the police to look to the matter,
and it is safer not to interfere in what does not concern them’. Here, to be
advantageous, a civilised government would need ‘to be in a considerable
degree despotic’ in order to impose ‘a great amount of forcible restraint
upon their actions’.166 A ‘vigorous despotism’ was best equipped to train
a people to become ‘capable of a higher civilization’. In other instances,
however, this might be harmful. The ‘ideal rule of a free people over a
barbarous or semibarbarous one’ would provide all the advantages of abso-
lute monarchy, ‘guaranteed by irresistible force against the precariousness
of tenure attendant on barbarous despotisms, and qualified by their genius
162 For a contextual assessment of this view, see Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, pp. 202–6.
163 CW 18, p. 224. Dicey commented that this ‘concession goes further than Mill seems to perceive. Its
principle seems to apply to every case where a government is far more intelligent than the governed’
(Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion During the Nineteenth Century, p. 147).
164 For the argument that Mill intended to defend ‘managerial’ rather than ‘political’ despotism, see
Urbinati, ‘The Many Heads of the Hydra’, p. 77.
165 CW 19, p. 383.
166 CW 19, p. 377. These examples are however common in ‘advanced’ societies too.
to anticipate all that experience has taught to the more advanced nation’.
Those in ‘a state of savage independence, in which every one lives for
himself, exempt, unless by fits, from any external control’ were ‘practically
incapable’ of progressing towards civilization until they had ‘learnt to obey’.
Thus the ‘indispensable virtue’ of such governments was that ‘it make itself
obeyed’, and to do this such governments needed to be ‘nearly, or quite,
despotic’. The same applied to ‘uncivilized races . . . averse to continuous
labour of an unexciting kind’.167
Some Victorian critics complained that Mill had not specified the degree
of civilisation required to exit the ‘barbaric’ state.168 Others thought he was
‘never in favour of liberty as a principle at all’ because freedom was not
applied equally to all peoples.169 Modern readers have found implausi-
ble the suggestion that mature adults in developed societies merited non-
paternalist treatment while South Asians were to be treated like children.170
Here, however, we see a parallel with the issue of domestic paternalism:
despotism over savages might tend to ‘confirm the slaves in their incapac-
ities’. Achieving self-governance required ‘not a government of force, but
one of guidance’, which ‘possesses force, but seldom uses it’. A ‘parental
despotism or aristocracy, resembling the St. Simonian form of socialism’
would maintain ‘a general superintendence over all the operations of soci-
ety’ sufficient to compel obedience. But ‘owing to the impossibility of
descending to regulate all the minutiae of industry and life’, it ‘necessarily
leaves and induces individuals to do much of themselves’. Such a ‘gov-
ernment of leading-strings . . . the only admissible as a means of gradually
training the people to walk alone’, Mill thought had been the governmental
idea of the Incas in Peru and of the Jesuits in Paraguay.171
Despotism then might enable progress for a time, but then hinder
it. Egyptian and Chinese ‘paternal despotism’ had been ‘very fit instru-
ments for carrying those nations up to the point of civilization which
they attained’. Both states thereafter came ‘to a permanent halt, for want
of mental liberty and individuality; requisites of improvement which the
institutions that had carried them thus far, entirely incapacitated them
167 CW 19, pp. 567, 394. 168 Blakesley, A Review of Mr. Mill’s Essay on Liberty, p. 6.
169 The Personal Rights Journal, no. 177 (15 May 1897), 39.
170 Scarre, Mill’s On Liberty, pp. 30–1. As did some contemporaries, like Cotton, who complained
that ‘men who speak better English than most Englishmen, who read Mill and Comte, Max Müller
and Maine, who occupy with distinction seats on the judicial bench, who administer the affairs
of native states with many millions of inhabitants, who manage cotton mills and conduct the
boldest operations of commerce, who edit newspapers in English, and correspond on equal terms
with the scholars of Europe – these can no longer be treated as an inferior breed’ (Colonies and
Dependencies – Part I. India, p. 75).
171 CW 19, pp. 395–6.
from acquiring; and as the institutions did not break down and give place
to others, further improvement stopped’. Yet Mill, at this vital point in
his argument, seemed unhappy with this narrative. He first reasserted that
‘good despotism’ implied ‘no positive oppression by officers of state’, but
enabled the people’s collective interests to be managed for them, though
this involved an ‘abdication of their own energies’. The ‘supposed good
despot’ might allow most government ‘to go on as if the people really gov-
erned themselves’, for example permitting ‘such freedom of the press and
of discussion as would enable a public opinion to form and express itself
on national affairs’. Local interests might be managed by the people them-
selves. The despot might establish ‘a council or councils of government,
freely chosen by the whole or some portion of the nation; retaining in his
own hands the power of taxation, and the supreme legislative as well as exec-
utive authority’. Such measures might remove many evils associated with
despotism. But, then, curiously, Mill cast this entire scenario into doubt,
terming a ‘good despotism’ ‘an altogether false ideal’, except for some tem-
porary purpose, and ‘the most senseless and dangerous of chimeras’. ‘Evil
for evil, a good despotism, in a country at all advanced in civilization’, Mill
concluded, was ‘more noxious than a bad one’ because ‘far more relaxing
and enervating to the thoughts, feelings, and energies of the people.’ And
yet later on, in the same work, he would insist that ‘good despots’ could in
fact be provided by more civilised countries when governing less civilised,
with the duty of imparting all their greater experience.172
What should we make of this? Mill thought the ‘spring of spontaneous
improvement in the people themselves’ could be encouraged by civilised
powers ruling over barbaric peoples. He admitted, however, that ‘the despo-
tism of those who neither hear, nor see, nor know anything about their
subjects, has many chances of being worse than that of those who do’. Fear
and loathing dominated both sides of the relationship; the rulers despised
the natives, the latter distrusted their masters. Mill’s portrait of the natural
propensity to abuse on the part of the rulers is a convincing one. Much of
his irritation here, however, was aimed at the assumption of direct British
rule after the Mutiny, not against British imperialism as such. The ‘del-
egated administration’ of the East India Company, he insisted, had had
‘no duties to perform except to the governed’ and ‘no interests to consider
except theirs’. Its power to derive ‘profit from misgovernment’ had been
reduced ‘to a singularly small amount’, and Mill thought that it could be
172 CW 19, pp. 396, 401–3, 567–8.

‘kept entirely clear of bias from the individual or class interests of any one
else’.173 Here his conclusions are clearly less persuasive.
Such justifications for long-term despotic rule over non-white peoples
seem, indeed, rather hollow pronouncements on the virtues of ‘civilised’
society, and more like post facto justifications for empire. They create what
one modern writer terms ‘the most serious ethical problems found’ in Mill’s
work.174 They appear odd beside Mill’s insistence, respecting the Mormons,
that within ‘civilised’ societies, no community had ‘a right to force another
to be civilized’.175 However, our concern here is to ascertain whether Mill
had a sense of relative civilisation, whereby this doctrine became more
flexible proportionately to the degree of civilisation of the countries to
which it was applied. The two instances of India and Ireland were the most
important assessed by Mill during his lifetime, and accordingly will be our
focus here.
India: ‘parental despotism’

India represents the most extreme instance of Mill’s justification of ‘enlight-
ened’ despotism and as such seems to constitute the limit of Mill’s liberal-
ism. Yet it is a peculiar case.176 Mill in many respects followed his father, ‘the
originator of all sound statesmanship’ regarding India, whom he believed
had ‘effected a great amount of good . . . to the many millions of Asiatics
for whose bad or good government his country is responsible’.177 James
Mill had defined despotism as the characteristic form of Indian govern-
ment, and described its foundations as rooted in the ‘most enormous and
tormenting superstition’, the caste system. He was prone to gross overgen-
eralisations about Indian life, commenting at one point, for instance, that
in ‘India there is no moral character’. He had little or no interest in pro-
moting participation by Indians in their government, looking instead to
173 CW 19, p. 573.
174 Habibi, John Stuart Mill, p. 203. Justman terms Mill a ‘racist’ (The Hidden Text of Mill’s Liberty,
p. 122). ‘Civilisationist’ might be a more accurate term.
175 CW 18, p. 291.
176 For background, see Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India; Bearce, British Attitudes Towards
India 1784–1858; Barber, British Economic Thought and India 1600–1858; Moir, Peers and Zastoupil,
J.S. Mill’s Encounter with India; and most particularly, Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India.
Recent approaches are summarised in Tunick, ‘Tolerant Imperialism: John Stuart Mill’s Defense
of British Rule in India’.
177 CW 1, p. 213; CW 31, p. 99. On James Mill’s views, see Majeed’s Ungoverned Imaginings, and for
a contrast with his son, see Burns, ‘The Light of Reason’. Bentham has been described as not
supporting the imposition of British ideas by force upon India, while recognising the value of
Indian exposure of them (Rosen, ‘The Tree of Utility in India’, in Moir, Peers and Zastoupil, J.S.
Mill’s Encounter with India, p. 35).
expert and efficient administration by Britons.178 But he also warned that
the ‘cruel lessons of Eastern despotism’ had been quickly learned by India’s
British conquerors.179 Many of J. S. Mill’s own best-known statements con-
cerning India came late in life, following the Mutiny, the assumption of
direct rule by Westminster, and Mill’s own subsequent retirement from his
position. Most aimed to justify the East India Company. Mill’s defence of
despotism fitted awkwardly with his own account of what makes a nation
civilised, however, as well as with his attachment to liberty. Mid-nineteenth
century India was a seven thousand year old civilisation. Despotism was
supposed to enforce the process of capital accumulation and introduce
better government, greater security of property, regular taxation, a better
land tenure system, improved ‘public intelligence’ and an end to practices
like widow-burning. Foreign arts and capital would also create ‘new wants,
increased ambition, and greater thought for the future’.180 There was, on
this account, only one highway to modernity.
Yet Mill was more ambiguous about rule of this type than such quotes
indicate. In 1848 he claimed that ‘the English nation does contrive to govern
[India] some degrees better than they were governed by their tyrannical or
incapable native despots’.181 But describing British rule as the lesser of two
evils was partly beside the point.182 The Considerations, as we have seen,
had concluded that even good despotisms only confirmed ‘the slaves in
their incapacities’. Yet self-government ‘would be entirely unmanageable
by them’. Their improvement could not ‘come from themselves, but must
be super-induced from without’. Their ‘only path to improvement’ was
to be ‘taught self-government’, meaning ‘the capacity to act on general
instructions’. What India required, then, was ‘not a government of force,
but one of guidance’, and here the Saint-Simonian model seemed most
appropriate.183 Mill’s sense of the value of an enlightened bureaucracy was
yet again to the fore.184 A ‘thoroughly paternalistic’ programme, as it has
been termed, would best suit India.185
Where did this leave the justification for British rule in India? Was
Saint-Simonian socialism the ‘good despotism’ Mill had condemned as a
178 Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, pp. 64–8.
179 Mill, The History of British India (vol. 2), p. 166, (vol. 5), p. 491, (vol. 4), p. 395.
180 CW 2, pp. 186–7. 181 CW 25, p. 1099.
182 This approach is reiterated in, e.g., Harris, ‘John Stuart Mill: Servant of the East India Company’,
201.
183 CW 19, p. 395. A contemporary discussion of Mill’s principles in this context is [Henry George
Keene], Chabeena. Trivial Talk on Indian Topics.
184 See the pioneering discussion of this topic in Ryan, ‘Utilitarianism and Bureaucracy: the Views of
J.S. Mill’.
185 Pradhan, ‘Mill on India: A Reappraisal’, 17.
contradiction in terms? Did Mill think Britain was implementing a gov-
ernment of this type? Most of what Mill wrote on India, having begun
his employment at the Board of Control at East India House in May
1823, working directly under his father, was relatively colourless, from a
theoretical viewpoint at least.186 His chief duty was conducting correspon-
dence with the native states. Most of his remaining dispatches date from
1858, when Indian government was transferred from the East India Com-
pany to Westminster by the India Act. His eventually well-remunerated
employment, if not overly taxing – the six-hour day left him ample time
for his own work – gave Mill the opportunity to witness at first hand
the problems associated with British rule in India. Whether it altered his
basic perceptions of relations with ‘barbaric’ peoples inherited from his
father, Bentham and others has remained a moot point. Certainly Mill had
already formed an opinion about the supposed ‘stationary’ quality of Asian
peoples, and their unsuitability to representative institutions, views which
his employment does not seem to have altered.
Something of Mill’s own opinions does emerge from his Indian dis-
patches. First, a commitment to free trade appears at various points. Sec-
ondly, Mill’s acknowledgement that natives in India required ‘protection
against the English’, as witnessed in the case of indigo planters in the late-
1830s, indicates that he thought the English abroad were ‘naturally inclined
to despise the natives and to seek to make themselves a privileged caste’. He
thought this however ‘ought to be resisted’, and considered that ‘because
the Company has always resisted it . . . the English public of Calcutta are
as a body, always hostile to the Company’s government’.187 But little of his
work involved initiating policy, and even altering existing policies he found
difficult.188 His own role was ‘merely one wheel in a machine’. He was not a
policy-maker, nor even arbiter, but more of a reporter. Yet his commitment
to the Company doubtless exceeded mere institutional loyalty: he felt it
served the best interests of India, rather than the ever-possible alternative
mode of administration, of British politicians and their rapacious offspring,
or British merchants on the spot. Mill particularly disliked religious prose-
lytism (a point driven home by the Mutiny). At the same time he supported
attempts to reduce widow-burning, slavery and suicide, in a degree which
some have found ‘illiberal’: these were the limits of ‘toleration’.189 Mill
186 Reproduced as CW 30, Writings on India. The vast majority of Mill’s dispatches were never printed
and thus are not included in this collection.
187 CW 30, pp. 7–8, 14–15. 188 CW 30, pp. xxiii–xxiv.
189 E.g., McCloskey, John Stuart Mill, p. 111.
thought that at least in the larger native states British policy had been gen-
erally ‘exerted on the side of good’. British representatives had ‘incessantly,
and to a great degree successfully, incited native princes to prohibit and
suppress the barbarous usages which we have ceased to tolerate in our own
territories’. In addition defects had been ‘pointed out, and improvements
suggested, in their revenue and judicial administrations’. Financial disorder
and general misgovernment had been ‘the subject of grave remonstrance,
followed up by such positive marks of displeasure as were consistent with
the respective treaties’. Mill also took a special interest in educating native
princes in British modes of administration. Where native states had long-
standing traditions he occasionally encouraged maintaining the status quo;
where recent native conquests had established a new ruler, he was more
likely to support British annexation. Yet even Mill’s editors treat this dis-
tinction sceptically, as ‘something rather unrealistic and subjective’ which
left plenty of scope for arbitrary intervention.190
Maintaining a system of justice which thus protected the natives Mill
regarded as central to sustaining Company rule. He clearly felt that this
administration, if despotic, was more ‘benevolent’ than anything the natives
might provide by themselves, or Britons, unsupervised by the Company,
would impose. Indeed Mill regarded resisting the ‘rapacity and tyranny’
of some of the English in India as ‘one of the most difficult but most
bounden duties of the Indian Government’. He had similar worries about
allowing British public opinion, unenlightened as it was, to play a larger
role in policy, because it was driven ‘usually from impulses derived from the
interests of Europeans connected with India, rather than from the interests
of the people of India itself ’. Unelected experts were more likely to provide
a disinterested view of Indian affairs, so long as they were unconnected
‘with political parties, or with Parliamentary influence at home’. Yet Mill
emphasised, responding to an 1852 Parliamentary enquiry, that the Court of
Directors (the twenty-four executive directors of the Company elected by
its chief shareholders) did not represent the people of India. Their position
was not ‘antagonistic’ to the latter, but the people of India, he urged, could
not yet represent themselves. If it was ‘essential that the administration
of India should be carried on by men who have been trained in the
subordinate offices, and have studied India as it were professionally’, it was
no less important that ‘the public of India afford no assistance in their
own government’. They were, Mill insisted, simply ‘not ripe for doing so
by means of representative government’, nor ‘even in a condition to make
190 CW 30, pp. 152, liii–liv.
effectual appeals to . . . people so different and so unacquainted with India
as the people, and even the Parliament, of this country’.191
Reforming this system by giving direct rule to a Secretary of State for
India, backed by an ill-informed Parliament, Mill thought in 1852, would
produce ‘the most complete despotism that could possibly exist in a coun-
try like this’. Yet Mill did perceive a middle way between excluding Indian
participation and inviting self-government. India had not ‘yet attained such
a degree of civilization and improvement as to be ripe for anything like
a representative system’. But the government could ‘take natives into its
counsels much more than at present . . . by cultivating a greater degree of
intercourse between intelligent natives and the members of the Govern-
ment, or the holders of public offices’, instead of ‘forming a body of persons
selected by the Government and considering them as the representatives
of the people of India, who, probably for the very reason of their being
selected by the Government, would not be inclined to recognise them as
their representatives’.192
If the system of patronage could be modified, Mill thought opening up
administrative offices to entry by public examination would also be useful.
In principle Mill conceded it to be ‘of the greatest importance to admit the
natives to all situations for which they are fit; and as they are constantly
becoming fit for higher situations, I think that they should be admitted
to them’, but excluding the covenanted civil service, where promotion
was virtually automatic. This reflected a clear change in circumstances.
Natives had not hitherto acceded to posts without a ‘controlling European
authority over them’. But, Mill wrote in 1852, there was now ‘hardly any
situation, admitting of that control, to which they are not now eligible; or
if there be any such, there is a constant tendency to open such situations
to them’. Thus while allowing the natives ‘to wield the military force of
India’ was unwise because this would threaten British ascendency, Mill
thought it ‘perfectly possible to open to them a very large share of the civil
government without its having any such effect’. He thus believed that ‘as
the natives become trustworthy and qualified for high office, it seems to
me not only allowable, but a duty to appoint them to it’.193
These responses summarise, effectively enough, thirty years’ worth of
Mill’s experience with ‘John Company’. He believed that growing native
191 CW 30, pp. 30, 34, 39, 49.

192 CW 30, pp. 50–1. For the influence of these views in India, see Topa, The Growth and Development
of National Thought in India, pp. 82–6.
193 CW 30, pp. 60, 63–5. On the charge that Mill’s approach to Indian education involved a narrow
elitism, see Sirkin and Sirkin, ‘John Stuart Mill and Disutilitarianism in Indian Education’.
expertise would result in increased participation in administration, and
should be encouraged. Mill may here have been disclosing his own sense
of ‘special trust’ in administering India. But as a general description of
the essential benevolence of British rule this appears a whitewash at best.
Even Mill acknowledged that the Company promoted individuals on the
basis of length of service rather than competence. Yet the Company, having
suggested ‘the true theory of the government of a semi-barbarous depen-
dency by a civilized country’, had perished. Mill ended this discussion on
a pessimistic note; there seemed little hope that the wisdom accumulated
under the Company would ever be deployed again.194
Any prospect of improvement, then, became unstuck in 1857, after which
Mill defended the record of the Company’s government as one of the
‘most beneficent in act, ever known among mankind’, and as having been
‘during the last and present generation in particular . . . in all departments,
one of the most rapidly improving governments in the world’. He feared
it would be replaced by something far worse, particularly where religion
was concerned, and warned that English public opinion would generally
be driven by private interest.195 Reflecting, in 1858, upon British rule over
the past thirty years, Mill particularly stressed attempts to improve the
position of the peasantry.196 In Bengal the government had forced landlords
to give tenants written statements respecting rents and tenure, which had
helped to specify estate boundaries. Where, as in much of India, landed
property remained with the village community, tenure was given further
security. In the Punjab reduced taxes had generated increased cultivation. In
south India, where the ryotwar system prevailed, and the actual cultivators
were regarded as the proprietors, cultivation had also increased where
reassessments, invariably reducing rents, had taken place.197 Mill denied
that the opium trade was ‘an improper source of revenue’, but he did (quite
inconsistently) concede that ‘any system involving the free cultivation of
the poppy’ might lead ‘India itself, which has hitherto been comparatively
free from this kind of hurtful indulgence, to be flooded with the article
at a low price’. Mill summarised Britain’s achievements by proclaiming
that ‘a great and rapid growth of general prosperity’ had resulted from her
rule, particularly as evidenced by the enormous increase in external trade.
In addition, creating native courts of justice and reforming penal codes
had reduced fraud and expense. Prison discipline had been reformed, and
the police generally improved. Thuggism, piracy and infanticide had all
194 CW 19, p. 577. 195 CW 30, pp. 79–80, 84.
196 See generally Platteau, ‘Classical Economics and Agrarian Reforms in Developed Areas’.
197 CW 19, p. 105. On Mill’s development of these themes, see Winch, Wealth and Life, pp. 61–88.
been suppressed, and suttee abolished in areas under British rule in 1829,
and slavery in 1843. Human sacrifices, forced labour and other abhorrent
practices had also been reduced or abolished. Public works, especially
irrigation, had been commenced. Roads and a vast railway network had
been constructed, not to mention the telegraph system which had ‘saved
the empire’ in 1858.198 Schools and colleges had been built, order had been
widely extended and oppressed tribes protected.
Mill acknowledged that many of these measures increased government
revenue. But he proudly boasted that few governments had ‘attempted so
much for the good of their subjects, or carried so many of their attempts to
a successful and beneficial issue’. Even after the Mutiny, Mill proclaimed
in 1858, it had ‘been an almost universal acknowledgement that the rule
of the Company has been honourable to themselves and beneficial to
India’. It is indisputable that Mill felt, as he repeatedly emphasised in
several pamphlets published in 1858, that direct British rule, the transfer
of administration to the Crown, as well as the governmental function it
already possessed, would bring about vastly worse results than what the
Company had accomplished. If 150 million ‘Asiatics’ could not be ‘trusted
to govern themselves’,199 this was the lesser of all evils. Nonetheless Mill
thought that an already difficult situation would become ‘an impossibility
if a body so ignorant and incompetent on Indian (to say nothing of other)
subjects as Parliament, comes to make a practice of interfering’. By 1860
he could ‘almost believe that we are at the beginning of the end’.200 The
Company’s ‘wise contrivances’ and ‘good government’ seemed ‘destined to
perish in the general holocaust which the traditions of Indian government
seem fated to undergo, since they have been placed at the mercy of public
ignorance, and the presumptuous vanity of political men’.201 Privately Mill
lamented ‘the monstrous excesses committed & the brutal language used
during & after the repression of the Indian mutiny’.202 In Parliament in
1867 he condemned the ‘inhuman and indiscriminate massacre, the seizing
of persons in all parts of the country and putting them to death without
trial, and then boasting of it in a manner almost disgraceful to humanity’.
He still maintained that the Company generally was better informed even
than those working in India, because it routinely compared activities in
different presidencies.203 But by 1869 he admitted that it was ‘impracticable’
to return to the old system.204
198 CW 19, pp. 106, 111, 141. 199 CW 19, pp. 155, 164, 199. 200 CW 15, pp. 560, 708.
201 CW 19, p. 523. 202 CW 16, p. 1282 [1867]. 203 CW 28, pp. 189, 236.
204 CW 17, p. 1561. Others would later uphold his judgement on its superior merits, e.g., Amos, The
Science of Politics, p. 340.
Although in his editors’ words, Mill’s Principles were ‘surprisingly reti-
cent on India’,205 one issue more than any other linked his Indian concerns
with his analysis of English and Irish conditions here: the land. Elsewhere
Mill advocated the view that British policy should favour the ryots, or
peasant-proprietors, and the panchayats, or village councils, over the land-
lord classes. Mill’s preference for strengthening the peasant-proprietors was
clearly stated here. Indian peasants rarely owned the land, only the tools
used to cultivate it. But government ownership of most land made it possi-
ble to make advances on these costs gratis, recovering them in rent after the
harvest. Native landowners in a similar position charged high interest rates
for this service. This placed Indians in a much better position than most
Irish. Like Ireland, however, rents in India were rarely subjected to open
market competition, again because the state was the chief landlord. There
was, Mill said, ‘always a rule of some sort common to a neighbourhood; the
collector did not make his separate bargain with the peasant, but assessed
each according to the rule adopted for the rest’. This established ‘a right
of property in the tenant, or at all events, of a right to permanent pos-
session; and the anomaly arose of a fixity of tenure in the peasant-farmer,
co-existing with an arbitrary power of increasing the rent’. British policy
in India had been to emulate the great estate system prevalent in England,
and this led to promoting the tax-gatherers, or zemindars, as a substitute
for the English aristocracy. This proved, Mill insisted, ‘a total failure’ in
Bengal; what emerged was not English landlords but only Irish ones. Else-
where in India, as in parts of Madras and the Bombay Presidency, rents
continued to be paid directly to the government by the cultivator, while
in the North-West provinces, government negotiated rents with the village
community collectively, determining each individual’s share but holding
all jointly responsible for any default. But in most of India the cultivators
possessed no perpetuity of tenure at a fixed rent. Instead, the ‘government
manages the land on the principle on which a good Irish landlord manages
his estate: not putting it up to competition, not asking the cultivators what
they will promise to pay, but determining for itself what they can afford
to pay, and defining its demand accordingly’.206 Towards the end of his
career, Mill thought that opinion had been shifting against this system, but
by 1869 he believed ‘landlordism of the present English type’ was being
favoured again. The ‘greater fear of the natives, & desire of conciliating the
natives, which have existed since the mutiny’ had resulted in a preference
for assuaging ‘the great landholders’, and ‘discredited the ideas of protection
205 CW 11, p. xxxvi. 206 CW 2, pp. 237, 319–22.

to the interests of the great mass of the population which in a more or less
enlightened shape had been the animating principle of Indian government
for a whole generation’.207 Mill’s chief economic principle vis-à-vis India,
thus, had been set aside in favour of short-term conciliation.
Mill’s last major discussion of India came in a review of Henry Maine’s
Village Communities in the East and West (1871). To Mill, Maine’s study
chiefly indicated the flexibility of landed property: past alterations in tenure
implied that tenures could be changed again when requisite. Britons might
decide, for instance, that the ‘transmutation of collective landed ownership
into individual shall proceed no further’, and move towards ‘reconverting
individual property into some new and better form of collective, as it has so
long been converting collective property into individual’, thus exercising
‘an unquestionable moral right’, subject to ‘satisfying all just claims to
compensation’.208 Mill asserted that further privatisation of common lands
in Britain should cease forthwith, and, equally importantly, that notions of
‘absolute property’ in land being introduced by Britain into India, which
had resulted in middlemen being designated owners, and the ryots declining
into destitution, should also be curtailed. The moral of English rule in
India, thus, was that landed property was not absolute or unconditional,
but limited. Mistakes made first in England and then transposed to India
had resulted in increasingly great inequalities of distribution. But these
results could be reversed.
Before considering the parallels Mill saw between India and Ireland we
should briefly note his views on colonialism generally.209 Neither India
nor Ireland were settler colonies as such, India because there were few
settlers relative to the indigenous population, Ireland because it was sim-
ply regarded as British. Planting colonies Mill defended as useful to their
founders as well as those nations which afterwards arose upon these foun-
dations. They also eased surplus population. Mill was thus ‘entirely in
favour’ of retaining connections with colonies which did not desire sepa-
ration, on the basis of some form of ‘modified federation’.210 Here, thus,
government alone had ‘power either to frame regulations, or to enforce
their observance’.211 When Mill came in the Considerations to assess how
dependencies should be governed, then, he supported ‘the fullest measure
of internal self-government’ for ‘her colonies of European race’ within a
loose federative union, and approved separation for those colonies desiring
207 CW 17, p. 1536. 208 CW 19, p. 221.
209 A recent reappraisal of these is Bell, ‘John Stuart Mill on Colonies’, which stresses Mill’s acceptance
of enhanced state functions in colonies.
210 CW 17, p. 1758; CW 32, p. 146. 211 CW 3, p. 963.
it.212 In the case of Canada, Mill upheld the ideal of ‘complete internal self
government’.213 At the same time he recognised that there could not be
‘one system for the government of Demerara, Mauritius, the Cape of Good
Hope, Ceylon, and Canada’.214 Australia, for instance, might require large-
scale governmental irrigation works like those in southern India, since this
needed to be done on a ‘great scale requiring combined labour & there-
fore difficult to accomplish with your present population’.215 New Zealand
faced the need to prevent unjust treatment of the Maoris while developing
colonial self-government, a difficulty Mill acknowledged he found daunt-
ing, since the English were prone to ‘any injustice or tyranny whatever’
against the ‘inferior races’.216 This was a lesson from Jamaica, where a
rebellion was brutally suppressed by Governor Eyre in 1865. Here Mill,
whose position brought him death threats, helped protest against ‘acts of
violence committed by Englishmen in authority, calculated to lower the
character of England in the eyes of all foreign lovers of liberty’, which
formed a precedent which might ‘justly inflame against us the people of
our dependencies’ as well as ‘brutalize our own fellow countrymen’.217
Ireland and land reform

Ireland presented Mill with many parallels to India and eventually he
published far more about it.218 Two questions here interested him over
many decades: land reform and Irish claims to independence. Both, in
turn, as we will see, were treated by Mill as aspects of his wider theory of
liberty.
Mill’s assessment of Irish conditions consisted chiefly in an 1825 essay
and two subsequent accounts, ‘What is to be Done with Ireland?’ (1848),
and the pamphlet England and Ireland (1868). Beyond these, there were
substantial comments on Ireland in the Principles. In these analyses we will
see that Mill advanced from a general sympathy for the plight of the Irish
peasantry to a much more radical position of extending to them new rights
in the land.219
212 CW 19, p. 563. 213 CW 1, p. 224. 214 CW 28, p. 135 [1867].
215 CW 17, p. 1598. See Neale, ‘John Stuart Mill on Australia’.
216 CW 16, pp. 1136, 1196. 217 CW 16, p. 1411; CW 28, p. 111.
218 On these parallels, see, e.g., Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India, pp. 183–6. His treatment
of Ireland has been seen as harsher than that of many earlier liberals (Sullivan, ‘Liberalism and
Imperialism’, 606). See more generally Boylan and Foley, ‘John Elliot Cairnes, John Stuart Mill
and Ireland’.
219 For a comprehensive treatment of this issues, see Steele, ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish Question’, 419–50,
[216–36], Lebow, John Stuart Mill on Ireland, pp. 1–22 and Kinzer, England’s Disgrace? J.S. Mill
and the Irish Question. For general background see Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question,
1817–1870.
Mill’s first comment on Ireland, in 1824, described the country, though
‘in the full enjoyment of the English Constitution’, as the ‘completest spec-
imen upon record of the combined horrors of despotism and anarchy’.220
Mill did not, he wrote in 1825, see this as resulting from a superfluity of
absentee landlords, for this did not affect demand for Irish produce.221 Nor
did he regard demands for Catholic Emancipation as helpful, though he
condemned civil discrimination on the basis of religious belief. Mill indeed
thought it extremely unlikely that re-establishing Catholicism as the dom-
inant religion would result, Catholics being in his estimate six out of the
twelve million inhabitants of Ireland, or that the majority, ‘the poorest and
most oppressed people in Europe’, would be benefitted. Recent events, he
thought, showed that ‘government and law exist in that country solely for
the benefit of the strong’. The black slave at least was ‘protected against the
encroachments of all masters except his own’. Irish peasants were ‘at
the mercy, not only of a whole series of landlords, from the proprietor of
the soil down to the lowest middleman, but moreover of the tithe-owner
and the tithe-farmer or proctor, to say nothing of vestries and grand juries’.
This oppression was unconnected to Catholic disabilities, and would be
unaffected by their removal. Indeed Mill feared clerical power in Ireland,
which he thought the ‘real danger’, not the Pope, and accordingly he
condemned Catholicism as a ‘bad’ religion.222
Mill offered no sense here of Ireland as possessing sufficient ‘nationality’
to merit independence.223 But there was a Malthusian dimension present.
Ireland was ‘the only country in the world where the two sexes begin to
propagate their kind as soon as nature enables them to do so without the
slightest thought of the future – and it is therefore the only country where
the mass of the people are reduced to the smallest pittance which is sufficient
to sustain life’.224 This ‘excess of numbers’ could not be alleviated ‘without
correcting the prevailing habit of early marriages and heedless increase of
families’. Here religion came into play, for priests gained their living chiefly
through marriages, baptisms and funerals. Mill implied, without wishing
to appear ‘invidious’, that they had an interest in ‘encouraging improvident
marriages’ (which was of course an invidious suggestion). This function
should thus be removed from them, and the revenue instead given to the
public. Mill did not want the peasantry to be the ‘tools of their landlords’
any more than of their priests.225 But he thought that landlords were now
frequently uniting smaller farms into larger, and introducing a better system
of cultivation.
220 CW 26, pp. 268–9. 221 CW 22, p. 104. 222 CW 6, pp. 62–6, 82, 85.
223 See generally Varouxakis, Mill on Nationality and Grader, ‘John Stuart Mill’s Theory of Nationality’.
224 CW 26, p. 305. 225 CW 6, pp. 84–5, 88.
Ireland was then a special case, at least in the sense, as Mill wrote in 1832,
that it was ‘a society the most wretchedly constituted which has existed in
Europe since the commencement of modern civilisation’.226 On at least
one occasion, in 1837, he confessed that ‘I myself have always been for a
good stout Despotism – for governing Ireland like India. But it cannot
be done. The spirit of Democracy has got too much head there, too
prematurely.’227 But he gave the problem little thought until the famine of
the mid 1840s forced him to re-examine his views. His growing interests
in small-scale peasant proprietorship now converged from two directions.
On the one hand, he believed that while small farms were not an ‘absolute
safeguard’ against over-population, they tended, as W. T. Thornton had
argued, to repress it, as France seemingly instanced.228 On the other, Mill
increasingly argued that land tenure reform in Ireland could bring about
greater independence for the peasantry.
The immediate pressing issue during the potato famine was how to
relieve the vast distress which resulted. Relief was urgently required, but
Mill would not concede that it was ‘necessary that they should have a
right to food and employment’, claiming that the afflicted ‘must be enabled
to earn it, but not empowered to demand it’.229 They should not ‘learn
to expect support from any body’, but had ‘a right, not to support at the
public cost, but to aid and furtherance in finding support for themselves’,
which included ‘a right to a repeal of all laws and a reform of all social
systems which improperly impede them in finding it’, and ‘a right to
their fair share of the raw material of the earth’. Yet Ireland would have
been better off if it had been ‘treated directly and avowedly as an English
province or dependency’ instead of being left to the ‘tyranny, corruption,
and lawlessness’ of her landlords.230
Forty-three articles entitled ‘The Condition of Ireland’, published
between October 1846 and June 1847, at the height of the famine, antic-
ipated the arguments of the Principles.231 Mill now acknowledged that
Ireland had ‘made itself by its own efforts’ an ‘independent nation . . . in all
essentials’, but yet was maintained in subjection by England. He rejected
introducing an expanded Poor Law, and further outdoor relief, as adequate
to the problem, thinking such measures indeed likely to worsen it. Ireland’s
226 CW 22, p. 398. 227 CW 12, p. 365.

228 CW 24, p. 989. But Mill in 1862 would reflect that the death rate may have played a greater role
than he had formerly thought (CW 15, p. 772). See Thornton, Over-Population and Its Remedy,
pp. 246–67.
229 CW 14, p. 1005. 230 CW 24, pp. 979, 966.
231 For analysis see Zastoupil, ‘Moral Government: J.S. Mill on Ireland’.
grand evil Mill now identified as the ‘cottier-tenant system’, where produce
was divided between landlord and farmer, with the latter under constant
pressure from competition from other cultivators, which resulted in rents
much higher than the produce justified. Indian conditions, however, pro-
vided an answer. In both cases there was ‘a superabundant population
depending wholly on land’ and the people would ‘promise to pay anything
for the land rather than not obtain it’. In India the landowner, generally
the government, had ‘long since discovered that it will not do to leave
the matter to competition; that itself, as landlord, must not ask the ten-
ant what he will pay, but must determine for him what he can pay, and
resolutely abstain from asking more; that if it has inadvertently asked too
much, it must not hold the tenant to his contract, but at once cancel it,
and grant another’. Ireland, Mill insisted, now presented an extreme case
justifying similar measures. The ‘free disposal of land by the landowner’
was a power society permitted while reserving ‘a liberty of interference in
extreme cases’. The increased clearing of destitute tenants from the land
constituted ‘such an extreme case’. Fixity of tenure and of rents would
ease over-population, and the Irish ‘would thenceforth work and save for
themselves alone. Their industry would be their own profit; their idle-
ness would be their own loss. If they multiplied imprudently, it would be
at their own expense, no longer at the expense of the landlords.’ Every-
where in Europe, indeed, Mill insisted, ‘wherever the increase of population
is slow, not from legal restraints but from individual prudence, as in France,
Switzerland, Norway, it is in countries of peasant proprietors’.232 Ireland
should not be made ‘another England, that is to say, a country of large-
scale agriculture with a population of paid farm-workers’. Instead, rents
should be fixed equal to the net income of their land, for the present own-
ers, while leaving management of the land to the cultivators.233 This was,
Zastoupil has suggested, little less than a ‘comprehensive scheme for social
engineering’ aimed at moral as well as economic regeneration.234
The solution, then, was reforming land tenure, not providing fur-
ther relief. How the money was to be found was not the issue: ‘If ever
compensation was due from one people to another, this is the case for
it.’ Mill proposed that land might be granted on yearly leases by the
state, and he insisted that any right to own land hinged upon improving
it.235 But expanding the food supply was insufficient if this only pro-
duced an ‘increase of mouths’. What was required was to create ‘the most
232 CW 24, pp. 880, 889–90, 895, 897. 233 CMC, pp. 383–4.
234 Zastoupil, ‘Moral Government: J.S. Mill on Ireland’, 712. 235 CW 24, p. 909,
numerous class of small proprietors; a class the most acted on by prudential
motives’. Rather than the state erecting farm buildings and the like, too,
Mill thought the ‘people themselves should do all the work of improve-
ment which they are capable of ’. Extending the expectation of ‘making all
take care of each, instead of stimulating and helping each to take care of
himself ’, would only bring ‘a crisis and a termination sooner than could
otherwise have been hoped for’. And Mill was not sanguine even of the
results of mass emigration, writing in March 1847 that ‘with an outdoor
relief poor law they will just set about peopling again, and will replace even
two millions in half a generation’.236 Effective government was impossible
‘in a country where the majority of the people has become accustomed to
loudly demand sustenance and happiness from others instead of pursuing
these objectives for themselves’. Mill hoped for a certain reaction ‘against
government charity’, and against the view that workers could be treated
‘as one does cattle – that is, by making them work for others [merely] in
exchange for good food and housing. That was possible only [in the days]
when the whip was added.’237 If outdoor relief raised ‘the most unbounded
expectations’, he warned, ‘& if the poor law is to be worked without ful-
filling them, the life of no guardian & no relieving officer will be worth
a week’s purchase, & the country will be ungovernable except by military
occupation of every village’. His only hope, then, lay in some reaction to
‘the present wild notions about the mode of being good to the poor’.238
Paternalism was again the central issue.
The brief unpublished essay, ‘What is to be Done with Ireland?’ (1848),
denied that the situation there was in fact revolutionary. The people were,
admittedly, in ‘the utmost state of exasperation’ through want of food
and most rents being paid to perhaps eight thousand people. This ‘vicious
social system’, a ‘radically wrong state’ of relations between proprietors
and cultivators, was being ‘protected and perpetuated by a wrong and
superstitious English notion of property in land’. Land was being let to
a superabundant population by competition, generating higher rents but
relatively less food. Landlords did not make the land more productive.
To change the system their rights had to suffer ‘some infringement’: this
was ‘not impossible’, and ‘must’ be done. The French Revolution of 1789
had improved both the physical and moral conditions of the peasantry by
transferring much landed property to them. Ireland could choose to effect
this change by law, or suffer it to occur by revolution.239
236 CW 13, pp. 710–11. 237 CMC, pp. 383–4.

238 CW 13, p. 715. 239 CW 6, pp. 501–3.
The first edition of the Principles (1848) reiterated Mill’s case that the
cottier system was the ‘very foundation of the economical evils of Ireland’,
and ‘absolutely incompatible with a prosperous condition of the labouring
class’.240 Ireland was ‘similar in its requirements’ to India. But no one
in India had proposed ejecting the ryots or peasant farmers from their
land. The chief difference of opinion was whether permanent tenure or
merely long leases would improve their conditions.241 For Ireland, then,
fair rents and a lengthy, even permanent, fixed tenure, were the remedy.
The peasantry alone could not improve their own condition. ‘Almost alone
among mankind the Irish cottier is in this condition’, Mill wrote in 1848,
‘that he can scarcely be either better or worse off by any act of his own. If
he was industrious or prudent, nobody but his landlord would gain; if he
is lazy or intemperate it is at his landlord’s expense.’ Matters were so bad,
indeed, that Mill thought that no slaves were ‘worse fed, clothed, or lodged,
than the free peasantry of Ireland’. Yet as a principle of right, the land of
Ireland belonged ‘to the people of that country’. Landowners had ‘no right,
in morality and justice, to anything but the rent, or compensation for its
saleable value’. Respecting the land itself, the paramount consideration was
‘by what mode of appropriation and of cultivation it can be made most
useful to the collective body of its inhabitants’.242
The remedy, then, lay in abolishing cottier tenancy by Act of Parliament,
and introducing low rents, ‘making the whole land of Ireland the property
of the tenants, subject to the rents now really paid (not the nominal rents),
as a fixed rent charge’. No other improvements had a greater bearing upon
‘the productiveness of labour, than those in the tenure of farms, and in the
laws relating to landed property’. A ‘just legislature’ could accomplish this
without infringing property ‘if the landlords had the option allowed them
of giving up their lands at the full value, reckoned at the ordinary number
of years purchase’.243 Just principles required parliament ‘to regulate the
supposed right of an owner of land in such a manner as to make it at least
consistent with the essential conditions of industry, prudence, and material
comfort, in the agricultural population’.244 And the government’s role in
transforming this system could be still greater, draining land, building
roads, perhaps even constructing houses on the Chartist home colonisation
plan, which Mill praised. All this should be done, too, because England
owed ‘an atonement to Ireland for past injuries, which she ought to suffer
almost any inconvenience rather than fail to make good, by using her power
240 CW 2, pp. 314, 324. 241 CW 3, p. 993.

242 CW 2, pp. 318–19, 246, 326. 243 CW 2, pp. 183, 329. 244 CW 25, p. 1115.
in as determined a manner for the elevation of that unfortunate people,
as she used it through so many dreary centuries for their abasement and
oppression’.245 Emigration now seemed a much less viable preference and
governmental action a proportionately greater one.246
The example of France since the 1789 Revolution was again raised here.
There, initially, the ‘majority of the population being suddenly raised from
misery, to independence and comparative comfort; the immediate effect
was that population, notwithstanding the destructive wars of the period,
started forward with unexampled rapidity’. Afterwards, however, despite
great prosperity, the birth-rate became ‘nearly stationary, and the increase
of population extremely slow’. A generation had ‘grown up, which, having
been born in improved circumstances, has not learnt to be miserable; and
upon them the spirit of thrift operates most conspicuously, in keeping the
increase of population within the increase of national wealth’. Not only had
the birth-rate declined, but the proportion of births to deaths was relatively
decreasing: this was the effect of ‘prudence’, though Mill did not spell out
the means directly. But in Belgium, where similar circumstances might
deliver a similar result, Mill felt that the Catholic priesthood had ‘every-
where strongly exerted’ its influence ‘against restraining population’.247
In 1848 Mill thought that desperate times called for desperate measures.
A ‘complete expropriation of the higher classes of Ireland’ was ‘perfectly
warrantable’ if it were ‘the sole means of effecting a great public good’.
He hoped, however, that it would not be necessary to drive away all the
larger landlords: many current tenants might be better off not gaining
immediate possession of the land they worked. ‘Milder measures’, like
allowing those who reclaimed waste lands to become their owner, ‘at a
fixed quit-rent equal to a moderate interest on its mere value as waste’, and
the compulsory surrender of waste lands, might help. Land might also be
bought for the purpose of resale as peasant property at a profit.248
The years after 1848 brought ameliorated conditions in Ireland. In 1862
Mill wrote that while his opinions had not changed, he no longer thought
them ‘susceptible of practical application’. Ireland’s decreasing population
and the passage of the Encumbered Estates Act had made ‘the introduc-
tion, on a large scale, of the English agricultural system for the first time
possible in that country’. Agriculture had improved greatly, and despite the
recurrent danger of ‘improvident multiplication’, the demand for ‘heroic
remedies’ had passed. The benefits of peasant proprietorship would still
245 CW 2, p. 398. 246 CW 13, p. 730. 247 CW 2, pp. 343, 287–8, 292.
248 CW 2, pp. 329–30. The Tenant League in Ireland found these principles sufficiently attractive to
invite Mill to stand as an Irish member (Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle, p. 166).
‘be as great as ever’, but they were ‘no longer indispensable’. Mill still
however called for ‘the total extinction of cottier tenancy’ as ‘the only real,
permanent, and radical reform in the social economy of that long-suffering
country’, warning that if this were not accomplished these gains might be
lost.249 By 1864 he was ‘considerably puzzled what to recommend for Ire-
land’. Applying the English system of landlords, tenant farmers and hired
labourers he again thought not impossible, but he confessed that it did ‘not
seem to me to suit the ideas, feelings, or state of civilization of the Irish’.
Cottierism had not yet been abolished, and Mill did not see ‘that the tenant
has an atom more of motive to improve, or inducement to industry and
frugality, than he had’. Over-population had been temporarily ‘neutralized’
by emigration, but not solved.250 In Parliament he continued to argue for
tenant-right and fixity of tenure on the basis of Continental experience.251
By 1867 Mill was beginning to see the Irish problem in more politi-
cal terms. He had conceded in 1848 that separation was ‘better than bad
government’.252 The Irish were ‘sufficiently numerous to be capable of con-
stituting a respectable nationality by themselves’, though their demands
might be mitigated by removing their religious grievances.253 1867 seem-
ingly presented the opportunity, with parliamentary reform imminent, of
transferring in Ireland ‘a large share of political power to classes who are not
under the influence of landed or Church prejudices’, and thus removing
the preponderance of the landed interest there. When Fenianism raised
the prospect of independence again, Mill wrote privately that he did not
want to encourage separation, which he thought would be strongly resisted
by the English. And yet he acknowledged the Fenians all seemed ‘to want
total separation, & a republic’, and that ‘total separation is what I think
we must make up our minds to if after having done full justice to the Irish
in church & land matters & done all we can do for their educational &
economical interests we find that their aversion to union with us remains
unabated’.254 But he continued to argue that the English had ‘a deep and
sincere desire’ ‘to make Ireland prosperous, and give her no cause to regret
her union with us’, pointing to the vast sums raised in England during
the famine.255 He saw the treatment of Fenian prisoners as only exacer-
bating existing bitterness, and pleaded for clemency. Mill’s was a perilous
line to follow. He asked Parliament whether Britain had ‘any right to hold
Ireland in subjection unless we can make Ireland contented with our gov-
ernment’, clearly believing it did not.256 But while admitting he knew
249 CW 2, p. 331. 250 CW 15, pp. 965, 967. 251 CW 28, p. 77 [1866].
252 CW 25, p. 1096. 253 CW 19, pp. 550–1. 254 CW 16, pp. 1316, 1328.
255 CW 28, p. 166 [1867]; CW 28, p. 252 [1868]. 256 CW 28, p. 172 [1867].
little of their views, Mill still condemned the Fenians as ‘greatly culpable,
because it was contrary to the general interests of society and of their coun-
try’, and insisted that ‘even those revolutionists who deserve our sympathy,
ought yet for the general good, to be subject to legal punishment if they
fail’.257
At the same time Mill returned to the land question. He defended the
small-holding principle as the best means of furnishing powerful incentives
to labour and frugality, citing in Parliament the example of Flanders.258 He
denied wanting the state to purchase land for sale or letting to tenants,
terming this ‘extremely objectionable’. Later he clarified this, saying that
he only wished to offer ‘to each individual landlord this as an alternative,
if he liked better to sell his estate than to retain it on the new conditions’,
and anticipating that ‘most landlords would continue to prefer the position
of landowners to that of Government annuitants, and would retain their
existing relation to their tenants, often on more indulgent terms than the
full rents on which the compensation to be given them by Government
would have been based’.259 Mill wanted full and fair perpetuity of tenure
and rent to be granted, giving existing tenants the choice of remaining as
they were or claiming such terms later, and existing landlords the choice
of retaining tenants for less than full rent. He denied that ‘taking land for
public improvements’ interfered with property rights, and saw no injustice
in rents being converted into rent-charges paid by the government from
the Treasury or in the form of consols.260
England and Ireland (1868) was Mill’s crowning effort to address the Irish
problem. Fenianism had now burst ‘like a clap of thunder in a clear sky’, and
Irish discontent was ‘more intense, more violent, more unscrupulous, and
more universal than ever’. The Fenians invoked ‘the idea of nationality’
in their rebellion, and Mill conceded that rebellions were ‘never really
unconquerable until they become rebellions for an idea’. He again took up
the example of landed property, ‘the original inheritance of all mankind’,
to be treated differently from moveable property, where labour and skill
created the right of ownership. Before England’s conquest of Ireland, Mill
asserted, her people had known nothing of absolute property in land:
the sept, with the chief as manager, had acted as owner. English Protestant
landlords were mostly absentees, and often extravagantly wasted their rents.
An overwhelmingly agricultural nation by contrast to England, Ireland
remained largely divided into small farms, whose proprietors suffered the
257 CW 28, p. 249; CW 28, p. 189; CW 16, p. 1275. 258 CW 28, pp. 259–61.
259 CW 1, p. 280. 260 CW 28, pp. 254–7.
worst terms of any such group in Europe, with eviction at six months’ notice
common. The only recourse now, Mill advised, was to ‘fulfil the rational
and moral conditions of a government’, by allowing smallholders to acquire
their own property, subject to a fixed payment to the state. This ‘permanent
possession of the land’, Mill admitted, would be a revolutionary change. But
he added that ‘revolutionary measures are the thing now required’. Some
compensation for the ‘bare pecuniary value’ of existing landlords’ rights
might be offered. But ‘no mercy ought to be shown to the mischievous
rights themselves’. If England could not make the cultivators of Ireland
its owners, the Irish, Mill inferred, could justly do so themselves. This
alone would ensure rule of the island according to its own institutions, as,
Mill claimed, had been done by the East India Company in India. But the
contrast of Ireland lay with ‘the Poles, the Italians, the Servians, the Greeks’
and other ‘oppressed nationalities’.261
Mill appealed to ‘a sense of right’ on the Irish issue, and thought ‘the
democracy’ of Britain agreed with him. Separation would be ‘a dishonour
to one, and a serious misfortune to both’ countries. The defence of both
would be weakened; their geographical situation made them ‘far more fit
to exist as one nation than as two’. Civil war and anarchy might result
in Ireland. An independent Ireland might side with Catholic countries
in disputes with Britain. Irish soldiers and sailors would also lose their
footing within the British empire and establishment. A more equal union,
not like that of Canada with Britain, but closer to that of Austria and
Hungary, might prove a satisfactory alternative. Yet Mill thought even
this form of federal union likely to fail. But even if ‘separation be ever so
complete a failure’, if it converted the peasantry into peasant proprietors,
this alone ‘would be more than an equivalent for all that she would lose.
The worst government that would give her this, would be more acceptable,
and deservedly acceptable, to the mass of the Irish people, than the best
that withheld it.’ Justice and utility, in other words, trumped all political
considerations. Mill recommended that a commission establish what fair,
fixed rents might consist of, and extend to the state compulsory powers
to mediate between landlord and tenant. Every estate not farmed by its
proprietor ‘would become the permanent property of the existing tenant,
who would pay either to the landlord or to the State the fixed rent which had
been decided upon’.262 Any number of ‘purely material improvements to
which voluntary enterprise is not adequate’, should, Mill thought, ‘with due
261 CW 6, pp. 508–8, 512, 514, 518–20.
262 CW 6, pp. 521, 526–7. For hostile commentary see [Dufferin], Mr Mill’s Plan for the Pacification of
Ireland Examined.
consideration and proper precautions, receive help from the State’, such as
consolidating Irish railways under state management, or under a company
run by state concession. But such measures would not by themselves allay
the Fenian threat. Nor, thought Mill, could Ireland be long held by force.
A ‘permanent military despotism’ was ‘out of the question’.263 Perhaps,
as Mill wrote privately in 1869, there was ‘nothing like Indian experience
for enabling men to understand Ireland . . . My own official knowledge
of Indian matters has greatly helped me to put the right interpretation
on Irish phenomena.’264 But Ireland was nonetheless not India. And Mill
found himself increasingly isolated on the Irish issue, opposed by a majority
English opinion favouring ‘landlordism’,265 and identified too closely with
the Fenians.266 Even friends worried about the loss of his reputation.267
But, as historians have stressed, his basic objective still remained conserving
the union rather than destroying it.268
Yet suggesting that Mill’s mature views on Ireland only acknowledged
that the state might intervene in landed property, and that Mill’s main aim
was ‘not subverting individual property, but improving it, and ensuring
the full participation of every member of the community in its benefits’,
is misleading.269 The scale of Mill’s vision for Ireland implied a potentially
far greater role for the state than it played in England, and one indeed
analogous to its role in India.270 ‘Full participation’ in landownership was
Mill’s goal in promoting peasant proprietorship in both India and Ireland.
But we need to treat the phrase ‘system of individual property’ carefully
here: Mill regarded the disposition of landed property in both cases as
legitimately the state’s function. The old system was to be completely
eradicated by the new.
conclusion
How far, then, did Mill develop a consistent theory of state intervention
across the broad range of issues considered here? It is hardly appropriate,
as we have seen, to describe Mill as an unqualified advocate of laissez-faire.
As Schumpeter stressed, rather, he was not ‘on principle averse to a large
263 CW 6, p. 538 (draft material). 264 CW 32, p. 214.

265 CW 32, p. 216 [1870]. 266 CW 1, p. 277.
267 The Amberley Papers (vol. 2), p. 85. But Alfred Russel Wallace was supportive (Land Nationalisation,
p. 45).
268 Kinzer, England’s Disgrace?, p. 211. 269 CW 22, p. lxxxiv.
270 Mill has still been condemned as an ‘imperialist’ respecting Ireland (Steele, ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish
Question’, p. 236).
amount of government activity’.271 As Kurer has argued, to an important
degree Mill’s ethical precepts underpinned his approach to intervention.
Here equality as well as justice were amongst the ends Mill sought.272
Domestically, Mill encouraged the state to lessen and even reverse inequal-
ity through redistributive taxation and land reform. He also sought to
mitigate the worst effects of democracy by excluding large numbers from
obtaining the franchise until sufficiently educated. Abroad, his experience
of India and growing knowledge of both continental and Irish land tenure
systems suggested an increasing intervention to alter existing property
arrangements. His ultimate proposals for Ireland bore a marked resem-
blance to Indian practices, with government playing a fundamental role
in promoting social justice. In both cases Mill thought that small-scale
peasant farming was both more just and more likely to reduce population
growth. Small families, reasonable rents and fixed tenures, where extreme
subdivision of property had not occurred, might assist the prosperity of
peasant classes everywhere. Although Mill offered a firmer justification for
despotic rule in India, this was not based upon race as such, but upon the
advancement of the spirit of nationality. Though he would not concede
that uncivilised peoples possessed sense of honour,273 Mill was not a racist
in the sense that he imputed unbridgeable ontological differences between
races, and insisted that Europeans were invariably a ‘higher’ race.274 Indeed
he wrote in 1839 that ‘a more intimate & sympathetic familiarity’ between
blacks and Europeans would give the latter, with their more highly devel-
oped intelligence and activity, ‘what is most needful to us as a qualifying
counterpoise, in their love of repose & in the superior capacity of animal
enjoyment & consequently of sympathetic sensibility, which is character-
istic of the negro race’.275 Education could raise Indians and any other
peoples, to the same level as the British – this was what divided Mill from
racial imperialists like Dilke.276
Politically, however, there were important differences between India and
Ireland. In Ireland, by 1868, Mill thought the disaffection had become ‘more
than at any former period, one of nationality’.277 But India in his time still
lacked those ‘common sympathies’ which would enable its peoples to ‘co-
operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be
271 Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, p. 549.
272 Kurer, ‘John Stuart Mill on Government Intervention’, 466.
273 See his comments on savages being ‘always liars’ who had ‘not the faintest notion of truth as a
virtue’ (CW 10, pp. 395–6).
274 He did think the English, along with most other Europeans, generally were (CW 15, p. 561).
275 CW 13, p. 404. But here ‘race’ implies ‘level of social development’.
276 Bearce, British Attitudes towards India, p. 293. 277 CW 28, p. 250.
under the same government, and desire that it should be government by
themselves or a portion of themselves, exclusively’.278 Mill in some instances
saw advantages in nationalities being absorbed by others; the Breton and
Basque, he thought, benefitted greatly from being French, adding that
the ‘same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander,
as members of the British nation’. But ‘keeping different nationalities of
anything like equivalent strength, under the same government’ was not
advisable.279 Ireland had met the three criteria for forming political society
which Mill had outlined in the Logic: it possessed a system of education
which included ‘restraining discipline’, a sufficient sense of allegiance or
loyalty, and an adequate ‘feeling of common interest among those who live
under the same government, and are contained within the same natural
or historical boundaries’.280 Indians and many other peoples remained
incapable of self-government, and thus it was ‘often better for them to be
under the despotism of foreigners than of natives, when those foreigners
are more advanced in civilization and cultivation than themselves’. But if
the nationality of such peoples had not become ‘merged and blended in the
nationality of their conquerors’, it might be reclaimed as ‘an indispensable
condition either to obtaining free institutions, or to the possibility, were
they even obtained, of working them in the spirit of freedom’.281
Many of these examples respecting Mill’s interventionism have not been
used in previous discussions of his views of the state and of paternalism.
Mill’s own account in the Principles, indeed, was misleading, for it did not
discuss many of the instances described here, notably the restriction of the
franchise, and the duties of the state abroad. The even narrower focus of On
Liberty on self- versus non-self-regarding acts similarly illuminates little of
what we have described in this chapter. Ignoring these examples of course
gives us a different Mill. To ask the question, as Capaldi has done, whether
Mill favoured ‘limited government’ or ‘governmental activism’, and to
answer: ‘Mill was not an ideologue. If something can be done by private
agencies, then the government ought not to do it’,282 is to give only half an
answer to the question. The other half is that where the existing system had
failed, or a new system, such as democracy, threatened to fail, governments
ought to step in, if need be on a massive scale, overturning entire existing
278 CW 19, p. 546. Mill did nonetheless concede that various semi-independent Indian states indeed
possessed ‘nationality, & historical traditions & feelings’, and argued that Britain should not take
advantage of a failure of dynastic succession to annex them as a result (CW 16, p. 1202, here
opposing the annexation of Mysore).
279 CW 19, pp. 547–9. 280 CW 8, pp. 923–4.
281 CW 20, p. 347. 282 Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, p. 301.
systems of property ownership and management. Capaldi baldly asserts
against Hamburger, following Letwin and Cowling, that ‘Mill was no
authoritarian’.283 This utterly leaves out Mill’s justification for despotism, as
we have seen, as well as Mill’s defence of ‘revolutionary’ measures in Ireland,
where he expected that parliamentary reform might dispossess the great
landlords. To argue that ‘Mill advocated freedom (understood as autonomy
or self-government) as the only intrinsic end, with laissez-faire justified as
a means to it’,284 is to miss much of Mill’s approach to the state. The
insistence of the Principles that laissez-faire ‘should be the general practice’,
with ‘every departure from it unless required by some great good’ being ‘a
certain evil’ overlooks the fact that in a number of essential contexts Mill
believed that very great good would be achieved by substantially rejecting
the market. This is true for his continuing support for the Poor Laws, his
radical approach to the redistributing wealth through altered inheritance
laws, his argument for massively expanded educational provisions, his
manipulation of the franchise, and his views on the land, and, as we will
shortly see, cooperation. It was not only the case that there were certain
functions the market could not assume. The market could not define the
end of society in terms of greater social equality and autonomy conceived
in collective terms. It could not meet the needs of society collectively,
where specific ends (e.g. the environment) could not be identified with
individuals. It could not serve individuals whose judgements were not
adequate to the task. Indeed its operations often produced the opposite
result. Moreover, Mill’s growing list of exceptions later in life pushed him
more towards intervention and away from laissez-faire, which makes Ryan’s
assertion that ‘throughout his life he wanted less government rather than
more’ seem misleading, though as we have seen, ‘more intervention’ for
Mill by no means automatically entailed more (centralised) government.285
My own view, thus, is much closer to McCloskey’s acknowledgement of
the substantial number of exceptions proposed by Mill to the laissez-faire
principle (but, as Ryan indicates, chiefly in the social rather than the moral
field), and to Reeves’s description of Mill’s ‘activist vision for the state’ as an
agency for creating and sustaining progress, stimulating demand for useful
goods and services, and assisting the poor.286
283 Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, p. 410, chiefly referring to Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and
Control.
284 Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, pp. 214–15. 285 Ryan, Mill, p. 175.
286 McCloskey, ‘Mill’s Liberalism’; Ryan, ‘Mr. McCloskey’s Liberalism’; Reeves, John Stuart Mill,
p. 292.
Mill’s approach to the issues can be broadly described as ‘paternalist’ in
that it sought to augment happiness, security, liberty and equality where
these failed to result from individuals acting freely themselves. Freedom
was not the sole goal here, then, but neither was happiness.287 Mill shared
with the Tory paternalists a sense of the guiding role of educated elites.
But his ultimate aim varied widely from theirs, for he sought not more
hierarchy but less, not more obedience but less, not more unthinking
forelock-tugging, but an end to deference on any other but intellectual
and moral grounds. Paternalism, far from merely restraining liberty, could
be a vital means of promoting it, even if suppressing or modifying some
forms of liberty might be required in order to promote others. Mill’s chief
concern, then, was not whether actions were ‘paternalist’, but whether, if
they promoted well-being, long-term dependency also resulted.288
Hence the conclusion that Mill thought that ‘paternalistic restrictions
always decrease a person’s autonomy’ cannot stand, and On Liberty cannot
remain the sole basis for such generalisations.289 To clarify this, however, we
must turn now to the contentious issue of Mill’s encounter with socialism.
We can then treat Mill’s most famous confrontation of this problem in On
Liberty.
287 Kurer even claims that Mill felt the government was ‘obliged to pursue any activities which lead to
an overall increase in happiness’ (Kurer, John Stuart Mill, p. 113).
288 Kurer reaches similar conclusions (John Stuart Mill, pp. 116–17, 194–5).
289 Arneson, ‘Mill versus Paternalism’, 481.
chapter 2
Mill, socialism and collective autonomy
Reflecting in the Autobiography on ‘the days of my most extreme Ben-

thamism’, Mill noted, in a famous passage summarising his life’s intellectual
trajectory, that he had then
seen little further than the old school of political economists into the possibilities
of future improvement in social arrangements. Private property as at present
understood, and inheritance, appeared to me as to them, the dernier mot of
legislation: and I looked no further than to mitigating the inequalities consequent
on these institutions, by abolishing primogeniture and entails. The notion that it
was possible to get rid in any considerable degree of the flagrant injustice involved
in the fact that some are born to riches and the vast majority to poverty, I reckoned
chimerical; and only hoped that by universal education, leading to voluntary
restraint on population, the portion of the poor might be made more tolerable. In
short, I was a democrat but not the least of a Socialist. We were now less democrats
than I had formerly been, because we dreaded more the ignorance and especially
the selfishness and brutality of the mass: but our ideal of future improvement was
such as would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists. While
we repudiated with the greatest energy the tyranny of society over the individual,
we yet looked forward to a time when society should no longer be divided into
the idle and the industrious, when the rule that they who do not work shall not
eat, should be applied not to the pauper merely, but impartially to all; when the
division of the produce of labour, instead of being dependent as in so great a degree
it is, on the accident of birth, should be made by concert, on an acknowledged
principle of justice, and when it should no longer either be, or be thought to be,
impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously for benefits which
were not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong
to. The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest
individual liberty of action with an equal ownership of all in the raw material of the
globe and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour. We knew
that to render any such social transformation practicable an equivalent change of
character must take place both in the uncultivated herd who now compose the
labouring masses, and in the immense majority of their employers. Both these
classes must learn by practice to labour and contrive for generous, or at all events
123
for public and social purposes, and not as hitherto solely for self interested ones.
But the capacity for this has always existed in mankind, and is not, nor is ever
likely to be, extinct.1
Just what this provocative account meant has provoked much disagreement,
and quite rightly. What kind of ‘qualified Socialism’, as it had been termed
a few pages earlier,2 did Mill (and/or Taylor) subscribe to? Mill’s reputation
as a liberal, indeed as a thinker, hinges in many respects on the answers
provided to this question.
Before responding to this issue, however, we should first briefly consider
how contemporaries and some later interpreters viewed it. Though many
socialists disavowed his Malthusianism,3 the influence of Mill’s writings
on socialism in the decades after his death is undisputed. Joseph Hiam
Levy, in an almost unrivalled position to judge this matter, thought he
had ‘done more to propagate Socialism than any writer of our generation,
Karl Marx not excepted’.4 William Morris, most famously, was converted
by the ‘Chapters’, which he thought intended to refute socialism.5 The
same thing happened to John Burns.6 But later writers disagreed over what
Mill himself advocated. To some he recommended ‘an increase in the land
tax, the reversion to the State of future unearned increments in the value
of land, and an increase in the taxes on inheritances and legacies’, and
thus was both ‘a Socialist, and a State Socialist’, if one ‘that expects his
ideal to be realized slowly – that is, he is a practical and sensible Social-
ist, and neither Utopian nor revolutionary’.7 Leslie Stephen thought that
having been ‘a thorough individualist’ in his youth, Mill was ‘well on the
way to state Socialism’ in later years.8 By the 1880s and even more by the
early twentieth century, many regarded him as the intellectual forefather
of non-revolutionary, statist, utilitarian, Fabian socialism.9 Sydney Olivier,
1 CW 1, p. 238. The French socialist leader Jules Guesde took this to be a clear statement of the aims
of socialism (Ely, Socialism, p. 34).
2 CW 1, p. 199.
3 Some associated it with his support for the wage fund theory before 1869. See, e.g., Fairman, The
Principles of Socialism Made Plain, pp. 57–8.
4 Levy and Belfort Bax, Socialism and Individualism, p. 72; Levy, The Outcome of Individualism, p. 6.
5 Hyndman et al., How I Became a Socialist, p. 18.
6 ‘It was after reading Mill’s exposition of the case against Socialism that I came to the conclusion that
I was a Socialist’ (Grubb, The Life of the Right Hon. John Burns, p. 31).
7 Graham, Socialism New and Old, p. 118.
8 Stephen, The English Utilitarians (vol. 3), pp. 37, 230. But Stephen also wrote that Mill’s use of the
term ‘must not be understood as including later implications of the word’ (Dictionary of National
Biography, 13, 1909, p. 395).
9 E.g., Borchard, John Stuart Mill the Man, p. 147, Britton, John Stuart Mill, p. 43, West, J.S. Mill.
An 1882 article noted of Mill that ‘undoubtedly he had a large share’ in bringing about the view
that governments had a right to interfere fundamentally with the distribution of wealth (National
Mill, socialism and collective autonomy 125
for instance, thought Mill’s writings had done much to ‘put men on the
track of Socialism’.10 Thomas Mackay termed him the ‘leading spirit’
in the evolution of liberalism towards socialism.11 Sidney Webb claimed
that Mill had become a socialist when he realised that ‘it was hopeless
to expect a Malthusian prudence’ to prevail amongst the working classes,
and saw him as particularly influential in popularising the idea of the
‘unearned increment’ on land values.12 But even the Fabians were at odds
on the issue. George Bernard Shaw wrote that while Webb drew paral-
lels between Mill and Fabianism, far ‘from being the economic apostle of
Socialism’, Mill, when the Fabian Society commenced, ‘was regarded as
the standard authority for solving the social problem by a combination
of peasant proprietorship with neo-Malthusianism’.13 And, still within
this generation, Ernest Barker wrote that Mill’s ideas served between
1848–80 as ‘the bridge from laissez-faire to the idea of social readjust-
ment by the State, and from political Radicalism to economic Socialism’.14
G. D. H. Cole suggested that he sought ‘to reform capitalism rather than
to overthrow it’.15 Bertrand Russell thought that the ‘socialism to which
Mill looks forward is that of St. Simon and Fourier’,16 but this, we will see,
is overly precise and more misleading than not.
Later writers have remained divided. John Robson describes Mill as
valuing socialism chiefly for its description of ethical ends rather than
how to attain them.17 Mill’s editors term his ‘socialism’ ‘much more like
non-revolutionary syndicalism than anything which would be called social-
ism at the present day’. This is questionable; though it can simply mean
Reformer (19 Nov. 1882), 355). Cole described the Fabians as ‘modern utilitarians’ who had ‘taken the
doctrines of Bentham and Mill and converted them from individualist to collectivist terms, using
them to justify the extension of State activity in the social field and applying the “greatest happiness”
principle in new ways corresponding to the changing technical conditions of the modern age’ (The
Webbs and Their Work, p. 281).
10 ‘J. S. Mill and Socialism’. 11 Mackay, The Dangers of Democracy, p. 226.
12 Webb, Socialism in England, p. 17, and The Difficulties of Individualism, p. 12. He added that the
‘economic influence most potent among the Socialist Radicals is still that of John Stuart Mill’
(Socialism in England, p. 47). Shaw said that Webb followed Mill into socialism because the latter
had proven that ‘under private property and free contract everybody except the proprietors would
be reduced to bare subsistence wages’ (The Webbs and Their Work, p. 6). Julius West’s Fabian
pamphlet, J.S. Mill, portrayed Mill as having been deflected from socialism by the ‘optical illusion’
of Malthusianism (p. 8).
13 Pease, The History of the Fabian Society, p. 273. Pease thought that it was ‘probably due to Webb
more than to any other disciple that it is now generally known that Mill died a Socialist’ (p. 274).
14 Barker, Political Thought in England 1848 to 1914, p. 190. Yet, commenting on this passage in the
most incisive account of Mill’s reputation in this area, Wolfe notes that ‘Mill was not generally
known in the nineteenth century to have been a Socialist at all’, taking the mid-twentieth century
reaction against the identification as his cue (From Radicalism to Socialism, p. 24).
15 Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, p. 383. 16 Russell, ‘John Stuart Mill’, p. 7.
17 Robson, The Improvement of Mankind, p. 246.
non-statist labour management of the economy, syndicalism has usually
been based upon trade unionism, not cooperation.18 But others have echoed
the description, seeing Mill’s syndicalism as having ‘no affinities what-
ever with the paternalist State celebrated in the Fabian socialist tradition’,
and preferring to term Mill a ‘market socialist’.19 Robbins believed he
used the term socialism to indicate his flexibility about future economic
developments.20 Some have found Mill essentially to be a romantic rather
than a socialist.21 It has been suggested that he thought socialism to be
linked to the pursuit of free enquiry and self-dependence.22 His ‘flirtation
with socialism’ has been described as ‘proximately caused by his associ-
ation with Harriet Taylor’.23 His claims about socialism have even been
dismissed as ‘impossible to take at face value’.24 Mill, then, ‘was not a
Socialist or Collectivist’ at all.25 His profit-sharing and cooperative enthu-
siasms were unrelated to ‘socialism in the modern sense of the term’: Mill
meant ‘cooperation’; ‘socialism’ is simply misleading.26 Capaldi stresses that
Mill’s support for a ‘free market economy’ and ‘the modern liberal state
or modern liberal culture’ as ‘the most efficient means for achieving the
productive benefits of the technological project’, ‘required private prop-
erty’, and ‘could be maintained only if there were limited government,
individual rights, the rule of law, and toleration’. This involved no ‘cri-
tique of the technological project, or . . . market economies, or . . . limited
government or private property or the rule of law or individual auton-
omy – it is the underlining of the moral dimension of autonomy’.27 Others,
18 CW 4, pp. xxxix–xl (1967). Gray used almost the same words in 1976, equating ‘syndicalist’ with
‘non-state socialist’ or ‘market socialist’ (‘John Stuart Mill and the Future of Liberalism’, 142).
Hollander rejects the label (The Economics of John Stuart Mill (vol. 2), pp. 813–15). Robbins describes
Mill’s conclusions as ‘syndicalist’ rather than ‘collectivist’ (The Theory of Economic Policy, pp. 158–9,
166). ‘Statist’ might work better for the juxtaposition here, since even syndicalism is essentially
‘collectivist’.
19 Gray, ‘John Stuart Mill: Traditional and Revisionist Interpretations’, 26.
20 Robbins, The Theory of Economic Policy, pp. 166–7.
21 As is contended by Davis, ‘Mill, Socialism and the English Romantics’.
22 E.g., Halliday, ‘John Stuart Mill’s Idea of Politics’.
23 Ekelund, Jr. and Tollison, ‘The New Political Economy of J.S. Mill’, 215.
24 Anschutz, The Philosophy of J.S. Mill, p. 31. 25 Mackay, A Plea for Liberty, p. 54.
26 Hollander, The Economics of John Stuart Mill (vol. 2), pp. 775, 812–13, and generally pp. 770–824.
Some of these interpretations are examined in Stafford, ‘How Can a Paradigmatic Liberal Call
Himself a Socialist?’.
27 Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, pp. 195, 198, 217. To confuse matters even more, Capaldi then describes
Mill’s eventual goal as that of ‘a “utopian socialist” in the mid-nineteenth-century sense of making
everyone a member of the entrepreneurial class’, utilising a label no one with any sensitivity to the
literature would use any longer, which was intended (by Marx and Engels) to (mis)describe the
views of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon (John Stuart Mill, pp. 217–18), and which in Capaldi’s
description hardly applies to most of the pre-Marxian socialists in any case. This label is also used by
Donner (The Liberal Self, p. 208). Capaldi’s account is evaluated more extensively in Winch’s review
however, have suggested that Mill’s critique of private property, allied to his
utilitarianism, moved him towards socialism.28 His restrictions on inher-
itance, support for nationalising cooperative industries and upholding of
the Poor Law have been seen as implying ‘a very far-reaching socialistic
programme’.29 Mill scholarship in the later twentieth century ranges from
dismissing the relevance of this issue; to simply not mentioning it;30 to
denying that Mill was a socialist even if his writings promoted socialism;31
to one or other henpecked explanations;32 to suggesting that Mill wanted
only ‘minor modifications’ of the existing economic system;33 to describing
him as a genuine convert to a very different social radicalism compared to
Benthamism, albeit one whose greatest changes occur well in the future
and where a strong commitment to liberty and individuality remain.34
(Beyond this lie some quainter designations.)35 Most recently, Baum sees
Mill as advancing a variety of ‘liberal democratic socialism’,36 while Reeves
terms Mill ‘a strong supporter of socialism in the form of collective own-
ership of individual enterprises, competing in a market economy’.37
The view which is broadly defended here sees Mill’s path towards (and
away from) socialism as consisting of five key stages. The first was his
acceptance of the possibility that laws of property-ownership might be
essay ‘Mill as Romantic Idealist’. Thomas (Mill, p. 86) also comes close to this view, while ultimately
arguing that in 1869 Mill eventually plumped for ‘private property’ rather than socialism (p. 90),
which he had really supported all along anyway. This misleading nomenclature mars otherwise useful
accounts by Collini (‘Liberalism and the Legacy of Mill’, 249–50) and Wolfe (From Radicalism to
Socialism, p. 205), where the general assumption prevails that Mill could not have been a ‘collectivist’
and must therefore have been a ‘utopian socialist’.
28 Meadearis, ‘Labor, Democracy, Utility, and Mill’s Critique of Private Property’.
29 Hutchison, A Review of Economic Doctrines 1870–1929, p. 53.
30 This holds for most of the studies of On Liberty in particular.
31 This is, e.g., broadly true of Abel, ‘John Stuart Mill and Socialism’, Fredman and Gordon, ‘John
Stuart Mill and Socialism’, Schwartz, ‘John Stuart Mill and Socialism’, McCloskey, John Stuart Mill,
p. 137 and Flew, ‘J.S. Mill: Socialist or Libertarian?’.
32 E.g., Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, p. 266, Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism,
pp. 130–1.
33 E.g., Losman, ‘J.S. Mill on Alternative Economic Systems’, 86. Losman infers that these included a
preference for ‘socialism on a village basis’.
34 This is broadly the position of Bain, John Stuart Mill, p. 90; Webb, Fabian Essays in Socialism, p. 58,
who describes Mill as a ‘convinced Socialist’; Robson, The Improvement of Mankind, pp. 180, 245–
71; Kurer, John Stuart Mill, p. 34; Feuer, ‘John Stuart Mill as a Sociologist’, p. 108; Ashcraft, ‘John
Stuart Mill and the Theoretical Foundations of Democratic Socialism’; Lipkes, Politics, Religion
and Classical Political Economy, p. 2; Stafford, John Stuart Mill, pp. 122–7; van Holthoon, The Road
to Utopia, p. 112; Sarvasy, ‘A Reconsideration of the Development and Structure of John Stuart
Mill’s Socialism’. Much of this literature does not, however, address in any detail Mill’s views on
inheritance, which are here treated as crucial to the argument.
35 E.g., Mill as ‘libertarian communist’ (Levy, ‘Libertarian Communists, Malthusians and J. S. Mill
Who is Both’). See further in particular Harris, Economics and Social Reform, pp. 24–118 and Duncan
and Gray, ‘The Left against Mill’.
36 Baum, ‘J.S. Mill and Liberal Socialism’, p. 99. 37 Reeves, John Stuart Mill, p. 7.
mutable; this resulted from his encounter with Owenism in the mid-1820s
and, even more, with Saint-Simonism slightly later. The second consisted
of his acknowledgement of Coleridge’s doctrine of landed property as
essentially public property, and coincided with his growing appreciation
of cooperation. This occurred between 1840 and 1845. The third followed
the revolutions of 1848, and the renewed enthusiasm for cooperation they
inspired in Mill, filtered through Harriet Taylor’s eyes; we will have to revisit
henpecked yet again here. The fourth involved his wedding of cooperative,
anti-dependent, Malthusian and feminist and anti-capitalist ideals into
one coherent concept, which developed across some twenty years. The
fifth then consisted of his reassertion, in the ‘Chapters on Socialism’, of
the dangers and limitations of certain strands of existing socialist thought.
By the end of his life, then, Mill aspired to a society defined as socialist,
where this meant, loosely, ‘any system which requires that the land and the
instruments of production should be the property, not of individuals, but
of communities or associations, or of the government’, but so ‘qualified’ in
certain key particulars that the term is somewhat misleading.38 It is not the
label we apply to Mill, however, it will be argued, which is primary here,
but his description of his goals, and of the means proposed to achieve them.
Here what is crucial, more than ‘socialism’ as such, is Mill’s egalitarianism
and his radical meritocratic ideal, which were eventually closely united
with his Malthusianism and his feminism.
owenism and saint-simonism: from the mid 1820s to c. 1840

Bentham had invested successfully in Robert Owen’s New Lanark mills,
and James Mill had written sympathetically about the educational exper-
iments there,39 so the younger Mill knew of Owen’s endeavours from
an early age. His first encounter with socialism came in the mid 1820s,
when he debated in London with various Owenites, most notably William
Thompson.40 Mill was doubtless alerted to Owen’s opposition to existing
marital arrangements, and to rumours of Owenite neo-Malthusianism.
This issue was not a prominent part of Owenism in the mid 1820s, but was
sufficiently important for Mill to have been impressed by it. Mill mentioned
Owen in his description of marriage given to Harriet Taylor around 1832 (or
possibly 1834). At this time the key text was William Thompson’s Appeal of
38 CW 2, p. 203.
39 Mill, ‘A New View of Society: or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character’.
40 On this context, see my Machinery, Money and the Millennium and Pankhurst, William Thompson,
pp. 70–3.
One-Half the Human Race (1824), which linked cooperation, the demand
for female enfranchisement (attacking James Mill in the process) and the
promotion of equality in the family, all themes later central to the younger
Mill’s ideas, and lamented that women were often only viewed as the
‘passive machines of producing’ children.41 But Mill was still an orthodox
Ricardian in political economy and a steadfast Benthamite in philosophy.
He was accordingly contemptuous of most aspects of Owenism, especially
the viability of communal property to provide incentives to labour and
the claim that labour produced all wealth. Separate classes of labourers
and capitalists existed, he insisted, because some had ‘worked harder, or
squandered less, or had more skill, or more ingenuity, or a smaller family’,
and had been enabled to employ others and to give the proceeds to their
successors. Wages would not increase through implementing the ‘princi-
ple of cooperation’, by which Mill meant ‘community of property; the
fundamental principle of Mr. Owen’s plan’ (his usage of this term would
later alter). Communities might marginally improve the comforts, educa-
tion and government of the working classes. But rivalry for wages would
continue until population was ‘properly regulated’. Cooperation, indeed,
would only hinder the regulatory function of competition. Communities
were also very expensive to commence. And even if successful, they might
eventuate in ‘a system of universal regulation’, with idleness in particular
being treated with a ‘graduated scale of punishments, from something tri-
fling, to expulsion from the society’.42 But, Mill thought, it was ‘infinitely
better to attain a given end by leaving people to themselves than to attain
the same end by controlling them’, noting that it was ‘delightful to man to
be an independent being’. Any hope that cooperation might ‘have more
than an experimental existence’, then, lay in adopting Malthusianism. But
this was not intended to hold out any hope that the system, even thereafter,
might work in practice. Mill was keener on Owen’s system of education,
but even here he thought a universal infant school system ‘would give us all
that we could have by Owen’s system and more: the pleasures and virtues
of individual freedom of action’, thus obviating the need for cooperation.43
Mill’s first encounter with cooperation – but this of a communitarian
kind – thus revealed a stiff opposition to any system of economic regu-
lation not based upon competitive self-interest. This position is entirely
commensurate with the more libertarian readings of Mill’s philosophy gen-
erally. But Mill, we will see, would change his mind dramatically about
41 Thompson, Appeal of One-Half the Human Race, p. 192.
42 CW 26, pp. 311, 318–20. On the context of such judgements, see my Citizens and Saints.
43 CW 26, pp. 321, 323, 326.
several vital aspects of the debates of 1825. And we must measure Mill’s
economic orthodoxy in this period year by year with care. By 1828, in
another debate, he asked whether it was ‘an error to suppose mankind
capable of great improvement’ or ‘really a mark of wisdom, to deride all
grand schemes of human amelioration as visionary?’ The answer was no:
‘the progressiveness of the human mind’ was not ‘chimerical’, and ‘an
extremely high degree of moral and intellectual excellence’ might ‘be made
to prevail among mankind at large’, since it had existed ‘in many particular
instances’.44
A second aspect of Mill’s encounter with Owenism haunted him for
many years. Owen’s central principle, the idea that a person’s character
‘was formed for and not by him’, implied that no free will in the usual sense
existed. During his mental crisis Mill felt himself ‘scientifically proved to be
the helpless slave of antecedent circumstances . . . agencies beyond our con-
trol . . . wholly out of our own power’. Eventually, however, he concluded
that ‘our own desires can do much to shape those circumstances’, and could
‘modify our future habits or capabilities of willing’.45 Mill regarded this
conclusion as ‘critical’ to his development,46 and went over the ground
again in the Logic. Here he insisted that while we could not ‘directly will
to be different from what we are’, we could act as ‘one of the intermediate
agents’, and were ‘exactly as capable of making our own character, if we will,
as others are of making it for us’. This feeling of ‘our being able to modify
our own character if we wish’ was ‘itself the feeling of moral freedom which
we are conscious of . . . hence it is said with truth, that none but a person
of confirmed virtue is completely free’.47 Here we see how central the idea
of self-mastery, in the sense of self-command over habits or temptations,
was to Mill’s ideas of individuality and virtue.48
More than Owenism, it was Saint-Simonism which would first signifi-
cantly dent Mill’s confidence in the sacrosanct nature of private property
and Ricardian economics.49 Mill first encountered the Saint-Simonians
in the late 1820s, as we have seen, partly through Carlyle, who was also
44 CW 26, pp. 428–30. 45 CW 1, p. 177.
46 CW 15, p. 706. It is not implausible that this is a key reason why Mill was prone to overestimate the
value of independence and underestimate that of sociability.
47 CW 8, p. 842.
48 He would further clarify, in his attack on Sir William Hamilton, the idea of punishment annexed
to his conception of moral freedom. Here he argued that responsibility meant punishment as such,
either by the expectation that punishment would occur, or the knowledge that it was deserved (CW
9, pp. 453–4). See generally Smith, ‘The Logic of J.S. Mill on Freedom’.
49 Pankhurst claims that William Thompson may have been a substantial influence on Mill’s ideas
about property in the mid 1820s (William Thompson, pp. 150–2). Hollander discounts this period
as influencing Mill’s interest in socialism (The Economics of John Stuart Mill, vol. 2, p. 772n3).
enthusiastic about the sect’s division of history into alternating ‘critical’ and
‘organic’ periods.50 The first major breach with his liberal upbringing was
suggested (c. 1829–30) by the assertion of the ‘very limited and temporary
value of the old political economy, which assumes individual hereditary
property as a necessary fact, and freedom of production and exchange as
the dernier mot of social improvement’.51 The Autobiography recalled that
at this time Mill had been ‘by no means prepared to go with them even this
length’ (and neither was Comte). Nonetheless he found the Saint-Simonian
scheme, where, on a national scale, every individual would be ‘required
to take a share of labour either as thinker, teacher, artist or producer, and
all being classed according to their capacity and rewarded according to
their works . . . a far superior kind of Socialism to Owen’s’. Its aim, he
reflected, ‘seemed to me perfectly rational, however their means might be
inefficacious’. Mill still doubted both the practicability and ‘the beneficial
operation of their social machinery’. But he conceded that proclaiming
such an ideal might nonetheless bring others closer to that standard. And
he was impressed ‘above all for the boldness and freedom from preju-
dice with which they treated the subject of family, the most important of
any, and needing more fundamental alterations than any other, but which
scarcely any reformer has the courage to touch’. ‘In proclaiming the perfect
equality of men and women’, he thought, ‘and an entirely new order of
things in regard to their relations with one another, the St. Simonians in
common with Owen and Fourier have entitled themselves to the grateful
remembrance of all future generations’.52
By late 1829, however, Mill had begun to express various objections
to Saint-Simonism. Its ‘grand practical conclusion’, ‘that the business of
government must be placed in the hands of the principal industriels, the
pouvoir temporel at least, & the pouvoir spirituel in the savans & artistes’ he
now felt ill-suited to England, where these were ‘the very classes of persons
you would pick out as the most remarkable for a narrow & bigotted
understanding, & a sordid & contracted disposition as respects all things
wider than their business or families’. The pouvoir spirituel presented a
particular problem. Mill liked the Saint-Simonian forecast that society
would reach a point where the uninstructed masses would ‘entertain the
same feelings of deference & submission to the authority of the instructed,
in morals and politics, as they at present do in the physical sciences’.
This was, he agreed, ‘the only wholesome state of the human mind’. But
50 CW 12, p. 42.
51 CW 1, p. 168 (deleted text from the ‘Early Draft’ of the Autobiography). 52 CW 1, pp. 171, 174.
he objected ‘altogether’ to the means for organising the pouvoir spirituel,
concluding that ‘you cannot organise it at all’. What was this power,
indeed, ‘but the insensible influence of mind over mind?’ Its instruments
were ‘private communication, the pulpit, & the press’. To ‘collect together
the instructed’, he insisted, ‘you must have somebody to chuse them,
& determine who they are: in what respect, then, will this differ from
an elective national assembly, with a qualification for eligibility, not a
qualification of property but of education?’ Such suggestions, he wrote to
Gustave D’Eichthal, were ‘impracticable, & not desirable if practicable,
like that of Mr Owen’.53 Mill was on the fence again. Socialist ideas he
was willing to see discussed, but chiefly so ‘that the higher classes might be
made to see that they had more to fear from the poor when uneducated,
than when educated’.54
At this point, however, Mill seems to have undergone a change of heart.
He wrote his friend Sarah Austin sometime in 1831 that though he was ‘not
a St Simonist nor at all likely to become one, je tiens bureau de St Simonisme
chez moi’. But he was more than a mere intermediary. In November 1831
he wrote D’Eichthal that he now thought ‘that your social organisation,
under some modification or other . . . is likely to be the final and permanent
condition of the human race’, while adding that ‘several ages’ of preparation
might still be required first.55 What did Mill mean here? He did not, like
Carlyle, pin his hopes on a great infusion of religiosity from the sect, and in
1833 was perturbed when it appeared. But he did, like Carlyle, admire the
Saint-Simonians’ focus on leadership. His 1831 articles entitled ‘The Spirit
of the Age’ thus rejected Bentham’s premise that each was the best judge of
his own interest in favour of guidance by a scientific elite. As importantly
for Mill’s long-term ideals, he announced that a new moral and social
revolution would ‘leave to no man one fraction of unearned distinction or
unearned importance’. In January 1832 he reiterated that the new doctrine
evidenced ‘an entirely new tone of thinking and feeling in France’, and
praised its anti-revolutionary character.56 Mill still agreed with the Saint-
Simonians ‘partially on almost all points, entirely perhaps on none’. But he
acknowledged that ‘politics are an essentially progressive science’, and that
the ‘great questions of social organization’ could only receive ‘their true
answer’ when juxtaposed to ‘views which ascend high into the past, and
stretch far into the future’.57 Mill’s sense of history had been transformed.
53 CW 12, pp. 37, 40–1, 47. 54 CW 1, p. 179.

55 CW 12, pp. 71, 88–9. 56 CW 22, pp. 245, 403. 57 CW 23, pp. 443, 510, 445.
He had conceived both of a new vision of an ideal society and a new way
of thinking about the future.
By 1834 Saint-Simonism had virtually collapsed. Mill thought that
scarcely any major French thinker at that moment was not ‘largely indebted’
to it. He continued to find appealing its proposition to divide produce not
equally, as in Owenism, but ‘on the principle that no one who does not
work either with head or hands, shall be allowed to eat’, and that each
should ‘be employed according to his capacity, and paid by a salary pro-
portioned as far as possible to his services, as is now supposed to be the
case in the army, or in a public office’. He now described the scheme of the
state ownership and management of the land and all the instruments of
production as ‘impracticable indeed’, but insisted that ‘the impracticability
is only in degree, not in kind’. Unlike other visionary projects which were
‘not only impossible, but if possible, would be bad, this plan, if it could be
realized, would be good’.58 And, indeed, thought Mill, it seemed to have
time on its side, for as civilisation advanced ‘the principle of combination
of labour’ came ‘into perpetually greater play; and associations for pur-
poses of productive industry have become practicable, and been actually
realized, on a continually enlarging scale’. If ‘the same progression indefi-
nitely continued’, then, ‘a time would come when St. Simonism would be
practicable; and if practicable, desirable’.59
Yet this proposal still suited a distant future. Mill’s editors have insisted
that no ‘anti-property’ doctrines appeared in his discussion of Wakefield’s
emigration principles at this time.60 But as early as 1832 Mill saw no
‘injustice in buying up all the land in the country, paying to the present
proprietors its fair value’, for the state was ‘at liberty to modify the general
right of property as much as it likes; to new-model it altogether, if the
public interest requires it’.61 Landed rent, he wrote a year later, referring to
the United States, was ‘a mere Godsend’ received through occupancy and
increasing with population and wealth, without exertion on the owner’s
part. It ought, thus, ‘in all new countries, to be reserved in the hands of
58 CW 23, pp. 676–8 [1834]. Following Anschutz (The Philosophy of J.S. Mill, pp. 51–2), who describes
Mill’s position as an ‘extraordinary regression to the sort of theory based on natural rights rather
than utility that had been current before the days of Hume and Bentham’, Gray characterises this
in terms of a ‘neo-Lockean’ defence of just reward (‘John Stuart Mill on the Theory of Property’,
p. 268). This position is supported in Broadbent, ‘The Importance of Class in the Political Theory
of John Stuart Mill’.
59 CW 23, pp. 677–8.
60 CW 22, p. lxxi. But the note implies this remained Mill’s view throughout the rest of his life.
61 CW 23, p. 460. On the development of Mill’s views on land see Martin, John Stuart Mill and the
Land Question.
the State, as a fund which would in time be sufficient to supersede the
necessity of taxation’.62
from ‘coleridge’ (1840) to ‘the claims of labour’ (1845)

The second period of Mill’s development of these themes was marked by
his embrace of two new sets of doctrines, the first associated with Coleridge,
the second with cooperation.
Mill began reading Coleridge in the late 1820s in search of answers to the
shortcomings of Benthamism, and by 1834 would remark that few people
had ‘exercised more influence over my thoughts and character’.63 Coleridge
vehemently criticised the ‘overbalance of the commercial spirit’ in modern
society and proposed revitalising both the Church and agriculture, with
landed property being treated as a trust held for the nation’s benefit.64
Coleridge, like Carlyle, recognised that for individuals to subsume their
own personalities in the greatness of their genuine betters could promote
hero-worship of the most life-enhancing sort. This was a type of Toryism
Mill could admire. It implied, Mill wrote John Sterling in 1831, in an
extraordinary passage, ‘a reverence for government in the abstract . . . that
it is good for man to be ruled; to submit both his body & mind to the
guidance of a higher intelligence & virtue’. It was, therefore, we recall,
‘the direct antithesis of liberalism, which is for making every man his own
guide & sovereign master, & letting him think for himself & do exactly
as he judges best for himself, giving other men leave to persuade him if
they can by evidence, but forbidding him to give way to authority’. And
Mill thought that it was ‘difficult to conceive a more thorough ignorance
of man’s nature, & of what is necessary for his happiness or what degree
of happiness & virtue he is capable of attaining than this system [i.e.
liberalism] implies’.65 The authority of virtue and higher intelligence had
a vital role to play, then, in social progress.
Mill’s appreciation of Coleridge led him to describe his differences with
the ‘philosophic Tory’ as ‘differences of matter-of-fact or detail’, while
those with other radicals and utilitarians were ‘differences of principle’.66
62 CW 23, p. 544 [1833]. For antecedents of Mill’s proposals on taxation of rent in his father’s writings,
see Winch, Wealth and Life, pp. 78–9. Some later writers thought Ricardo originated the idea (Levy,
A Symposium on the Land Question, p. 13).
63 CW 12, p. 221. The main study is Turk, Coleridge and Mill.
64 Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State, pp. 400–30.
65 CW 12, p. 84. Packe makes out Mill here to be a ‘stern authoritarian’ (The Life of John Stuart Mill,
p. 133) on the basis of this admittedly ambiguous passage.
66 CW 12, p. 81.
Coleridge like Carlyle and Burke before him, understood that the bonds
linking individuals extended far beyond, indeed might not even be chiefly
centred on, self-interest. Coleridge tried to account for and promote ‘a
principle of sympathy, not of hostility; of union, not of separation . . . a
feeling of common interest among those who live under the same govern-
ment, and are contained within the same natural or historical boundaries’.
He also upheld ‘the principle of an endowed class, for the cultivation of
learning, and for diffusing its results among the community’, an idea Mill
termed ‘one of the permanent benefits which political science owes to the
Conservative philosophers’.67 (There would later be some back-pedalling
here.) Coleridge understood that reformers had to balance principles of
permanence and progression in plotting the future, even if Mill thought he
was ‘quite wrong in considering the land to be essentially identified with
permanence & commercial wealth with progression’.68 For these might,
curiously, be reversed in some circumstances.
Coleridge’s approach to landed property remained important to Mill. He
was acquainted by then with various schemes of common landownership,
a different issue, of course, from many other sources besides Owenism.
Francis Place, amongst others, whom he knew well personally in the
1820s, sympathised with the Spencean scheme of parish land management.
Coleridge’s great service as a conservative philosopher was to revive ‘the idea
of a trust inherent in landed property’. Land, ‘the gift of nature, the source
of subsistence to all, and the foundation of everything that influences our
physical well-being’, was not property ‘in the same absolute sense in which
men are deemed proprietors of that in which no one has any interest but
themselves – that which they have actually called into existence by their
own bodily exertion’. This idea, suggested to Mill by Saint-Simonism, was
cemented by Coleridge. Landed property, once considered ‘a public func-
tion’, might now have its former duties redefined. The state, by granting
an individual ownership over more land than sufficed ‘to raise by his own
labour his subsistence and that of his family’, gave them power over the
‘most vital interests’ of others. But such power should ‘not be abused’. By
‘giving this direct power over so large a portion of the community’, indirect
power was ‘necessarily conferred over all the remaining portion’. This, too,
the state should ‘place under proper control’. Land tenure, the rights con-
nected with it, and system of cultivation it encouraged were ‘points of the
utmost importance both to the economical and to the moral well-being of
67 CW 10, pp. 135, 150–1. Coleridge’s On the Constitution of Church and State is the main text relevant
here.
68 CW 13, pp. 408–9.
the whole community’. If necessary, then, the state might ‘withdraw the
fund from its actual holders, for the better execution of its purposes’.69
We have seen how extensively Mill used this doctrine in relation to land
tenure in Ireland and India. Brought home, however, it looked dramatically
different.
Coleridge also prompted Mill’s most important early concession of the
weakness of the extreme laissez-faire model. His rejection of ‘the let alone
doctrine, or the theory that governments can do no better than to do
nothing’ Mill now conceded to be half true and half false. The true part
was that ‘that government ought not to interdict men from publishing
their opinions, pursuing their employments, or buying and selling their
goods, in whatever place or manner they deem the most advantageous’.
But government might ‘exercise a free agency of its own’, and ‘beneficially
employ its powers, its means of information, and its pecuniary resources
(so far surpassing those of any other association, or of any individual),
in promoting the public welfare by a thousand means which individuals
would never think of, would have no sufficient motives to attempt, or
no sufficient power to accomplish’. The state indeed might be considered
as ‘a great benefit society, or mutual insurance company’ for helping ‘that
large proportion of its members who cannot help themselves’. Government
might ‘do something directly, and very much indirectly, to promote even
the physical comfort of the people; and . . . if, besides making a proper use
of its own powers, it would exert itself to teach the people what is in theirs,
indigence would soon disappear from the face of the earth’.70 This, as we
have seen, formed the basis for the discussion of both authoritative and
non-authoritative intervention in the Principles.
Mill’s second turning point in this period came with his reappraisal of
cooperation in the mid 1840s. In 1834 he still insisted that cooperation
wasted so much labour, and diminished individual exertion so far, that it
would result in ‘a smaller share for each, than falls or might fall to the lot
even of the most scantily remunerated, under the present arrangements’.
In 1836, however, he commented that if cooperatives could manage ‘the
great operations of industry independently of individual capitalists, inde-
pendently of inequality of wealth and the irritating sense of contrariety of
interest, where is the good man, of whatever political opinion, who would
not hail their success?’ Even failing ‘would be an instruction to them in
political economy, worth a thousand treatises’.71 His sympathies then grew
69 CW 10, pp. 156–8, 148. See Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State, pp. 46–7.
70 CW 10, p. 156. 71 CW 6, pp. 190–1, 487.
stronger in the mid 1840s. At the moment of communitarian Owenism’s
noisy public collapse with the failure of the Queenwood experiment, con-
sumer cooperation began to revive at Rochdale in 1844. It was this limited
form of profit-sharing, rather than producer cooperation, with which Mill
was chiefly engaged at this time.72 Yet he clearly discerned affinities between
both approaches to reward and ownership, for each could be seen as vari-
ations on ‘partnership’. Though 1848 is often deemed the point at which
Mill’s sympathies towards socialism began to shift dramatically, a move-
ment in this direction is evident in his 1845 review of W. T. Thornton’s On
Labour.73 Those who deny that Mill was ‘utopian’ might take note.74 If,
Mill said, ‘on a subject on which almost every thinker has his Utopia, we
might be permitted to have ours’, he placed his chief hope ‘at some distant
date’, for ‘healing the widening breach between those who toil and those
who live on the produce of former toil’, by ‘raising the labourer from a
receiver of hire – a mere bought instrument in the work of production,
having no residuary interest in the work itself – to the position of being, in
some sort, a partner in it’. The wisdom, Mill emphasised, ‘of associating
the interest of the agent with the end he is employed to attain’, was ‘so
universally recognised in theory’, that it was ‘not chimerical to expect it
may one day be more extensively exemplified in practice’. And there would
be the added benefit of ‘making the employers the real chiefs of the people,
leading and guiding them in a work in which they also are interested – a
work of co-operation, not of mere hiring and service; and justifying, by
72 When, in a well-known description, Mill wrote in 1839 that Owenism was ‘at present in one form
or another the actual creed of a great proportion of the working classes’, he probably meant that
a paternalist form of government was expected to assist them (CW 6, p. 486), which would have
caricatured Owen’s largely anti-statist schemes, unless it meant welfare extended within small-scale
cooperative communities.
73 Some have seen this as a response to Mill’s wish to solve the problem of class conflict as such. See,
e.g., Ashcraft, ‘Class Conflict and Constitutionalism in J.S. Mill’s Thought’.
74 A lengthy open discussion on this subject took place at the most important meeting of modern
Mill scholars, at the Mill Bicentenary meeting in 2006, with the vast majority of contributors
vehemently denying that Mill could at all be termed a ‘utopian’. Packe (The Life of John Stuart
Mill, p. 302), Russell (‘John Stuart Mill’, p. 7), Donner (‘Mill’s Political Economy’, pp. 318–20),
van Holthoon (The Road to Utopia) and Kurer (John Stuart Mill, pp. 49–54, 200) disagree. Even
Robbins, surely no raving red, ascribes the concept to Mill (The Theory of Economic Policy in English
Classical Political Economy, pp. 159–60). But I am using a more circumscribed definition of the
term than these authors, to describe the pursuit of a society based upon enhanced sociability and
increasingly common resources (Searching for Utopia, pp. 11–15). Mill himself had admittedly used
the term in the more conventional sense of ‘impossible’ many years earlier, writing that in 1823 a
‘Utopian theory is one which is founded not upon our experience of mankind, but upon something
inconsistent with experience – upon the supposition that by some wondrous scheme of education
which is to be established, men may be induced to act with a view to the public interest, even when
it is inconsistent with their own’ (CW 22, p. 40). But his usage in 1845, in the sense of ‘attainable
ideal society’, was clearly quite different.
the superior capacity in which they contribute to the work, the higher
remuneration which they receive for their share of it’.75 He wrote privately
at the same time, too, that he looked ‘upon inequality as in itself always
an evil’, and did ‘not agree with any one who would use the machinery of
society for the purpose of promoting it’. ‘As much inequality as necessarily
arises from protecting all persons in the free use of their faculties of body
& mind & in the enjoyment of what these can obtain for them, must be
submitted to for the sake of a greater good’, he added, ‘but I certainly see
no necessity for artificially adding to it, while I see much for tempering it,
impressing both on the laws & on the usages of mankind as far as possible
the contrary tendency.’76 A clearer statement of his essential commitment
to much greater egalitarianism could not be hoped for.
Mill’s position in 1845 is interesting both in its general principle and inso-
far as it still provides a guiding role for employers, and indeed strengthens
the plausibility of their claims for higher salaries. Saint-Simonian and Car-
lylean echoes thus still seem present here. But the drift of Mill’s thinking
from now onwards would be towards extending cooperation among the
working classes from profit-sharing to co-ownership. The principles of
Rochdale and of the French housepainter Leclaire, loosely speaking, profit-
sharing proportionate to effort, were a stage on the road towards greater
collective economic control.77 Mill moved steadily in this direction. In the
first edition of the Principles (1848) profit-sharing broadly conceived was
mooted as a ‘futurity’ to be aimed at. By 1852 this was greatly strengthened,
and now comprised an ideal ‘association of the labourers themselves on
terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on
their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by
themselves’.78 Mill’s premise from 1845 onwards seems to have been that the
greater the workers’ share in the enterprise, the stronger would be their
incentive to make it profitable. His confidence that this would provide a
solution to a key problem of social justice now grew steadily. ‘Partnership’
thus became an increasingly extensive concept from this point onwards.
Just as with Irish peasant-proprietorship, ownership was to act as a stim-
ulus to activity, but the ownership was now joint rather than individual.
Wage-labour might eventually be abolished. So too might idleness. In 1847
75 CW 4, p. 382. Mill’s later critic, Levy, alleged that his ‘celebrated review of Thornton “On
Labour” . . . left his much over-praised “Principles of Political Economy” a wreck’ (The Outcome of
Individualism, p. 37).
76 CW 17, p. 2002.
77 Robertson suggested that Leclaire was also a probable source for Carlyle’s profit-sharing ideas in
Past and Present (Modern Humanists Revisited, pp. 31–2).
78 See Betts, ‘The Business Enterprise in mid-Victorian Thought’, 55–64, on this development.
Mill reflected that he had ceased to think that a leisured class was ‘an
essential constituent’ in the ideal society. What was essential rather was
‘that society at large should not be overworked, nor over-anxious about the
means of subsistence’, for which ‘the grand source of improvement’ was
‘repression of population, combined with laws or customs of inheritance
which shall favour the diffusion of property instead of its accumulation
in masses’.79 This, we may note, was before henpecked becomes a serious
issue, with the composition of the Principles. In fact such passages indicate
that Harriet Taylor quite rightly indicated the gap lacking here with-
out some kind of ‘Futurity’ chapter. And, once written, the chapter thus
reflected Mill’s trajectory from 1845 rather than a conclusion focussed solely
on 1848, or Taylor’s own undiluted opinions.80 There is further evidence
of this shift, too. Writing in 1846, Mill praised the French government’s
efforts to ‘encourage and favour what is voluntarily done by employers of
labour, to raise their labourers from the situation of hired servants, to that
of partners in the concern, having a pecuniary interest in the profits’. He
cited again the example of Leclaire, whose business allowed his employees a
fixed salary, and shared ‘the surplus among the whole body in rateable pro-
portion to the salaries’, with profitable results.81 The turning point in Mill’s
thought respecting both landed and state obligation, then, came between
1845–48, as the currents emanating from Coleridge, Saint-Simonism and
cooperation began to merge. The events of 1848, to which we now turn,
would then move this synthesis still further in a radical direction.
1848
Mill had nearly completed the Principles when the February revolution
erupted in Paris, and soon spread to Germany, Austro-Hungary and else-
where. He was very sympathetic to French developments, and vigorously
defended them in several newspaper articles.82 As early as the 1820s he
had upheld the progressive nature of the first French Revolution against
Sir Walter Scott and others, and denied that republicanism was inevitably
sanguinary. The moral of political convulsions, he thought, was to pro-
mote timely reform. Progress was not inevitable. Stagnation, instigated by
merely instinctive self-interest ‘without any basis of moral conviction at
all’, was worse than movement, even if Owenite and Saint-Simonian ‘anti-
property’ doctrines forced the latter on.83 Now a great moment seemed
79 CW 13, p. 713. 80 As Pappe (John Stuart Mill and the Harriet Taylor Myth, p. 36) suggests.
81 CW 20, p. 315. 82 CW 25, pp. 1091–3. 83 CW 20, pp. 118, 126.
to be dawning. For socialism, Mill wrote in November 1848, seemingly
represented ‘the greatest element of improvement in the present state of
mankind’.84
This was, indisputably, a turning point in Mill’s ideas about socialism.85
But towards what? The revolutions forced Mill to confront his ideas about
property and industrial organisation in three main ways. He needed to
rethink his own image of the future of the working classes; he needed to
juxtapose what was happening in France with this image, particularly in
relation to state activity; and he needed to engage with Harriet Taylor’s
somewhat different take on these issues.
First, as she pointed out, it was inadvisable to project a ‘utopia’ without
describing how it would be reached. The ‘Futurity’ chapter did not exist
in the first draft of the Principles; Mill later wrote that it was ‘entirely due
to her’. She had ‘pointed out the need of such a chapter and the extreme
imperfection of the book without it; she caused me to write it, and the
whole of the general part of the chapter, the statement and discussion of
the two theories respecting the proper condition of the labouring classes,
was a mere exposition of her thoughts, often in words taken down from
her lips’.86 Yet this exposition also restated Mill’s ‘utopia’ of 1845, adding
a strengthened account of ‘self-dependence’, which was attached to an
increasingly collective context. By 1852, as we have seen, Mill proposed
an ideal of labourers associated on equal terms, owning their capital col-
lectively and electing their own managers.87 This would be the image of
Mill carried forward, both positively and negatively, to many subsequent
generations.88 In the Principles Mill described the virtues of cooperatives at
length, praising their rules of discipline as ‘stricter than those of ordinary
workshops; but being rules self-imposed, for the manifest good of the com-
munity, and not for the convenience of an employer regarded as having an
opposite interest, they are far more scrupulously obeyed’. He lauded the
widely adopted mode of remuneration, by which a minimum subsistence
wage was supplemented by additions according to the work performed.
He approved managers being paid higher wages, so long as ‘the exercise of
power shall never be an occasion of profit’. And he hoped that when coop-
eration had spread sufficiently, ‘both private capitalists and associations will
84 CW 13, pp. 740–1.
85 This is given priority by, among others, Mueller (John Stuart Mill and French Thought, pp. 226–7).
86 CW 1, p. 254. 87 CW 3, p. 775.
88 The passage is quoted approvingly, for instance, by the leading New Liberal/socialist, J. A. Hobson
(Confessions of an Economic Heretic, p. 24). Wordsworth Donisthorpe later attacked Mill for not
supporting ‘the moral right of the owner of wealth to the fruits of that wealth’ (Labour Capitalization,
p. 114).
gradually find it necessary to make the entire body of labourers participants
in profits’. Eventually cooperation might ‘combine the freedom and inde-
pendence of the individual, with the moral, intellectual, and economical
advantages of aggregate production’, and thus ‘realize, at least in the indus-
trial department, the best aspirations of the democratic spirit, by putting
an end to the division of society into the industrious and the idle, and
effacing all social distinctions but those fairly earned by personal services
and exertions’. As only the worst workers would prefer any other system,
Mill hoped that gradually capitalists would see the wisdom of lending their
capital to the associations, doing this ‘at a diminishing rate of interest’, and
eventually exchanging ‘their capital for terminable annuities’. Thus capital,
‘by a kind of spontaneous process’, would ‘become in the end the joint
property of all who participate in their productive employment’. If then
female equality were added, this would produce ‘the nearest approach to
social justice, and the most beneficial ordering of industrial affairs for the
universal good, which it is possible at present to foresee’.89
Linked to this argument were Mill’s comments on the ‘Stationary State’,
a final stage of capitalist development where growth was greatly diminished
or halted.90 This was for Mill no longer, as with Ricardo, feared as an evil,91
but seen potentially as sustaining ‘a well-paid and affluent body of labour-
ers’ with ‘no enormous fortunes, except what were earned and accumulated
during a single lifetime’ (note the limitations on inheritance). A ‘much
larger body of persons than at present’ would then exist, ‘exempt from the
coarser toils’, and with sufficient leisure ‘to cultivate freely the graces of life,
and afford examples of them to the classes less favourably circumstanced for
their growth’. This state, ‘so greatly preferable to the present’, was ‘not only
perfectly compatible with the stationary state, but, it would seem, more
naturally allied with that state than with any other’. It would prove that ‘the
trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which
form the existing type of social life’, were not ‘the most desirable lot of
human kind’, but only ‘the disagreeable symptoms’ of ‘a necessary stage in
89 CW 3, pp. 780–1, 792–4. Taylor in May 1848 wrote W. J. Fox that there were two great questions of
the era, the ‘condition of women question’, and ‘labour’, which she defined as the ‘equalising among
all the individuals composing the community (varied only by variation in physical capacities) the
amount of labour to be performed by them during life’ (Jacobs, The Complete Works of Harriet
Taylor Mill, p. 392).
90 Cowling rightly assumes that ‘deliberate restriction of population growth’ is also amongst its
attributes (Mill and Liberalism, p. 17). Mill’s description of this final stage of development has
not been discussed adequately. See, however, Levy, ‘Mill’s Stationary State & the Transcendance of
Liberalism’ and Arneson, ‘Prospects for Community in a Market Society’.
91 Though Ricardo had pointed out that here wages were solely governed by population, with wealth
and resources increasing (The Works of David Ricardo, pp. 379, 474).
the progress of civilisation’. Mill wondered why anyone should be pleased
that ‘persons who are already richer than any one needs to be, should have
doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure
except as representative of wealth; or that numbers of individuals should
pass over, every year, from the middle classes into a richer class, or from
the class of the occupied rich to that of the unoccupied’. In an oft-quoted
passage, he thought it ‘questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet
made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.’ They had, he
thought, ‘enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and
imprisonment’ while others made fortunes. But they had not ‘yet begun to
effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and
in their futurity to accomplish’, a prospect only possible when ‘in addition
to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate
guidance of judicious foresight’. The ‘conquests made from the powers of
nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers’ could ‘become
the common property of the species, and the means of improving and
elevating the universal lot’.92 But only if Malthus was heeded. For here,
Mill supposed, the ‘combined influences of prudence and public opin-
ion’ might ‘in some measure’ (in 1848–49: ‘generally’) operate to restrict
numbers.93
A radical meritocratic argument thus became central to Mill’s outlook
from 1848 onwards. ‘No rational person’, he contended, could consider it
‘abstractedly just’, that a few enjoyed ‘all the external advantages which life
can give, without earning them by any merit or acquiring them by any
exertion of their own’, while ‘the immense majority are condemned from
their birth, to a life of never-ending, never-intermitting toil, requited by a
bare, and in general a precarious, subsistence.’ Some maintained that any
interference with accumulation would harm social progress, and ‘would
be a still greater injustice than that of which the levellers complain’, the
path of least injustice thus being ‘to recognise individual property and
individual rights of inheritance’.94 Mill now rejected this standpoint. If
property was not taken from individual capitalists – inheritance aside –
but cooperation could supersede the need for capitalists as such, incentives
would be maintained. Capitalists would voluntarily transfer their capital
92 CW 3, pp. 754–6. A passage in Taylor’s 1851 essay ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ reiterated these
themes: ‘With respect to the future, we neither believe that improvident multiplication, and the
consequent excessive difficulty of gaining a subsistence, will always continue, nor that the division
of mankind into capitalists and hired labourers, and the regulation of the reward of labourers mainly
by demand and supply, will be for ever, or even much longer, the rule of the world’ (CW 21, p. 404).
93 CW 3, p. 753. 94 CW 2, p. 208.
to cooperatives, ‘because we could offer them a sufficient interest for its
use; and because, once able to work for themselves, no labourers of any
worth or efficiency would labour for a master, and capitalists would have
no means of deriving an income from their capitals except by entrusting
them to the associated workpeople’. This system would ‘cut up by the
root the present partial distribution of social advantages’, and would ‘be
so vast an improvement on the present order of society’, so at least the
socialists argued, that government ‘ought to favour its introduction by every
expedient in its power; ought, in particular, to raise funds by taxation, and
contribute them in aid of the formation of industrial communities on the
co-operative principle: which funds it is not doubted that the success of the
scheme would enable, in a few years, to be paid back with interest’.95 Mill
wrote in 1849 that the new forms of association had great value in ‘healing
the widening and embittering feud between the class of labourers and the
class of capitalists’. It was impossible now to believe, he thought, ‘that the
majority of the community will for ever, or even for much longer, consent
to hew wood and draw water all their lives in the service and for the benefit
of others’.96 Socialism was ‘the modern form of the protest . . . against the
unjust distribution of social advantages’, and Mill had now accommodated
himself to its claims.97
Secondly, Mill in 1848 confronted the new French government’s
approach to the ‘organisation of labour’. Cooperation was one issue, but
the Revolution had also popularised a wide spectrum of left-wing nostrums
respecting both communitarian and statist schemes for providing employ-
ment. Mill thought much of the republican movement was ‘more or less
imbued’ with communism in particular.98 He was willing to concede that
a few thousand individuals associated on commonly owned land might
be self-supporting, and might call forth sufficient labour from every able-
bodied member of the association. Stressing that mankind were ‘capable
of a far greater amount of public spirit than the present age is accus-
tomed to suppose possible’, he conceded that history bore ‘witness to the
success with which large bodies of human beings may be trained to feel
the public interest their own’, thinking such associations might prove the
point.99
He now also, somewhat surprisingly, averred that rather than hastening
over-population communism might tend ‘in an especial degree’ to prevent
it. New mouths to feed would tax all, and either opinion or ‘penalties of
95 CW 20, pp. 351–2. 96 CW 3, p. 1013. 97 CW 20, p. 351.

98 CW 13, p. 732 [1848]. 99
CW 2, pp. 203, 205.
some description’ would curtail ‘this or any other culpable self-indulgence
at the expense of the community’.100 Some forms of communism, how-
ever, were less risky than others. Fourierism in particular, Mill said, did
‘no violence to any of the general laws by which human action, even in
the present imperfect state of moral and intellectual cultivation’ (perhaps
because it was not really communist at all, only communitarian).101 But
Mill did still maintain – making the same objection here that he had pre-
viously made respecting Bentham – that Fourier had neglected to promote
‘a moral sense – a feeling of duty, or conscience, or principle, or whatever
name one gives it – a feeling that one ought to do, & to wish for, what
is for the greatest good of all concerned’, seemingly relying instead upon
‘the spontaneous action of the passions’.102 Without this, he made clear at
a number of points, no movement forward was possible for the working
classes, particularly in Britain, where any ‘large idea or generous sentiment’
respecting the public good seemed less likely to develop than in France,
Germany or Italy.103 This sentiment of moral communism, then, had in
many respects to precede any more substantive transformation of industrial
relations. If it failed to materialise, no amount of mere self-interest would
ultimately breach the distance between owners and employees. Coopera-
tion was precisely supposed to be such a school of sociability and it might
teach other lessons besides. (But who would teach the teachers?)
Mill had other reservations, too, about competing schemes. Some com-
munists he felt were particularly wedded to the illusion that success required
‘sagacity, industry, honesty, and truth’ alone, without ‘the vulgar incentives
of private interest’.104 He worried, too, in 1848, that in communities ‘the
yoke of conformity’ would become ‘heavier instead of lighter; that people
would be compelled to live as it pleased others, not as it pleased themselves;
that their lives would be placed under rules, the same for all, prescribed by
the majority; and that there would be no escape, no independence of action
left to any one, since all must be members of one or another community’.
The ‘restraints of Communism’ might admittedly be ‘freedom in compar-
ison with the present condition of the majority of the human race’. But
the problem remained ‘whether there would be any asylum left for indi-
viduality of character; whether public opinion would not be a tyrannical
yoke; whether the absolute dependence of each on all, and surveillance of
100 CW 2, pp. 204–6.

101 CW 2, p. 213; CW 3, p. 1028. Fourier had proposed a division of produce in a ratio of four-twelfths
to capital, five-twelfths to labour, and three-twelfths to talent, though one person could possess
more than one claim within these categories.
102 CW 3, p. 1031. 103 CW 14, p. 95. 104 CW 25, p. 1145.
each by all, would not grind all down into a tame uniformity of thoughts,
feelings, and actions’.105 The greater social unity communities promised
might well be outweighed by their threat to individuality.106 Mill hoped,
consequently, that freedom from want ‘might be ensured to all who are
born, without obliging them to merge their separate as well as their work-
ing existence in a community’.107 This would seem to put paid to the idea
that any kind of ‘village’ scheme formed part of his ultimate ideal: even
given the Malthusian benefits, this model of enforced sociability was too
risky. Mill was not by nature a cheek by jowl man. After suffering years
of ostracism he had become somewhat paranoid and sociophobic. He had
not, accordingly, become more of a man to feel at home in the crowd, or
to sympathise with its moral tendencies. Something between the Greek
polis and the Fourierist phalanx, rather, seems closer to what he had in
mind.
Nor was Mill willing to juxtapose an ideal socialism to a flawed capi-
talism. If laws could be introduced favouring the diffusion rather than the
concentration of wealth, the principle of individual property, he claimed,
‘would have been found to have no necessary connexion with the physical
and social evils which almost all Socialist writers assume to be inseparable
from it’.108 In other words, if Mill’s radical doctrine of inheritance was
adopted, individual accumulation of property in one’s life would continue
to fuel economic progress, but much greater social equality would prevail.
The capitalist, to paraphrase a current euphemism, might well have to
endure a haircut to enter Mill’s utopia, but he would not suffer the shaven
head favoured by Marx’s barbers, much less the decapitation practised by
some of Marx’s followers.109 Mill concluded, however, it was too early to
determine which system would predominate, and that the final decision
would probably hinge on which promoted ‘the greatest amount of human
liberty and spontaneity’.110
Mill did not, in 1849, think in any case that French cooperative schemes
were likely to succeed ‘in the present state of education’. For it was not
feasible yet to imagine a ‘world governed by public spirit, without needing
105 CW 2, pp. 208–9. The first part of this passage was approvingly cited by later socialists, e.g., Joynes,
The Socialist Catechism, p. 11.
106 The sole exception here about which Mill had some knowledge was probably Josiah Warren’s
community at Modern Times, New York, which was organised on radical individualist or anarchist
lines. Mill acknowledged its existence in the Autobiography, but does not appear to have been much
acquainted with the details of its operations.
107 CW 25, p. 1180 [1850]. 108 CW 2, p. 208.
109 Unlike Marx, of course, time was not of the essence to Mill: he wanted the optimum outcome,
and was not driven by a theory of crisis which necessarily dictated a tight timetable.
110 CW 2, p. 208.
the vulgar incentives of individual interest’. Accordingly he urged philoso-
phers and politicians to ‘use their utmost endeavours for bringing about the
same end by an adaptation of the existing machinery of society’. Equality,
he said, agreeing with Bentham, ‘though not the sole end’, was ‘one of
the ends of good social arrangements’. A system of institutions which did
‘not make the scale turn in favour of equality, whenever this can be done
without impairing the security of the property which is the product and
reward of personal exertion’, was thus ‘essentially a bad government – a
government for the few, to the injury of the many’.111
Mill was not, then, a self-declared ‘socialist’. Yet he had come some
distance down the path of translating socialist objectives into more realistic
forms. Equality was an admirable goal, cooperation an admissible means
when still wedded to competition. The end was accepted: maximising
both the reward for ‘personal exertion’ and liberty, and ending injustice of
distribution. The means certainly included considerable interference both
with inherited wealth and landed property. And Mill thought that the
great advantage of the socialist movement was the pressure it would exert
in ensuring that one or another means would produce the right end; this
seems to be the thrust of his remark to Harriet in March 1849 that ‘progress
of the right kind seems to me quite safe now that Socialism has become
inextinguishable’.112
But how far was the state to provide the means or define the ends? Two
aspects of the French government’s proceedings particularly interested Mill:
its role in organising labour and the proclamation of the right to work.113 He
broadly welcomed the first, terming this the most favourable opportunity
for such efforts and lamenting that they had not been attempted in Britain’s
colonies.114 Experiments in regulating industry would prove what needed
to be abandoned or limited.115 It seemed, he wrote in 1849, a ‘perfectly
just demand, in the present circumstances of France, that the government
should aid with its funds, to a reasonable extent, in bringing into operation
industrial communities on the Socialist principle’. Even if these inevitably
failed, the workers needed to see that ‘everything possible has been done
to make the trial successful’.116 Mill even wrote, indeed, that he would ‘be
glad to see Leclaire’s system generally adopted, and should not object to it
being made compulsory by law if I thought such a law could be executed’.
To effect this, however, Mill thought, the state would have to fix not only
111 CW 20, p. 354 [1849]. 112 CW 14, p. 21.
113 Some have seen Mill as explicitly supporting this second principle (e.g. Urbinati, ‘An Alternative
Modernity’, p. 252).
114 CW 25, pp. 1146–7. 115 CW 13, p. 734 [1848]. 116 CW 20, pp. 351–2.
the interest on capital, but labourers’ wages and supervisors’ salaries, and
so on. If it went this far, he continued, ‘it would be better in many respects,
& probably not worse in any, that the state should take all the capital of
the country, paying interest for it, & become itself the sole employer of
labour, which would be communism’.117 But we have noted his scepticism
on this point, and the assertion seems self-defeating.
The question of the right to labour raised a quite different set of issues.
The Provisional Government had proposed the most important extension
of rights doctrines into economic affairs in this period in taking up the
droit au travail, or ‘an obligation on society to find work and wages for
all persons willing and able to work, who cannot procure employment
for themselves’.118 Mill admitted the fundamental justice of the premises
that ‘the earth belongs, first, to all, to the inhabitants of it; that every
person alive ought to have a subsistence, before any one has more; that
whosoever works at any useful thing, ought to be properly fed and clothed
before any one able to work is allowed to receive the bread of idleness’. All
people had ‘a moral claim to a place at the table provided by the collective
exertions of the race’. But none had ‘a right to invite additional strangers
thither without the consent of the rest’.119 If they did, Mill said, ‘what is
consumed by these strangers should be subtracted from their own share.
There is enough and to spare for all who are born; but there is not and
cannot be enough for all who might be born’. The right to work, then,
Mill described in his ‘Vindication of the French Revolution of February
1848’ (1849) as ‘the Poor-law of Elizabeth, and nothing more’. Indeed it
was rather less, for while on ‘the English parochial system, the law gives to
every pauper a right to demand work, or support without work, for himself
individually’, the French government ‘contemplated action on the general
labour market, not alms to the individual. Its scheme was, that when there
was notoriously a deficiency of employment, the State should disburse
sufficient funds to create the amount of productive employment which
was wanting. But it gave no pledge that the State should find work for A or
B.’ Individuals would still have to find employment for themselves. There
was thus ‘incomparably less injurious influence’ from this intervention in
favour of the labourers collectively, than from the parish’s mandate ‘to find
employment individually for every able-bodied man who has not honesty
or activity to seek and find it for himself’.120
117 CW 14, p. 54. 118 CW 20, p. 348. See my ‘Socialism and the Language of Rights’.
119 CW 20, p. 349. This paraphrases Malthus’s famous passage about ‘Nature’s mighty feast’ in the
2nd edn of the Essay on Population.
120 CW 20, pp. 348–50.
Yet just as the Poor Law ideally intended to restrain population, the ‘droit
au travail ’ too would succeed only if ‘some new restraint were placed upon
the capacity of increase, equivalent to that which would be taken away’.121
All living persons could ‘guarantee to each other, through their organ the
State, the ability to earn by labour an adequate subsistence’. But then they
would have to ‘abdicate the right of propagating the species at their own
discretion and without limit’. But this proposal to guarantee maintenance
in exchange for population control, Mill was aware, dramatically surpassed
the mental horizons of most of his readers. It would appear ‘visionary’,
indeed, until ‘almost complete renovation’ occurred respecting ‘one of the
most important and responsible of moral acts, that of giving existence to
human beings’, about which currently existed hardly any sense of moral
obligation, or of the rectitude of interfering with individual behaviour.
But this ‘superstition’, Mill concluded, would ‘one day be regarded with as
much contempt, as any of the idiotic notions and practices of savages’.122
We recall the thrust of Mill’s letter to Edwin Chadwick, cited earlier, which
dates from this period: the population question was likely to be taken ‘under
a more direct controul than is consistent with present ideas’. This, we will
see, would have striking implications for Mill’s discussion of the family in
On Liberty.123 Here, as Hollander concludes, Mill did see providing full
employment as contingent on population control. But still, whatever he
thought privately, Mill did not overtly propose this exchange as such.124
We must at this point revisit the henpecked allegation. Mill acknowl-
edged that Harriet Taylor’s influence on the Principles had lent it that ‘gen-
eral tone’ which distinguished it ‘from all previous expositions of Political
Economy that had any pretension to being scientific’, namely in making
‘the proper distinction between the laws of the Production of Wealth,
which are real laws of nature, dependent on the properties of objects, and
the modes of its Distribution, which, subject to certain conditions, depend
on human will’.125 ‘What was abstract and purely scientific was generally
mine’, he added, while ‘the properly human element came from her: in all
that related to the application of philosophy to the exigencies of human
121 CW 20, pp. 349–50. Louis Blanc rejected this objection, seeing the check on over-population as
lying ‘in the good sense and the foresight of each father of a family in good circumstances, who
takes great care not to give existence to more children than his means allow him to support, and to
put into a condition, when grown up, to support themselves’ (1848. Historical Revelations, p. 87).
122 CW 20, p. 350.
123 For later support for this formulation (by Drysdale), see, e.g., The National Reformer (10 Sept.
1864), 406.
124 Hollander, The Economics of John Stuart Mill (vol. 2), p. 747.
125 CW 1, p. 255. Harriet Taylor’s influence here is generally played down by Alan Ryan (J.S. Mill,
pp. 183–4).
society and progress, I was her pupil, and that, too, equally in the boldly
speculative and in the cautiously practical.’ In particular, he emphasised,
those parts of the Principles and other works which anticipated ‘changes
in the present opinions on the limits of the right of property and which
contemplate possibilities, as to the springs of human action in economical
matters, which had only been affirmed by Socialists and in general fiercely
denied by political economists; all this, but for her, would either have
been absent from my writings or would have been suggested much more
timidly and in a more qualified form’. Lessons originally learned from
Saint-Simonism particularly, now became ‘a living principle pervading and
animating the book by my wife’s promptings’.126
Yet Mill’s acceptance of these changes did not all come easily.127 For
the third key consequence of the revolution was to provoke a modest
confrontation between Mill and Taylor, who became his wife in 1851.
Between 1848 and 1852, but particularly for the third edition (1852) of
the Principles, Mill revised his opinions about socialism steadily, largely,
in his own little community of two, under Harriet’s watchful eye. Just
how ‘socialist’ he was by 1852, and how much this resulted from her
interventions, have as we have seen been highly controversial. Mill’s editors
assert that the ‘general tone in 1852 is more favourable to socialism, but
the change is less dramatic than might be thought. In both early and
late versions the emphasis is on liberty.’128 Both Fourierism and Saint-
Simonism, in particular, were more extensively discussed by 1852. But Mill
clearly remained convinced that substantial achievements might result if
capitalism were modified to produce greater equality. (Whether the result
should still be called capitalism remains to be seen.) In 1852 Mill wrote that
the only objection remaining to ‘Socialism, regarded as an ultimate result
of human progress’ was ‘the unprepared state of mankind in general, and
of the labouring classes in particular; their extreme unfitness at present for
any order of things, which would make any considerable demand on either
their intellect or their virtue’. He still insisted that ‘the great end of social
126 CW 1, pp. 256–7.
127 On their progression to the end of Mill’s life see in particular Schwartz, The New Political Economy
of J.S. Mill, pp. 165–92.
128 CW 2, p. lxxiv. They add: ‘An interesting change in 1849 is the deletion of one long and one short
passage emphasizing the comparative advantages of a competitive economy. In 1852 the account of
Fourierism which was added in 1849 as §5 was combined with the account of St. Simonism in §4,
and a long introductory paragraph was added to point out more clearly the differences between St.
Simonism and Fourierism on the one hand, and strict and theoretical Communism on the other.
Also in 1852 Mill deleted his recommendation of St. Simonism as a probable stimulant to social
diversity. Finally, the concluding paragraph of §4 (the last section) in 1852 replaced the end of §5
in the version of 1849, and all of §6 in the versions of 1848 and 1849.’
improvement should be to fit mankind by cultivation, for a state of society
combining the greatest personal freedom with that just distribution of the
fruits of labour, which the present laws of property do not profess to aim
at’. But he was equally firm that those ‘of the present are not competent
to decide’ whether, ultimately, ‘individual property in some form (though
a form very remote from the present)’ or ‘community of ownership in the
instruments of production and a regulated division of the produce’, would
‘afford the circumstances most favourable to happiness, and best calculated
to bring human nature to its greatest perfection’.129
These equivocal conclusions were the outcome of nearly four years’
intensive discussion and correspondence. We know from what remains of
the latter, at least, that Mill thought that Harriet tended to ‘greatly overrate
the ease of making people unselfish’. He resisted her suggestion that in
ten years children in a new community might become ‘perfect’, and the
proposal that ‘if there were a desire on the part of the cleverer people to
make them perfect it would be easy’, asking again the recurrent question,
‘how to produce that desire in the cleverer people?’ Even with ‘absolute
power tomorrow’, and a people much improved by good laws and ‘a very
much better education than they have ever had’ yet, still, thought Mill,
‘for effecting in our lives anything like what we aim at, all our plans would
fail from the impossibility of finding fit instruments. To make people
really good for much it is so necessary not merely to give them good
intentions & conscientiousness but to unseal their eyes – to prevent self
flattery, vanity, irritability & all that family of vices from warping their
moral judgments as those of the very cleverest people are almost always
warped now.’130 Mill hoped cooperative association would promote a sense
of the public good more gradually, in a manner, he suggested, akin to that
of the small commonwealths of the ancient world, and which would then
counteract the ‘deep rooted selfishness which forms the general character of
the existing state of society’.131 Mill greatly feared the intransigence of what
he termed ‘the very worst point in our national character, the disposition to
sacrifice every thing to accumulation’, and what he elsewhere called ‘pure
individualism, entire want of care for others’.132 But, writing in 1852, he
insisted that cooperation could only ‘succeed with people who can labour
for the community of which they are a part with the same energy and
zeal as if labouring for their own private and separate interest’, and who
129 CW 2, p. xciii [1852]. 130 CW 3, p. 1020. 131 CW 1, pp. 240–1.

132 CW 2, p. 164; CW 12, p. 31. This underscores again his acceptance of the negative, Tocquevillian
sense of the word, by contrast to ‘individuality’ (but not ‘miserable’ individuality).
were ‘willing to submit to any privation until they have effected their
emancipation’.133
Mill’s chief objection to socialism, then, rested upon ‘the unprepared
state of the labouring classes & their extreme moral unfitness at present for
the rights which Socialism would confer & the duties it would impose’.134
In order to succeed, socialism required a ‘generous feeling for the public
good, or a disinterested devotion to an idea, not by the mere desire of more
pay & less work’, sentiments Mill thought more likely to emanate from
the French, Italians or Germans than the English, who were ‘so ignorant
too as to pride themselves on their defect as if it were a virtue, & give it
complimentary names, such as good sense, sobriety, practicalness, which
are common synonyms for selfishness, short-sightedness, & contented
acquiescence in commonplace’. And yet even in the first edition of the
Principles, he emphasised to a correspondent, he had not regarded such
objections as ‘final & conclusive’, adding that ‘I think them of very little
weight so far as regards the ultimate prospects of humanity’.135
The question here as to what exactly was Mill’s and what Taylor’s, view,
produces the first of many ‘two Mills’ hypotheses.136 In the Autobiography
Mill stressed that the change of tone from ‘on the whole that of oppo-
sition’ to one of ‘a decidedly socialistic tendency’ resulted from studying
and discussing continental socialist writings.137 The extant correspondence
indicates that Harriet’s role in this alteration was considerable. Her objec-
tions focussed upon Mill’s assertion that little incentive to labour would
exist in a socialist community.138 Mill remained sceptical, however, insist-
ing (probably with a tone of suppressed irritation) that Harriet’s proposed
changes left ‘nothing to be said against communism at all. One would have
to turn round and advocate it’. Other, lesser objections, as Hayek puts it,
‘fell under Harriet’s axe’, with Mill justifying the alterations as ‘probably
only the progress we have been always making, and by thinking sufficiently
I should probably come to think the same (as you) – as is almost always the
case, I believe always, when we think long enough’. He still maintained,
133 CW 14, p. 81. Mill deleted a passage of the 1848–49 editions which stated that it ‘was in vain
to inculcate feelings of brotherhood among mankind by moral influences alone, unless a sense
of community of interest could also be established; and that sense we owe to commerce’ (CW 3,
p. 594). Trade unionism, too, might perform the ‘educational office’ of ‘a wholesome subordination
of the individual to the general’, for merely combining ‘for some common object, causes people to
take pride and pleasure in that object, whatever it be, and renders them ready to make sacrifices
for its furtherance’ (CW 5, p. 667).
134 CW 14, p. 85 [1852]. 135 CW 14, pp. 95, 87.
136 E.g., Levy, Short Studies in Economic Subjects, p. 37. 137 CW 1, p. 240.
138 See the passage reprinted in CW 3, p. 980, and Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor,
pp. 103–4, 133–4, for discussion of the relevant correspondence.
however, ‘that the objections as now stated to communism are valid’, but
added that ‘if you do not think so, I certainly will not print it, even if
there were no other reason than the certainty I feel that I never should
long continue of an opinion different from yours on a subject which you
have fully considered’.139 In the final version, then, Mill wrote that under
communism ‘there would be an end to all anxiety concerning the means of
subsistence; and this would be much gained for human happiness’, upon
which judgement Hayek concluded, with a manifest air of disgust: ‘It was
this version dictated to Mill by Harriet that ran through nearly a hundred
reprints and made history.’140
Harriet’s impact upon Mill’s ideas in these years, then, remains indis-
putable. But we should note three features of this influence which have
often gone unremarked. First, Hayek (and others) have ignored the fact
that she probably shaped Mill’s theory of autonomy as much as his views
on socialism. Her influence was greatest upon what all acknowledge to
be the least socialistic of his major works, On Liberty. Mill recalled in
the Autobiography that there had been ‘a moment in my mental progress
when I might easily have fallen into a tendency towards over-government,
both social and political; as there was also a moment when, by reaction
from a contrary excess, I might have become a less thorough radical and
democrat than I am’. In both cases she had ‘benefitted me as much by
keeping me right where I was right, as by leading me to new truths and
ridding me of errors . . . but for her steadying influence, have seduced me
into modifying my early opinions too much’.141 Like 1832, 1848 was such a
moment, and this passage implies that Mill might have gone much further
away from Benthamism were it not for Harriet’s ‘steadying influence’. Sec-
ondly, the modifications occurring between 1848–52 in Mill’s own account
owed much to the circumstances of the times. But Mill had, in any case,
reached several turning points without Harriet’s obvious intervention: the
concession of much of the Saint-Simonian case against inherited private
property; the acknowledgement of the rectitude of treating landed prop-
erty as conditional; and the appreciation of cooperation as the best means
of achieving a rapprochement between employers and employees. Thirdly,
and perhaps most crucially, Harriet never dissuaded Mill from his insis-
tence upon retaining competition even under cooperative arrangements.
Socialists, he argued, tended to ‘forget that wherever competition is not,
monopoly is; and that monopoly, in all its forms, is the taxation of the
139 CW 3, p. 1028.
140 Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, p. 104. 141 CW 1, p. 259.
industrious for the support of indolence, if not of plunder. They forget,
too, that with the exception of competition among labourers, all other
competition is for the benefit of the labourers, by cheapening the articles
they consume’.142 Mill was willing to concede that the moral objection
to competition, ‘arming one human being against another, making the
good of each depend upon evil to others, making all who have anything
to gain or lose, live as in the midst of enemies, by no means deserves the
disdain with which it is treated by some of the adversaries of socialism’.
Avoiding this, by sale at cost price, he thought was ‘somewhat underval-
ued’ by socialists, but he nonetheless added (in 1850) that ‘the difficulty
cannot be insurmountable’.143 Nonetheless if we consider Mill’s comments
about ‘self-dependence’ as germane here, any shift towards socialism as
such seems less extreme than might otherwise be assumed. And the last
shift towards greater equality – a final redefinition of just inheritance – had
yet to come.
land, cooperation and the ‘chapters on socialism’, 1852–73

During the last twenty years of his life the development of Mill’s social
radicalism focussed on three main themes: cooperation; the land; and
assessing the emerging revolutionary socialism of the mid 1860s. By the
mid 1850s most of the French cooperative schemes which interested him
had collapsed, and his interest reverted to Britain. British cooperation,
now rebranded by writers like George Jacob Holyoake (philosophically, as
‘rationalism’ or ‘secularism’) to give greater stress to working-class inde-
pendence of thought,144 thus became Mill’s chief focus. Of all the means
of improving the working classes in physical condition, social dignity and
‘those moral and intellectual qualities on which both the others are ulti-
mately dependent’, he wrote in 1863, none was ‘so promising as the present
Co-operative movement’.145 He gave financial support to it, aiding Henry
Pittman’s paper, the Co-operator, which ran at a loss.146 The Rochdale
experiment in particular he regarded as ‘really glorious’,147 and Mill added
details on it to new editions of the Principles.148 Rochdale proved, he wrote
a correspondent, that ‘with honest & intelligent management, coopera-
tive establishments can under-sell individual dealers’. If this experience
then taught ‘the working classes the value of honesty & intelligence to
142 CW 3, p. 794. 143 CW 5, p. 441. 144 Holyoake, John Stuart Mill, pp. 9–10.
145 CW 15, p. 832. 146 Mercer, John Stuart Mill and Co-operation, p. 6.
147 CW 15, p. 569. 148 CW 15, p. 778 [1862].
themselves’, it would ‘work as great a moral revolution in society as it will,
in that case, a physical’.149
The probable short-term benefits of the movement, he thought, would
assume five forms. First, large scale cooperation would ‘establish a practical
minimum of wages’, and would ‘strike at the root of the opposition of
apparent interest between employers and labourers, since whatever profit
the capitalist can obtain in the face of cooperation, must be a mere equiv-
alent for the advantage the enterprise derives from his capital, skill, and
unity of management’.150 Secondly, cooperation would forge an identity of
interest between capitalists and labourers. It was, indeed, the only means of
preventing the existing division from ‘increasing in importance, & gradu-
ally swallowing up all others’. This would, Mill insisted, continue until ‘the
growth of Cooperation practically merges both classes into one’, adding
that ‘if either of the two powers is strong enough to prevail without the
help of an enlightened minority of the opposite class, it seems to me
contrary to all experience of human nature to suppose that it will not
abuse its power’.151 Thirdly, cooperation if successful might prove ‘the true
euthanasia of Trades’ Unionism, while it would train and prepare at least
the superior portion of the working classes for a form of co-operation
still more equal and complete’.152 Fourthly, cooperation would reduce ‘the
enormous number of mere distributors who are not producers that really
eat up the produce of labour, much more than the mere profits of Capital’,
whose numbers, Mill thought ‘might be as well and better performed by a
tenth part of their number’ – an old and important socialist argument.153
Shopkeepers might compete by providing ‘goods as pure, as unadulterated,
as honestly measured, and of as good quality as the co-operative stores’,
but otherwise ‘they must suffer a little for a time in order to further the
general well-being in the end’.154 Fifthly, though he rarely mentioned the
issue, Mill also felt (as he wrote privately in 1862) that if cooperation
were universal the desirability of ‘regulating population would be palpable
to every one’, adding that ‘even a partial application contains important
lessons of the same kind’. During this period, then, Mill retained his com-
mitment to what he termed in 1861 ‘the only right organization of labour,
the association of the workpeople with the employers by a participation
of profits’.155 This particular formulation still ambiguously covered various
forms of cooperation. By the third edition of the Principles, however, Mill
149 CW 15, p. 546. 150 CW 15, p. 859. 151 CW 16, p. 1103 [1865].
152 CW 5, p. 666 [1869]. 153 CW 15, p. 864 [1863].
154 CW 28, p. 354 [1868]. 155 CW 15, pp. 813, 735.
had committed himself to the view that mere profit-sharing would be sup-
planted by industrial partnership, with collective ownership of capital and
democratically elected managers in the workplace.156 There is no evidence
that he retreated from this position.
Throughout the 1860s, in fact, Mill stressed that he was not interested in
a watered-down version of consumer cooperation. It was, he said in an 1864
speech, ‘not co-operation between a few persons to join for the purpose of
making a profit from cheap purchases, by which one, two, or more might
benefit. Co-operation is where the whole of the produce is divided.’ Nor
did he downplay the difficulties to be faced. It was ‘only when the entire
working class shall be as much improved as the best portion of them now
are that our hopes will be realised, and the whole mass of the people will
practically adopt co-operation’. But ‘in proportion as the lower grades rise
to the level of the higher classes’, Mill argued, ‘the owners of property will
be ashamed to be the only persons who do not take their share in the useful
work of the world, and will be willing to invest their capital in co-operative
societies, receiving a fair interest for its use. This is the millennium towards
which we should strive.’157 The danger always remained, however, that
cooperatives would degenerate ‘into close joint stock companies in which
the workmen who founded them keep all the profits to themselves’, which
might be avoided through increasing co-ownership.158
Mill’s second major area of interest during the 1860s and early 1870s was
the land. His views on the issue had not changed much since the early
1840s, though he was now prepared to contemplate cooperative farming.159
The Principles, echoing a theme later taken up by Harrison, Spencer,
Green, Hobhouse and others, had declared that the land was ‘the original
inheritance of the whole species’, and that its appropriation was ‘wholly a
question of general expediency’. Where property in land was ‘not expedient’
it was simply ‘unjust’. Appropriation could only be justified, after the
Lockean fashion, by the mixing of labour with earth: as Alan Ryan has
insisted, property rights were not a corollary of a right to liberty.160 They
derived, instead, principally from labour, and secondarily from expediency.
Property in land was ‘only valid, in so far as the proprietor of land is its
improver’. Unlike moveable goods, where no quantity ‘which a person
can acquire by his labour, prevents others from acquiring the like by the
same means . . . from the very nature of the case, whoever owns land,
156 CW 3, p. 775. 157 CW 28, pp. 6–9 [1864]. 158 CW 17, p. 1671 [1869].
159 CW 16, p. 1275 [1867]. See generally Hollander, The Economics of John Stuart Mill (vol. 2), pp. 833–55.
160 Ryan, Property and Political Theory, p. 144.
keeps others out of the enjoyment of it’.161 This meant, Mill thought,
that legislation could compel landowners ‘to allow to others all such use
as is not incompatible with the purposes for which he is permitted to
exercise dominion over it’. Land, if the public interest required, could ‘be
taken by the legislature, on payment of compensation’.162 The ‘unearned
increment’ – the famous phrase first appearing in 1873, which some thought
a ‘direct deduction from Ricardo’s theory of rent’163 – belonged to the
public.164 In some accounts this ‘extraordinary piece of illogical confusion’
places Mill squarely with the socialists of the period.165 Indeed, Mill’s most
active individualist critic, Joseph Hiam Levy, asserted that once he had
claimed that the government could interfere with distribution, but not
production, it required only one more step ‘for Mill to take in order to
arrive at the Socialistic goal, and he took it’. If distribution rested ‘on
the laws and customs of society’, the state could undertake it. Moreover,
insisted Levy, Mill had inconsistently alleged that nothing was ‘implied in
property but the right of each to his (or her) own faculties, to what he can
produce by them, and to whatever he can get for them in a fair market;
together with his right to give this to any other person if he chooses, and
the right of that other to receive and enjoy it’. This also had dramatic
implications for state interference. If property rights were instead seen
as ‘the outcome of the rights of person’, every inroad thereon violated
personal rights, and was ‘essentially inconsistent with that sovereignty of
the individual over himself which is the most sacred and fundamental of
human rights’.166 Mill the socialist had been confronted with Mill the
individualist and found wanting.
161 CW 2, pp. 227–32.

162 CW 5, p. 451 [1851]. But the requirement of full compensation makes Mill’s views much less radical
than they may appear, to some commentators (e.g. Martin, John Stuart Mill and the Land Question,
p. 28).
163 Courtney, Life of John Stuart Mill, p. 99. It has been claimed that the doctrine was introduced
as early as 1870, at the founding of the Radical Club, by Dilke (Tuckwell, The Life of the Right
Hon. Sir Charles Dilke, vol. 1, p. 100). Bain claimed that Mill ‘started the heresy of the unearned
increment’ (John Stuart Mill, p. 132). Some contemporaries insisted that the concept could only
apply to land, not, for instance, appreciations in value in works of art, which labour had originally
produced (Hyder, The Case for Land Nationalisation, p. 122). Others, however, used it in reference
to stock-market shares (Fawcett, State Socialism and the Nationalisation of the Land, p. 10), and
still others thought socialists took it to mean anything that had ‘not been created by the labour of
the person who enjoys it’ (Millar, Socialism. Its Fallacies and Dangers, p. 34). Sidney Webb claimed
that it was this principle in Mill’s writings which ‘gradually prepared the public mind for socialist
proposals’ (Socialism in England, p. 17).
164 CW 29, p. 425. This set Henry George’s famous schemes in motion. For subsequent discussion,
see, e.g., Cox, Land Nationalization, pp. 125–6.
165 Donisthorpe, Individualism, p. 105; Beer, A History of British Socialism (vol. 2), p. 238. Beer fails,
however, to take up Mill’s views on inheritance.
166 Levy, The Outcome of Individualism, p. 20; CW 2, p. 218.
Mill himself modestly noted that compared with Coleridge’s idea of land
as a public trust his own schemes were ‘the merest milk and water’.167 As he
developed these ideas in the 1860s, however, it was clear that they contained
revolutionary implications. In 1863, during an insurrection in Poland, he
agreed that once landowners were fairly compensated, the peasantry would
gain the same ‘great benefit’ the French peasantry had achieved after 1789,
which had been ‘an ample return for the sacrifice of a whole generation’.168
In 1866 Mill insisted that tenants in general had a right to ‘a full equivalent
for the additional value which either by his labour or his expenditure he
has given to the land’,169 and anyone who improved land acquired ‘thereby
an indefeasible right to prevent any one else from improving it for the
whole remainder of eternity’.170 He wrote in relation to Comte that ‘no
class of landlords living at ease on their rents’, but every landlord becoming
‘a capitalist trained to agriculture, himself superintending and directing the
cultivation of his estate’ was his own ideal.171 The working classes seemed
to be moving towards a similar view; later in the decade, Mill noted a
‘rapidly growing conviction’ amongst them that the land ‘should belong
to the State’, adding that the prospect ‘always seemed to me fundamentally
just’.172 Writing in 1868, Mill stated: ‘I often think that it would be much
better if a new country retained all its lands as state property, giving,
as we do in India, leases renewable for ever at rents guaranteed against
any augmentation except by a general measure . . . According to my own
notions, absolute property in land, even when owned by the cultivators,
is a prejudice and an abuse.’ But he worried that Americans might not
accept land on such terms.173 And when a new land reform association was
mooted in 1869, he thought Britain not ready for taking ‘possession of all
the land & managing it by the State’, and feared any such attempt invited
‘a perfectly intolerable amount of jobbing’. He contemplated various more
modest scenarios, including state purchase of land ‘to give a fair trial to
small holdings & to cooperative agriculture’ and, without public bodies
holding lands, state management of landed property, which, he added,
was ‘a great part of its business in India’. He reiterated in 1870, too,
that he did not regard the private appropriation of land as a ‘permanent
institution’.174
When the programme of the Land Tenure Reform Association was pub-
lished in 1871, Mill as chairman provided its introductory statement.175
167 CW 28, p. 82 [1866]. 168 CW 25, p. 1203. 169 CW 16, p. 1135 [1866].
170 CW 28, p. 81 [1866]. 171 CW 10, p. 347 [1865]. 172 CW 16, p. 1442 [1868].
173 CW 16, p. 1407. 174 CW 17, pp. 1644, 1749, 1740.
175 CW 5, pp. 687–95. There were about 30,000 landowners in England at this time, with 8,000 people
owning half the land, and 600 owning more than 20 per cent.
Much of his analysis of both India and Ireland appeared here, now applied
to England. It represented what Charles Dilke called an ‘extreme Rad-
ical’ viewpoint, with the land movement indeed being ‘socialistic in its
aims’.176 Heartened by the 1867 Reform Act, Mill now emphasised that the
past acquisitions of landowners were not proposed to be disturbed, only
the profits arising from them, which were to be measured periodically,
and their ‘unearned’ component taxed.177 No further public lands were
to become private. Endowments, educational and otherwise, were also to
be placed at the disposal of the state, including land in cities, particu-
larly London, which might, Mill suggested, be used to promote sanitary
works, improved housing, public dwellings, and cooperative buildings and
agriculture.178 The Association did not aim, then, Mill stressed, to expro-
priate landed property, but to reform it, leaving proprietors to enjoy their
improvements, but appropriating rental increases deriving from ‘the general
growth of society’.179 Mill termed this ‘a middle ground of compromise,
which, avoiding individual injustice, and sparing past acquisitions, shall
maintain the right of the entire community to all that it has not yet parted
with, and finally close the door to any further private appropriation of
what should belong to the public’.180 Unappropriated lands – perhaps 20
per cent of the total – Mill thought should ‘by no means be allowed to pass
into private ownership but should be sacred to public purposes, and made
a means of trying all promising modes of collective management’. This
would permit ‘testing the practicability and the effects of these modes, and
the capabilities of collective management in general . . . without meddling
at all with private property in land, until the advantage of doing so has
been completely proved by sufficient trial’.181 According to Alfred Russel
Wallace, Mill accepted Wallace’s recommendation that the state should be
able to buy any land at its current value, with compensation.182 He was
well aware that more radical proposals were afoot, notably those of the
Land and Labour League, which suggested commencing state ownership
by preventing any future sale of land except to the state.183 Mill was again
wary, however, about the prospects of a ‘mass of corrupt jobbing’, cit-
ing the example of New York.184 He was, as usual, cautious, prudent and
practical.
176 Cosmopolis, 5 (1897), 637, 631.
177 Later critics pointed out that given the fall in land values after Mill’s death, on his scheme
depreciation in value might have entailed substantial compensation to landowners, at great cost to
local authorities (Cox, Land Nationalization, pp. 137–8).
178 The Bee-Hive (22 April 1871), 12. 179 CW 5, p. 691. 180 CW 29, p. 424.
181 CW 17, p. 1926. 182 Wallace, My Life, p. 320. 183 CW 17, p. 1757 [1870].
184 Similarly emphasised in private conversation with Andrew Reid (Why I Am A Liberal, p. 180).
Yet Mill also proposed what he termed ‘very radical notions’ as to how
compensation might work. The burden should fall not on ‘property which
has been earned by the industry of its present possessors, but property
which has been inherited, & forms the patrimony of an idle class’.185 It was
however unjust to make ‘those who happen to have inherited land bear
more of the burthen than those who happen to have inherited money’.
So now, to apply this principle, Mill in advanced age pulled one more
impressively large rabbit out of his hat. We have seen that in the Principles
he had settled upon a ‘comfortable independence’ as the limit to which
inheritance should be permitted. Most writers assume this to have been his
final judgement on the subject.186 But in 1871 it was altered dramatically
as Mill now ratcheted up the egalitarian goal of his system. ‘I would’,
Mill now wrote, in words which were clearly carefully chosen, ‘lay a heavy
graduated succession duty on all inheritances exceeding that moderate
185 CW 10, p. 347 [1865].

186 Henry Sidgwick thought Mill aimed to assure a ‘comfortable independence’ (The Elements of
Politics, p. 104). But many and widely varying interpretations exist. Robson notes that Mill was
willing to ‘modify drastically’ inheritance laws (The Improvement of Mankind, p. 249). Thompson
also presumes that Mill wanted to abolish inheritance entirely (John Stuart Mill and Representative
Government, p. 163). Hollander quotes ‘comfortable independence’ as well (The Economics of John
Stuart Mill, vol. 2, p. 876), as does Kurer, who assumes a ‘gentlemanly life of leisure’ is permitted by
Mill’s scheme, and that Mill was ‘unwilling to go very far’ in restricting inheritance (‘John Stuart
Mill and the Welfare State’, 721, 728). Kurer also explores some of the redistributive aspects of these
suggestions (John Stuart Mill, pp. 139–41). Mazlish assumes Mill sought ‘graduated inheritance
taxes’ (James & John Stuart Mill, p. 373). Schwartz sees Mill as simply recommending a ‘maximum’
(The New Political Economy of J.S. Mill, p. 203). McCloskey describes Mill as proposing ‘severe
restrictions’ on inheritance (John Stuart Mill, p. 138). Street (Individualism and Individuality in
the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, p. 68) assumes Mill restricts inheritance to a ‘fixed sum’ for
each individual. Ryan paraphrases ‘comfortable independence’ to mean inheriting enough to give
one ‘a decent start in life’ (J.S. Mill, pp. 165–6) on the basis of the discussion in the Principles.
Various writers presume that Mill maintains the ‘moderate independence’ position (e.g. Mueller,
John Stuart Mill and French Thought, p. 81; Thomas, Mill, pp. 81–2; Levin, The Condition of
England Question, p. 104; Stafford, John Stuart Mill, p. 128; Hollander, The Economics of John
Stuart Mill (vol. 2), pp. 876–80. Schapiro sticks to ‘comfortable independence’ (‘J.S. Mill’, 148),
as do Baum (Rereading Power and Freedom in J.S. Mill, p. 218) and Berger (Happiness, Justice, and
Freedom, p. 173). Ekelund and Tollison indicate that Mill wished an ‘absolute limit’ to be placed
on inheritance, but without defining this (‘The New Political Economy of J.S. Mill’, 218). Donner
assumes that Mill does not retreat from ‘personal independence’ but still presumes a universal duty
of labour in the future (‘Mill’s Political Economy’, pp. 319–20). Arneson supposes that Mill wished
to create a ‘modestly endowed leisure class’ (‘Mill’s Doubts about Freedom under Socialism’, 248).
Semmel is closer to the position described here, arguing that Mill sought to adjust inheritance in
order ‘to oblige every person to be socially useful’ (John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue, p. 95).
Paul describes the end-state as ‘some designated level of moderate comfort’ (Moral Revolution and
Economic Science, p. 176). Gray sees Mill as allowing a ‘modest competence’ to be inherited (‘John
Stuart Mill on the Theory of Property’, 267), taking this to be Mill’s description in the Principles,
though the quote is not annotated and does not appear to be in the text. Harris more accurately
describes Mill’s limit as ‘moderate’, meaning that ‘children should earn their living in some useful
employment’ (Economics and Social Reform, p. 73).
amount, which is sufficient to aid but not to supersede personal exertion [my
italics]. If the land were nationalized and the fund for compensating the
holders were raised in this manner, the land-holders themselves would bear
I think quite fairly, a large share of the burthen.’187 This dramatic step,
taken after the last edition of the Principles published in Mill’s lifetime had
appeared, and virtually overlooked by Mill scholars, indicated a steeper tax
on inheritance than that he had previously projected. ‘Personal exertion’
would now be universal not merely for the married with children, but for all,
with inheritance duties rendering a ‘moderate independence’ impossible.
This was, by Mill’s standards, egalitarianism with a vengeance. It could
also be seen as a broadly republican strategy now bearing fruit, in the sense
that many republicans opposed substantial social and economic inequality
as undermining political freedom.188 No endowed ‘clerisy’, no leisured,
propertied elite, would survive such a reform. Instead what was essential,
as we recall Mill wrote privately in 1847, was that ‘society at large should
not be overworked, nor overanxious about the means of subsistence’.189
However Mill wanted the educated classes to serve as a counterweight to
the uneducated masses, their absolute or endowed financial independence
was not going to fund their efforts to protect and defend the public weal.
Radical meritocracy had indisputably trumped elitism; the pouvoir spirituel
and the well-to-do, at least initially, would labour like everyone else. Mill
had written in 1849, as we have seen – but let us now add due emphasis –
that ‘a system of government which did not make the scale turn in favour
of equality’ whenever ‘this can be done without impairing the security of
the property which is the product and reward of individual exertion [italics
mine]’ was ‘essentially a bad government’.190 He now defined this more
precisely than at any other point in his life. The system of production
would be maintained by rewarding exertion. The system of distribution
would now be designed to work to the same end. Private property would
be maintained, if much more equally distributed. But the right to property
187 CW 17, pp. 1847–8.

188 Mill wrote in 1831 to John Sterling that he did not care if a revolution ‘should exterminate every
person in Great Britain and Ireland who has £500 a year. Many very amiable persons would perish,
but what is the world better for such amiable persons?’ (CW 12, p. 84). To describe Mill’s ideas on
taxation as ‘fairly moderate attempts to ward off inequalities of wealth’ (Mueller, John Stuart Mill
and French Thought, p. 83) is thus well off the mark. Gray contends that ‘Mill’s radical conception
of social justice has no specifically egalitarian orientation, condemning the inheritance of large
fortunes rather on the grounds of its undeservedness and because huge concentrations of wealth
may ultimately become inimical to liberty’, a distinction which for Gray ‘distinguishes his radical
sense of social injustice sharply from that which animates most socialists’ (‘John Stuart Mill and
the Future of Liberalism’, 141).
189 CW 13, p. 713. 190 CW 20, p. 354.
would be greatly redefined. A duty to labour was now clearly part of Mill’s
civic scheme, and wedded to a radical republican conception of equality.
‘Liberty’, in this system, consisted of much more than non-interference:
it pushed the republican theme of not being dependent upon others to
a new liberal limit. Justice for Mill now centred upon the idea of the
universal duty to labour. ‘The essential principle of property’ was ‘to assure
to all persons what they have produced by their labour and accumulated
by their abstinence’.191 Reward was to be based on labour, but, as we
have seen, greatly circumscribed where wealth was not earned. It has been
said of Bentham that he represented ‘the secularized form of Protestant
abhorrence for idleness and praise of methodical work’, that he was obsessed
with work, and that it defined personal goodness.192 Carlyle, too, had a
ferociously strong work ethic, here too reinforced by Saint-Simonism. In
Mill there is little sense here of work being potentially pleasurable, creative
or unalienated. But there is a very strong sense of its being a universal duty,
and of idleness as being abhorrent. So much for Mill reverting to a more
conservative authentic self after the waning of Harriet Taylor’s influence.
Mill was by now also willing to concede, as he wrote to a correspondent
in 1870, that ‘the land ought to belong to the nation at large’. But he still
thought ‘a generation or two’ of ‘the progress of public intelligence and
morality’ might be required to ‘permit so great a concern to be entrusted to
public authorities without greater abuses than necessarily attach to private
property in land’.193 And he remained pessimistic about managing any
scheme of land nationalisation as such, though supporters thought this his
sole reservation.194 While, he said in 1871, ‘the thing might rightfully be
done’, it was still inexpedient to attempt it. Mill had, he stressed, such a
poor opinion of ‘both state and municipal management’ that he feared that
‘many years would elapse before the revenue realized for the State would
be sufficient to pay the indemnity which would be justly claimed by the
dispossessed proprietors’. It required ‘a greater degree of public virtue and
public intelligence’ than had yet been attained ‘to administer all the land of
a country like this on the public account’. Administering the waste lands
was as much, he thought, ‘as we are at present equal to’. At least it was
worth beginning here and giving ‘a thorough trial to collective before we
191 CW 2, p. 227. Levy accepted the goal of ‘self-dependent human beings’ in applauding this idea of
inheritance (The Individualist, no. 320, July–Aug. 1912, 46–7).
192 Bahmueller, The National Charity Company, p. 164.
193 CW 17, p. 1702. Mill’s step-daughter, Helen Taylor, would become a leading member of the Land
Nationalisation Society.
194 Wallace, Land Nationalisation, pp. 209–10. Packe, amongst others, describes this as Mill’s ultimate
goal (The Life of John Stuart Mill, p. 489).
substitute it for individual management’.195 But if land nationalisation was
‘altogether unsuited to the present time’, Mill thought that there were many
‘modifications of the rights of landed property of a more or less fundamental
character, which have already numerous supporters, and are likely, as we
believe, before long to become widely popular’. Here he had many practical
proposals to offer, including a survey of what lands should be left open
for all to enjoy, what might be cultivated by the poor on an allotment
basis, how long leases at reasonable fixed rents might increase produce, and
how associated labourers might engage in cooperative farming.196 Nations
where the land was not yet mostly private, ‘as in a great part of the East’,
were thus ‘fortunate, or would be fortunate if decently governed’, Mill
wrote in the last year of his life. But the state could not now ‘replace
itself in the fortunate condition in which it would now have been if it
had reserved to itself from the beginning the whole rent of the land’. If
land nationalisation was imprudent, uncultivated soil could nonetheless
be brought under public control, and bought by the state at its market
price. Lucrative ‘urban estates owned by great landlords’ could also be
subject to special taxes. Landlords might also ‘have the right reserved to
them of parting with their land to the State, immediately or at any future
time, at the price for which they could sell it at the time when the plan
is adopted’. Yet such measures fell short of his Irish proposals. For Mill
acknowledged that if the point of private landownership was to ‘provide
the strongest possible motive to its good cultivation’, it would ‘be vested
in the actual cultivator’. In England, however, most land was ‘cultivated by
tenant-farmers, who not only are not the proprietors, but, in the majority
of cases, have not even a lease, but may be dispossessed at six months’
notice’. Few of these would be affected by the Association’s plans.197
the ‘chapters on socialism’ and the limits of

mill’s socialism
We now reach the final stage in the shaping of Mill’s social radicalism.
Late in life Mill began work on a book about socialism, which he did not
live to complete. The material published posthumously in the Fortnightly
Review in 1879 as the ‘Chapters on Socialism’ is usually assumed to be
more sceptical about its subject than the later editions of the Principles.
Doubtless Mill did here strongly dismiss both revolutionary socialism and
the ‘obviously chimerical’ ideas of ‘conducting the whole industry of a
195 CW 29, p. 419 [1873]. 196 CW 29, pp. 1228, 421. 197 CW 25, pp. 1233, 1239, 1237.
country by direction from a single centre’.198 Bain, amongst others, believed
he had also now finally rejected the schemes of Fourier, Owen, Blanc and
others.199 Many writers have suggested that Mill became more critical of
socialism once Harriet Taylor Mill, ‘the socialist of the family’ (in Packe’s
terms),200 was no longer there egging him on. Yet Mill went far towards
accepting the socialist and radical meritocratic case respecting economic
justice. ‘The reward, instead of being proportioned to the labour and
abstinence of the individual, is almost in an inverse ratio to it: those
who receive the least, labour and abstain the most’, he wrote, the ‘very
idea of distributive justice, or of any proportionality between success and
merit, or between success and exertion, is in the present state of society so
manifestly chimerical as to be relegated to the regions of romance.’201 Mill
accepted that ‘great poverty, and that poverty very little connected with
desert – are the first grand failure of the existing arrangements of society’.
What Fourier had termed ‘industrial feudalism’ – the new dependence of
the modern world – Mill partially seemed to concede.202 But he denied
that the general tendency of modern wages was to decrease, and thought
socialists exaggerated the share of income enjoyed by the rich. And he could
not of course accept (citing Blanc, Fourier and Victor Considérant) that
competition chiefly caused this poverty, especially by enriching traders and
middlemen at the workers’ expense. Socialists often had a ‘very imperfect
and one-sided notion’ of how competition worked. Adulteration and fraud
were admittedly increasing, but Mill thought most fraud which affected
the price or quality of articles of consumer goods could be ‘overcome by
the institution of co-operative stores’. Socialists, however, often forgot that
competition caused ‘high prices and values as well as of low’, and that ‘the
buyers of labour and of commodities compete with one another as well
as the sellers’. Competition kept ‘the prices of labour and commodities
as low as they are’ and also prevented them from falling still lower. Mill
asserted, indeed, that the existing system tended generally to reduce the
chief evils complained of by the socialists. He expressed some sympathy
for experiments ‘on the scale of a village community or township’, which
might be ‘tried first on a select population and extended to others as their
education and cultivation permit’, and then possibly ‘be applied to an entire
country by the multiplication of such self-acting units’. ‘The practicability
then of Socialism, on the scale of Mr. Owen’s or M. Fourier’s villages’,
198 CW 5, p. 748. 199 Bain, John Stuart Mill, p. 90.

200 Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, pp. 488–9. 201 CW 5, p. 714.
202 See Mill’s discussion of this in the ‘Chapters’ (CW 5, pp. 726–7).
wrote Mill, ‘admits of no dispute.’ Managing ‘the whole production of a
nation by one central organization’ was ‘a totally different matter’.203
Mill still worried that incentives to produce efficiently might operate less
successfully in such associations, especially respecting managers. Education
might gradually enable motives besides personal gain to compensate. But
cooperation gained pride of place in Mill’s account. It was, he said, ‘a
far more complete remedy than piece-work for the disadvantages of hired
labour’. Industrial partnership, ‘the admission of the whole body of labour-
ers to a participation in the profits, by distributing among all who share
in the work, in the form of a percentage on their earnings, the whole or a
fixed portion of the gains after a certain remuneration has been allowed to
the capitalist’, had ‘been found of admirable efficacy, both in this country
and abroad’. It had ‘enlisted the sentiments of the workmen employed on
the side of the most careful regard by all of them to the general inter-
est of the concern; and by its joint effect in promoting zealous exertion
and checking waste’. It had ‘very materially increased the remuneration of
every description of labour in the concerns in which it has been adopted’.
It was evident, he thought, ‘that this system [admits]204 of indefinite exten-
sion and of an indefinite increase in the share of profits assigned to the
labourers, short of that which would leave to the managers less than the
needful degree of personal interest in the success of the concern’. And it
was ‘even likely that when such arrangements become common, many of
these concerns would at some period or another, on the death or retirement
of the chiefs, pass, by arrangement, into the state of purely co-operative
associations’.205
This system, ‘suggested by and partly grounded on socialistic princi-
ples’ (here is the ‘qualified’ socialism of the Autobiography), Mill regarded
as nonetheless ‘consistent with the existing constitution of property’. By
this he clearly meant not the current capitalist system, but remuneration
according to labour rather than communist equality. It would also retain the
existing division of labour, to which many socialists objected. For proposing
that ‘all should work by turns at every kind of labour’ involved ‘an almost
complete sacrifice of the economic advantages of the division of employ-
ments’. Mill still expressed concern that ‘private life would be brought
in a most unexampled degree within the dominion of public authority’,
which would leave ‘less scope for the development of individual charac-
ter and individual preferences than has hitherto existed among the full
203 CW 5, pp. 728–32, 737–8.

204 Word omitted in CW 5, p. 743; see J. S. Mill, On Socialism, p. 126. 205 CW 5, p. 743.
citizens of any state belonging to the progressive branches of the human
family’.206 The less communistical forms of socialism posed fewer such
dangers. Fourierism, in particular, Mill reiterated, was ‘both attractive in
itself ’ and demanded ‘less from common humanity than any other known
system of Socialism’. Fourierism, of course, was more antagonistic to the
division of labour than many other forms of socialism; yet Mill treated
Fourier’s proposals to render labour ‘attractive’ with surprising sympathy;
perhaps it was Fourier’s feminism which elicited this praise.207 Harriet’s
ghostly presence may yet have haunted these pages. Fair trial, in any case,
would alone ‘test the workableness of any new scheme of social life’.208
How then should we interpret the ‘Chapters’, incomplete as they are?
What, fifteen years after Harriet’s death, becomes of the henpecked argu-
ment? Had the greater sympathy for socialism of the early 1850s evapo-
rated, or at least been substantially modified? Whatever else Mill might
have added to the book had he lived,209 his preference for a system of coop-
erative production in a competitive economy clearly took precedence over
any sympathy for communitarian socialism as such. Let us recall that Mill’s
‘utopia’, as expressed in 1845, was the hope ‘of raising the labourer from
a receiver of hire – a mere bought instrument in the work of production,
having no residuary interest in the work itself – to the position of being, in
some sort, a partner in it’. This view remained unchanged in the early 1870s,
and Mill’s emphasis now that ‘all the land might be declared the property
of the State, without interfering with the right of property in anything
which is the product of human labour and abstinence’, simply confirmed
his earlier ideals.210 Mill’s sympathy for a gradually extending cooperation
was undiminished, while his opposition to revolutionary socialism was
unquestionable. It is misleading, then, to describe Mill as now providing
‘strong reason to be wary of even limited cooperatives’ and as ‘strengthen-
ing of the case for capitalism’.211 His opposition to capitalism as an ideal was
undiminished, but not to competition or private property as such. But so
206 CW 5, pp. 733, 746. But some thought that this also meant that ‘the authority necessary for the
ennobling of his character would there (according to Mr. Mill) exist in an unexampled degree’
(Clapperton, Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness, p. 283).
207 CW 5, pp. 747–8. Fourier, while preserving inheritance, also wanted it to be disseminated widely,
avoiding the concentration apparent in the existing society (Ouevres Complètes de Charles Fourier,
vol. 5, p. 457). See CW 1, p. 614, for late praise for Fourier’s ideas on women.
208 CW 5, p. 748. Hence the judgement that Mill ultimately favoured a ‘kind of modified Fourierism’
(Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism, p. 75).
209 The discussion of non- and even anti-socialist communitarianism, particularly Josiah Warren’s
schemes, which clearly interested Mill, seems an obvious candidate here. See my ‘Negative Liberty
and Mill’s Libertarian Reputation’.
210 CW 5, p. 736 [1879]. 211 Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, p. 353.
too was his scepticism about the more communistical forms of socialism.
Mill’s modern editors have insisted that we heed Mill’s sense of historical
progression, and they are right.212 Multiplying peasant proprietors, taxing
inheritance to remove any possibility of idleness, nationalising some of the
land, socialising industry extensively, belonged to different stages of devel-
opment. The means, the timing, remained to be tested and determined.
But the end, at least broadly conceived, had not altered since 1852.
conclusion: red in context?

Any appraisal of Mill’s ultimate position respecting socialism will clearly
hang on definitions. Like most writers in this period, Mill sometimes used
the word ‘socialism’ very loosely. Of Comte, for instance, he wrote that
his political writings were ‘likely to be mischievous rather than useful;
except qua socialist, that is, calling for an entire renovation of social insti-
tutions and doctrines, in which respect I am entirely at one with him’.213
Here ‘Socialist’ describes the scope of change rather than specific ends.
But Mill could also term himself a socialist respecting his support for land
nationalisation, for worker-managed cooperative industry and for stringent
restrictions on inheritance.214 (Some Malthusians also thought ‘socialism’
principally referred to population restriction.)215 The cooperative utopia,
in particular, was a hybrid which was neither capitalist nor socialist per
se, and many later thought that Mill’s ‘sympathy with co-operative enter-
prise, and better conditions for labour’ described his socialism.216 This is
commensurate with the definition offered in the ‘Chapters’, that the ‘dis-
tinctive feature of Socialism is not that all things are in common, but that
production is only carried on upon the common account, and that instru-
ments of production are held as common property’.217 Yet we recall that
Mill still contemplated possibly retaining private ownership in some such
‘instruments’. Distributing the product was not necessarily to be a ‘pub-
lic act’, as the Principles had defined the socialist principle, but might be
212 CW 22, p. lxxxiv. 213 CW 13, pp. 738–9.

214 Emile Durkheim commented that a ‘progressive tax on inheritance and on income’ diminished
social inequality but ‘nevertheless is not a concomitant of socialism’ (implying here an equal
distribution of property) (Socialism and Saint-Simon, p. 16).
215 E.g., The Malthusian (Dec. 1880), 182, (June 1887), 45. Others took an opposite view, stressing
that many socialists did not support Malthusianism (e.g. Olivier, ‘J.S. Mill and Socialism’). John
Robertson insisted that Mill taught ‘that Socialism must positively involve methodical restriction
of propagation’ (Socialism and Malthusianism, p. 16).
216 John Hobson in Justice (Feb. 1908), 8. Ryan holds a similar view (J.S. Mill, p. 189).
217 CW 5, p. 738.
divided between cooperatively agreed wages, privately accumulated profits
and savings and state redistribution of wealth through inheritance laws.
Mill ‘qualified’ this feature quite significantly, then, at least in the interim.
Despite these ambiguities, if Mill’s principles veered in one direction,
they veered more towards socialism, insofar as much greater equality was an
ultimate goal, and particularly Saint-Simonism, in its theory of justice and
reward according to labour, than towards capitalism. The means of reaching
this goal, however, were certainly as much capitalistic as socialistic, insofar
as each individual’s accumulation during their lifetime remained relatively
unrestricted. But these proposals were married to a paternalistic policy of
wealth redistribution and high expectations of the results of education.
Though contemporaries sometimes claimed that Mill thought that ‘con-
trary to the teaching of Socialism, inequality is a social necessity’,218 Mill’s
ultimate ideal implied much more social equality than existed in Victorian
Britain. Inequality could result from differential effort, but inheritance
would not preclude individual labour for married persons (in 1848) and
single persons (in 1871). Communitarian life, however, posed too great a
threat to liberty to remain attractive to Mill, despite the sop to Fourier in
the ‘Chapters’ – it was probably Fourier’s retention of financial incentives
to produce which Mill found agreeable. As van Holthoon has stressed,
Mill continued to believe that socialism and individuality were not easily
reconciled.219 For this reason Mill rejected most of the pre-1848 socialist
inheritance. He desired social unity and community of purpose and a
form of moral communism which promoted civic and moral unity. But he
was less keen to see individual living arrangements replaced by communal
structures, at least universally as opposed to experimentally.
Nonetheless Mill’s critique of the inequality generated by capitalism
became extremely radical by 1871: ‘personal exertion’ – a duty to work –
was to be imposed upon all. This was a strikingly paternalistic solution
to the problem of capitalism versus socialism. So even if, as Schwartz and
others have argued, the ‘Chapters’ represent a ‘considerably cooler attitude’
compared with the Principles, we need to look outside the discussion of
socialism to see that Mill had actually found another way to achieve the
most important socialist objective, much greater social equality. The ‘social-
ist’ label as such, then, as Graeme Duncan has suggested, is here relatively
unimportant.220 Mill remained open-minded about how the capital-labour
relationship would be superseded by cooperation, as Hollander has argued,
218 Davidson, Political Thought in England, p. 192.

219 van Holthoon, The Road to Utopia, pp. 109–14. 220 Duncan, Marx and Mill, p. 211.
but not whether it should be.221 And given the centrality of On Liberty, his
socialism would inevitably be defined by its principles too, leading some
to term him an ‘individualist socialist’.222 The end, again, was clear, the
means less so.
It is a moot point, then, as to how far Mill’s was a ‘capitalist’ ideal. Was
it ‘capitalism’ where managers were elected and factory owners had been
bought out by their workers? Where markets which generated increasing
inequality had been radically remedied by steep inheritance taxes? Mill
wrote in 1848 that it was not ‘the subversion of the system of individual
property that should be aimed at; but the improvement of it, and the
participation of every member of the community in its benefits’.223 But
the ‘system of property’ here refers to reward according to labour, and
retaining competition, not to ‘capitalism’ per se. We must here recall Mill’s
insistence that if legislation had tended to diffuse rather than to concentrate
wealth, then ‘the principle of private property would have been found to
have no necessary connexion with the physical and social evils which
almost all Socialist writers assume to be inseparable from it’.224 Only
through stringent inheritance laws could capitalism attain this end and,
effectively, save itself. A capitalism offering no ‘comparative advantage’ –
if cooperation could provide it – had a poor case to defend. A capitalism
with vast differentials in pay between workers and managers and steadily
increasing inequality was exactly what Mill sought to avoid. The ‘market’
could simply not deliver the ends human beings required to flourish, and
here its deficiencies required radical remedies indeed.
Mill’s ‘socialism’, then, was in fact so much a vastly altered version
of existing property arrangements that we have trouble today describing
it as capitalism. It is a hybrid, neither socialist fish nor capitalist fowl,
though something perhaps more palatable than either. In this sense the
old view that Mill foreshadowed Fabian socialism still has much to be said
in its favour, provided we recognise that this means not merely sweeping
away the vestiges of feudalism, but actually creating a much more equal
society.225 To assert, then, that ‘socialism meant a reformation of capitalism
221 Hollander, The Economics of John Stuart Mill (vol. 2), p. 821.
222 Lubac, John Stuart Mill et le Socialisme, p. 109.
223 CW 3, p. 982. Added later: ‘in the present stage of human improvement at least’.
224 CW 3, p. 986.
225 E.g. Borchard, John Stuart Mill the Man, p. 101. Fabian writers certainly drew out the connection,
with one writing in 1891 that Mill had come round to the view that any monopoly could be
controlled by the state, including roads, railways, gasworks and water supplies, amounting to ‘at
least one-third of the business capital of the country to be thus ‘communalised’ at once’ (The
Christian Socialist, April 1891, 40).
rather than its overthrow’,226 risks underestimating how fundamental that
reformation was intended to be. To reiterate that Mill wanted the working
classes to improve themselves by ‘becoming their own capitalists’ and that
Mill’s goal was some form of universal entrepreneurial society, also misses
his egalitarianism.227
Mill’s ultimate ideal was in fact not promoting the ‘striving, go-ahead’
entrepreneurial type, but something quite different and in some respects
opposite to this. Here the moral appeal of socialism to Mill, rather than
its economic arrangements, needs to be stressed. Utilitarianism, he wrote
in 1861, was founded upon ‘the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be
in unity with our fellow creatures, which is already a powerful principle in
human nature, and happily one of those which tend to become stronger,
even without express inculcation, from the influences of advancing civi-
lization’. Mill had admired the ‘great beauty and grandeur’ of Comte’s idea
‘that every person who lives by any useful work, should be habituated to
regard himself not as an individual working for his private benefit, but as a
public functionary’. This ‘cultivation of the social feelings on a most essen-
tial point’ meant people would ‘regard working for the benefit of others
as a good in itself; that we should desire it for its own sake, and not for
the sake of remuneration, which cannot justly be claimed for doing what
we like: that the proper return for a service to society is the gratitude of
society’.228 Not believing in ‘universal selfishness’, Mill even stressed in the
Considerations: ‘I have no difficulty in admitting that Communism would
even now be practicable among the élite of mankind, and may become
so among the rest’.229 In the Subjection of Women Mill reiterated: ‘I am
one of the strongest supporters of community of goods, when resulting
from an entire unity of feeling in the owners, which makes all things
common between them.’230 Mill was not sanguine that this unity would
arrive quickly. But it remained an aspiration nonetheless, to be sought by
economic reorganisation and legislative tinkering.
We can call these aims ‘socialist’ if we please, but only in a quite spe-
cific sense. Mill’s was not a ‘bourgeois’ vision of the future. It did not
aim to vindicate ‘commercial society’, whose moral horizons Mill found
contemptible. But neither was it in many particulars ‘socialist’ either. Mill
recognised that too much equality bred tyranny of the majority, while
a confiscatory socialism by the poor would destroy commerce. Eventual
social equality was to be moderated by an interim (indeed persistent) bias
226 Reeves, John Stuart Mill, p. 466. 227 E.g., Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, p. 207.
228 CW 10, pp. 231, 340–1. 229 CW 19, pp. 404–5. 230 CW 21, p. 297.
towards expertise and the educated classes. And Mill simply valued liberty
more than socialists had traditionally done: no social organisation could be
permitted to fail the liberty test. Yet we should recall that the socialist label
remains appropriate on at least three points: Saint-Simonian conceptions
of inheritance were crucial to Mill; the Saint-Simonian scheme was part of
his idea of justifiable imperial rule; and cooperation could also be seen as a
variety of socialism.231 But in all this there remained a firm commitment to
extending individual liberty and freeing individuals from servitude. This,
as Urbinati has argued, was the core of Mill’s belief in social justice.232 But
any prospect of realising socialism of any kind was for Mill linked to two
other key goals: universal education and ‘a due limitation of the numbers of
the community’. Without these two conditions being realised, he insisted
in the Principles, ‘neither Communism nor any other laws or institutions
could make the condition of the mass of mankind other than degraded and
miserable’. With them, ‘there could be no poverty, even under the present
social institutions: and these being supposed, the question of Socialism is
not, as generally stated by Socialists, a question of flying to the sole refuge
against the evils which now bear down humanity; but a mere question of
comparative advantages’.233
If Mill’s vision was ‘socialist’ only in a limited sense, can we plausi-
bly describe it as ‘republican’? Definitional issues again arise: in Britain
alone there were many republicanisms in this period.234 But there were
clearly some classical sources here. Mill as a young boy had ‘vindicated the
Agrarian law on the evidence of Livy’.235 He knew Greek – Bain called him
‘Greece-intoxicated’236 – and Latin well, and was an accomplished classicist
in his own right. But locating him on a map of republicanisms is not easy.
Despite his egalitarianism, he did not explicitly reject either aristocracy or
monarchy (but his proposed inheritance reforms would have put paid to
the former). Unlike Comte, he was not an advocate of small states as such.
Nor was he enthusiastic about citizen militias replacing existing military
forces. Imperialism stood in the way of both. Yet civic virtue is clearly a
Millian theme, even if some of the burden of sociability is displaced to
the workplace, and most explicitly cooperative economic activity. ‘In the
greatest Greek commonwealth’, Mill thought, ‘the public interest was held
231 But some contemporaries juxtaposed the two, Holyoake arguing that cooperation meant ‘self-help’
and socialism, state assistance (The Liberty Review, 15 April 1897, 159).
232 Urbinati, Mill on Democracy, pp. 190–1.
233 CW 2, p. 208. Later writers would insist that what Mill meant here was to contrast socialism with
these other essential reforms (National Reformer, 12 Jan. 1879, 20).
234 For a typology see Claeys and Lattek, ‘Radicalism, Republicanism, and Revolutionism’, pp. 204–5.
235 CW 1, p. 16. 236 Bain, John Stuart Mill, p. 94.
of paramount obligation in all things which concerned it; but, with that
part of the conduct of individuals which concerned only themselves, public
opinion did not interfere.’237 This is strikingly similar to the balance he
sought for modernity. We might concede, thus, that Mill inherited in part
from republicanism a compelling sense of public duty and self-sacrifice,
and of the dependency of one’s own liberty on maintaining that of others, a
sense of the political, social and psychological value of equality, a devotion
to autonomy, now reconceived in collective terms, and a willingness to
restrict landed property and inheritance, and an antagonism towards oli-
garchy. His levelling proposals were indeed little short of revolutionary, and
place Mill closer to republicans like Paine than to his father or Bentham.
But Mill went in some respects even further than this. His conception of
equality, after all, aimed ultimately to supersede servitude entirely. Such
ideas perhaps fatally undermined the role played by that body of indepen-
dent property-owners who had been the foundation of civic virtue in much
republican thought. Dependency might be abolished, but so would much
of independency and the linkage of nobility of character to landownership.
Some virtue might still rest on leisure, but much more would derive from
work: Mill thought leisure over-rated, and too productive of idleness. (Yet
over-work was also over-rated.) Skinner has suggested that a neo-Roman
theory of liberty is present in Mill’s account of the subjection of women.238
If rejecting submission to the arbitrary will of others sums up Mill’s views
on subjection, dependency and servility generally, we would expect to find
the idea in others of Mill’s works. And if the aim of Mill’s system was
to minimise personal dependence well beyond existing expectations, then
this does indeed serve as a summation of his ideas. Wedded to these pre-
cepts in Mill was an extraordinarily powerful work ethic (and contempt
for idleness) and feminism and Malthusianism, the latter two elements of
which were generally absent in earlier modern republicanisms. The former,
however, was a common element in ‘full-employment’ schemes for abol-
ishing poverty, like those proposed by John Bellers. Mill was, indisputably,
then, a radical republican. Yet he did not inherit the plebeian tradition of
Paine and Cobbett as such: Socrates is too Whiggish for that, and Mill
had too much respect for expertise to be this populist. He did not follow
in Thomas More’s footsteps, either, at least as far as Owen and Fourier
did. Sparta held no appeal for him. Nor would communal control over
the economy supplant private efforts and some inequality between rich
and poor, even in the future stationary state, would probably still remain.
237 CW 11, p. 319 [1853]. 238 Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, pp. ix–x.
Mill wanted republican virtue, then, in the sense that an active, committed
civic life rested upon broadly egalitarian foundations. Yet if devotion to the
public good was closely bound up with adherence to an ideal of justice,
which Pocock sees as crucial to republican argument,239 Mill also sought
this in universal labour. Public duty did not rest upon the shoulders of a
leisured, propertied class, however important the educated were to be.
Regardless of which labels appear more appropriate here, it is the goals
which are ultimately central to interpreting Mill. Here, as we have seen, the
population issue was intimately tied with all socialistic endeavours for Mill,
for without its resolution all the latter schemes no matter how realistic were
doomed to failure. The socialist question, then, cannot be fully clarified
without contrasting Mill’s treatment of the population question in On
Liberty.
239 See Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 40–1.

chapter 3
Rethinking On Liberty:
superstition, expediency and family values
After the primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is the first and
strongest want of human nature.1
the subject of family, the most important of any, and needing more funda-
mental alterations than any other.2
There are two Mr Mills, too, whom those who like reading
What’s vastly unreadable, call very clever;
And whereas Mill senior makes war on good breeding
Mill junior makes war on all breeding whatever.3
introduction: the ‘strongest case’

As we have seen, so much has been written about the famous ‘harm’
principle of John Stuart Mill’s study of ‘moral and intellectual’ freedom,4
On Liberty, that any attempt to supplement existing interpretations seems
presumptuous.5 This chapter will argue, however, that a serious anomaly
in accounts of the book requires rectifying, for most treatments of it have
done scant justice to the conviction which, in this context, Mill cherished
more than any other. It is the following.
In On Liberty, respecting action, Mill offered one ‘very simple princi-
ple’ to distinguish between self-regarding acts, generally to be tolerated,
if subject to moral disapprobation, and non-self-regarding acts,6 or those
1 CW 21, p. 336. 2 CW 1, pp. 174–5.

3 A verse by Thomas Moore written in 1826 and circulated the day of Mill’s funeral by one of his
enemies, quoted by Holyoake (Bygones Worth Remembering, vol. 1, p. 268).
4 CW 32, p. 108. 5 On its composition, see CW 1, pp. 257–9.
6 These are often called ‘other-regarding’, but Mill himself does not use this term, and it is accordingly
not adopted here. In fact, since Bentham juxtaposes ‘self-regarding interest’ to ‘social interest’, the
correct juxtaposition of ‘self-regarding action’ would probably be ‘social action’, not ‘other-regarding
action’. The difference is palpable: we are directed to think of the wider interests of society and
humanity, rather than merely to an assignable ‘other’ proximate to us. Why then did Mill substitute
‘non-self-regarding’ for ‘social regarding’? Perhaps the phrase was simply too awkward.
173
affecting either others or the general interest or both,7 which society may
justifiably regulate. Despite much speculation as to Mill’s meaning here,
interpretations of On Liberty have in one area been surprisingly negligent.
This chapter will focus upon a central, if exceptional, aspect of Mill’s argu-
ment: the duty one owes to support one’s children, and further, not to
produce those who cannot be maintained. We have seen that this argu-
ment was central to Mill’s social philosophy, but that he found discussing it
difficult. His reticence, compounded by our own squeamishness, has con-
sequently hampered adequate interpretation of the issue. The key issue here
was not so much social tyranny as paternal interference for the common
as well as individual good. Here utility, pace Cowling, would seem to be
on the ascendant, and liberty in retreat, and we confront the inference that
interference can be justified not only to avoid harm, but to promote the
interests of others.8 Here, too, we may face the paradox that Mill seemingly
counsels making individuals freer by means of restraint (both of themselves
and others), which some have denied can be a means of freedom at all.9
We have seen already that in the Principles and elsewhere Mill had had
much to say on the question of population control and often described
this as amongst his deepest concerns. Many studies of Mill’s thought and
much of the literature on Mill and ‘paternalism’, however, steer clear of
the problem.10 The few treatments of this issue have been rather coy.
Alexander Bain noted that ‘the relationship between the sexes’ seemed to
be Mill’s ‘strongest case’ for interfering in moral relations, even if it was
‘little more than hinted at’ in On Liberty.11 Leslie Stephen thought Mill’s
‘Self-Protection Principle’ justified legislating against imprudent marriages,
and then abruptly noted in one sentence, as if it were hopeless to investigate
7 In 1871 Mill juxtaposed actions affecting ‘l’individu lui-même’ to those affecting ‘l’intérêt général’
(CW 17, p. 1832).
8 Cowling’s reading, rejected by Rees in ‘Was Mill for Liberty?’, 75. Such interests, in Mill’s words, as
‘either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights’ (CW
12, p. 276). See the discussion in Honderich, ‘Mill on Liberty’.
9 See MacCallum, Jr., ‘Negative and Positive Freedom’, 330–1, where the logical retort is that this is
not real restraint, but an enforcement of what a rational person would ideally do.
10 One of the most authoritative single-volume treatments of Mill’s thought as a whole, for instance,
Robson’s The Improvement of Mankind, makes no mention of it. Nor, perhaps even more surprisingly,
does Feinberg’s The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law (vol. 1), examines the issue, though it
does discuss guaranteeing well-being for children in terms of genetic deformity (pp. 101–4). It is
commented on in passing only in Britton, John Stuart Mill, p. 104. There is little or no mention of
it in Cowling, Mill and Liberalism and Semmel, John Stuart Mill.
11 Bain, John Stuart Mill, p. 108. Yet Britton writes: ‘Bain says that Mill’s Essay on Liberty was written
with the relation of the two sexes very much in mind. This is not very obvious to the reader: but Mill
certainly held that society was inclined to interfere quite unnecessarily in this matter’ – a curious
formulation (John Stuart Mill, p. 104).
Rethinking On Liberty 175
further: ‘Yet, what interference with private conduct could be more strin-
gent or more directly affect morality?’12 But some contemporaries found
these proposals surprising; the Positivist Frederic Harrison condemned as
‘somewhat startling’ the fact that such a proposition had emanated so men-
acingly from ‘the mouth of an apostle of freedom’, especially when yoked
to the ‘Chinese tyranny’ of compulsory education.13 With few exceptions,
later commentators have largely baulked at treating the issue. Only rarely
has it been asserted that for Mill ‘the population question in reality gov-
erns all others’.14 Bosanquet thought Mill’s ‘startling’ proposals to interdict
marriage would inevitably fail, or perhaps result in depopulation.15 Most
commentators on On Liberty, however, simply pass over such issues as
manifestly at odds with Mill’s chief concerns, or politely skim those pas-
sages introducing such themes, thus allowing the matter to rest. Most have
assumed the starting point and unit of reference in On Liberty to be the
isolated individual as such, rather than individuals in their primary social
context, the family. Harrison did this in order to reject Mill’s position,
asserting that ‘the social science which starts with individuals, not with
families, is based on a radical sophism. It is this fundamental error which
vitiates Mill’s book On Liberty, and vitiates indeed the whole scheme of
Mill’s social philosophy.’16
Amongst modern scholars, few even acknowledge this issue. Three of
the main studies of On Liberty, thus, by C. L. Ten, John C. Rees and
John Gray, despite extensive evaluations of the types of paternalism which
might apply here, do not take up the family example.17 H. J. McCloskey
devotes a paragraph to it, noting that to ‘all but extreme Platonists this
would represent an intolerable invasion of privacy’ (but why not ‘extreme
Millites’?), a point echoed by Himmelfarb, who protests of Mill’s ‘very
considerable departure from his principle of liberty’ that ‘it is hard to
credit his protests that laws prohibiting marriage constituted no violation
of liberty’. Halliday offers a brief but unconvincing rebuttal of the charge
that Mill was a ‘Malthusian fanatic’ prepared to wield the tyranny of
public opinion on this issue.18 Few amongst the twenty or so articles
12 Stephen, The English Utilitarians (vol. 3), p. 290.

13 Harrison, Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, pp. 283–4. 14 de Laveleye, The Socialism of To-Day, p. 12.
15 Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 68. He excepted cases ‘of very definite physical
or mental defects’.
16 Harrison, Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, p. 282. 17 Ten, Mill On Liberty, pp. 109–23.
18 McCloskey, John Stuart Mill, p. 116; Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism, pp. 117–20; Halliday,
John Stuart Mill, p. 105. McCloskey most curiously but quite consistently alleges that on Mill’s
principles the state ‘might be justified in preventing the manufacture and sale of instruments of
birth-control’ because they were judged to be immoral when he wrote, and contends that Mill’s
which centrally address the ‘harm’ principle take up this question.19 Even
those who have sought to portray Mill as somehow less than liberal, or
inconsistently liberal, or more utilitarian than liberal, such as Cowling,
generally ignore this case. Most surprisingly, perhaps, given the general
drift of his argument against seeing Mill as a libertarian, Joseph Hamburger
discusses it only very briefly, despite the fact that it is Mill’s chief concern,
and does not reach the conclusions proposed here with respect both to
the harm principle, Mill’s feminism and his egalitarianism.20 Alan Ryan
gently chastises Mill for his apparent ‘unconcern with twentieth-century
anxieties about privacy and intimacy’ and his unwillingness to indulge ‘the
impulsiveness of youth’ respecting marriage.21 Amongst recent biographers,
Reeves notes that this section of On Liberty ‘is often skipped over by
modern liberals’, but sheds no further substantial light on the importance
of Mill’s ‘startling proposal’, other than positing that Bavaria alone had laws
limiting marriage, of the type Mill discusses.22 Capaldi comments merely
that Mill thought ‘there are grounds to seek to discourage individuals
‘suggested means test for marriage’ implies applying the view that individuals may not always
be the best judges of their own interests (‘Mill’s Liberalism’, 150–1). Himmelfarb emphasises the
importance of overpopulation for Mill for some two pages, but without developing the type of
argument offered here, or without drawing out its implications for the ‘two Mills’ hypothesis of a
‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ Mill.
19 Included in this generalisation are: Gardner, ‘Liberty and Compulsory Education’; Lyons, ‘Liberty
and Harm to Others’; Taylor and Wolfram, ‘The Self-Regarding and Other-Regarding Virtues’;
Kilcullen, ‘Mill on Duty and Liberty’; Struhl, ‘Mill’s Notion of Social Responsibility’; Spahr, ‘Mill on
Paternalism in its Place’; Arneson, ‘Mill versus Paternalism’; Hart, ‘Paternalism and the Enforcement
of Morality’; Brown, ‘Mill on Harm to Others’ Interests’; Ten, ‘Mill on Self-Regarding Actions’;
Mill, On Liberty; and the articles collected in G.W. Smith, John Stuart Mill’s Social and Political
Thought (Routledge, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 13–280. In the latter collection see pp. 58 and 447 for two
brief discussions of the issue.
20 Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control, pp. 11–12. Scott Gordon portrays Mill as
‘singularly illiberal’ in his ‘obsession’ with Malthusianism (‘Mill, Population, and Liberty’, 17).
21 Ryan, ‘Mill in a Liberal Landscape’, p. 513.
22 Reeves, John Stuart Mill, p. 298. Joseph Kay, however, referred to several Swiss cantons where
universal male suffrage operated, and where laws imposed a heavy fine on those marrying before
they were able to support a family (The Social and Economic Condition of the People in England
and Europe, vol. 1, pp. 67–8). Cantonal regulations remained in force until the late nineteenth
century, and included requiring parental consent, and not receiving poor relief. In Germany, the
laws were certainly amongst the strictest in Bavaria, where restraints on the marriage of servants
had been in place since 1553 and were strengthened in the 1830s. Here town councils might prohibit
marriage on the grounds of idleness. On the operations of marriage laws in some German states, see
Wilberforce, Social Life in Munich, pp. 323–37, which upheld Mill’s claim that those who could not
maintain their offspring had no right to marry (p. 328). Bavarians who married illicitly elsewhere
were subjected to a fine of 300 florins or thirty days’ imprisonment. In Hessen-Nassau an 1822 law
established the minimum ages of marriage as twenty-two and eighteen years for men and women
respectively. In many states beggars or those in receipt of poor relief in recent years were refused
permission to marry. A uniform legal right of marriage for all Germany was not passed until 1919.
Similar laws prevailed in parts of Austria during the nineteenth century. See Knodel, ‘Law, Marriage
and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth Century Germany’.
who are not autonomous from having children’.23 Perhaps even more
surprisingly, analyses of Mill’s feminism, too, have been largely silent on this
matter.24 Most scholars who have sought to ground a stronger conception
of duty in On Liberty, notably in republicanism,25 have also made little of
this particular duty.26
More recent writers have improved somewhat on this. Riley briefly dis-
cusses the birth control issue, as does Scarre.27 But none of these accounts
assumes Mill’s Malthusianism, the basis of these proposed restrictions, for
Mill a central social principle, and a buttress to his feminism as well, to
be germane to dissecting the ‘harm’ principle, or proposes that compe-
tency criteria did not for Mill apply here. While recognising, then, that
children as such are exempt from the application of the liberty principle,
the literature on Mill has blithely and almost completely ignored his most
obvious instance of the enforcement of morality, the intention to regulate
child-bearing by adults, and particularly the poor. The result of this quite
conscious neglect, as Ryan has commented, is that Mill’s proposals on
this matter have ‘languished in an unwarranted obscurity’.28 The concept
of marriage restraint, it would appear, is simply not on our mental map,
because it lies outside the spectrum of liberalism we accept. Accordingly
we do not ‘see’ it in the text, in manifest defiance of Mill’s intent. We make
Mill ‘liberal’ by rendering invisible his illiberal themes, in a manner not
unlike the old Stalinist erasing of unpersons from pictures.
This is quite extraordinary. The reasons for this neglect, however, are
obvious: Mill was, embarrassingly, and, going beyond his Malthusian
23 Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, p. 279. This infers that ‘autonomy’ requires financial independence.
24 E.g., Tulloch, Mill and Sexual Equality, which makes no mention of Malthus. There is some
discussion of the issue of children in Habibi, John Stuart Mill and the Ethic of Human Growth,
pp. 158–81, but not its implications for the harm principle.
25 E.g., Justman, The Hidden Text of Mill’s Liberty, pp. 17–74.
26 Alan Ryan suggests that Mill thought continental restrictions on marriage were ‘perhaps ineffective
in practice’ (J.S. Mill, p. 154), implying perhaps that Mill was aware of the high illegitimacy rate in
Bavaria and thought systems of land tenure to be a more reliable guide to actual population restraint.
Mill says: ‘The countries in which, so far as is known, a great degree of voluntary prudence has been
longest practised on this subject, are Norway and parts of Switzerland . . . In both these countries
the increase of population is very slow; and, what checks it, is not multitude of deaths but fewness
of births. Both the births and the deaths are remarkably few in proportion to the population; the
average duration of life is the longest in Europe; the population contains fewer children, and a
greater proportional number of persons in the vigour of life, than is known to be the case in any
other part of the world’ (CW 2, pp. 157–8). Levin (Mill on Civilization, p. 133) sees this as an instance
of Mill’s ‘paternalism’.
27 Riley, Mill On Liberty, pp. 139–40. Geoffrey Scarre notes that Mill upholds ‘reprobation and social
stigma’ as means of controlling births, but does not insist that the state impose legal punishment
for failure to do so (Mill’s On Liberty, pp. 128–9).
28 ‘Mill in a Liberal Landscape’, p. 506.
proclamations in the Principles and elsewhere, apparently at his harsh-
est in suggesting that the labouring classes might legitimately have their
right to marry restricted by having to prove their ability to support a fam-
ily and thereafter might be compelled to maintain their progeny.29 But
does acknowledging this position really upset our view of Mill, or is this
merely – as most readers seemingly respond – an archaic example which
may be dispensed with as irrelevant? The argument offered here is that
the anomaly as such is not that Mill’s proposed restriction has not been
scrutinised more rigorously in this context. Instead it is contended that
Harrison’s conception of Mill’s methodological individualism is actually a
misreading of On Liberty.30 The family, for Mill, is not an exception to the
application of the harm principle. Mill in fact assumes familial obligation
to be central, rather than peripheral, to his account. This makes the family
a basic unit in society, indeed the basic unit, for it is here, as the Subjection
would later insist, that morality is learned, even if much of Mill’s discussion
also concerns individuals outside of family life – hence the common mis-
conception that this is his sole concern. Even if an extended feudal family
no longer existed, the basic ‘unit of society’ was described in the Principles
in 1848, was ‘not now the family or clan . . . but the individual; or at most
a pair of individuals, with their unemancipated children’.31 This ‘at most’
is a large and telling modification of Mill’s premise. It was Bentham who
thought that society did not exist except as an aggregate of individuals, not
Mill.32 Mill, at least in this degree following Comte (and Wollstonecraft),
saw the family as the fount of moral behaviour.33 This rooted the individual
in a social context: as with the principle of inheritance, we can no longer
address individuals embedded in families in the same manner that we can
single adults. (Or, to use a slightly different language, our selves are initially
defined in the family as communitarian, then become more individuated,
and later again become more communitarian when we form our own fam-
ilies.) The duties we owe chiefly to our spouses and children, then more
29 This is usually appreciated by writers on Mill’s political economy, e.g., Lipkes, Politics, Religion, and
Classical Political Economy in Britain, p. 22.
30 But not only Harrison’s of course; Mill’s lack of a sense of a social ‘organism’ was also a central
charge to later Idealists like David Ritchie (The Principles of State Interference, pp. 12–13).
31 CW 2, p. 219. A debt to Comte on this issue cannot be ruled out. This places Mill much closer to
some of his later critics, such as Ritchie and Bosanquet. See Rees, ‘A Re-reading of Mill on Liberty’,
117.
32 Yet Bentham, too, maintained the importance of family duties, for instance insisting that children
had a duty to support their parents in old age, and husbands their wives (Bentham’s Political Thought,
p. 37).
33 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 228; Comte, System of Positive Polity
(vol. 2), p. 302.
faintly to other relatives, are actually integral to understanding how the
‘harm’ principle works.34 Where better, then, to commence paternalism
than with paternity (and, we will see, maternalism with maternity)?
Without placing ‘family values’ at the centre of any analysis of On Lib-
erty, consequently, we fail to understand that much of Mill’s argument was
geared towards convincing us that a vast range of behaviour which was
appropriate, or at least non-punishable, for single persons, would not in
certain circumstances be acceptable to adults possessing a family. In what
circumstances? In the famous phrase, when our ‘distinct and assignable
obligation’ – by which Mill evidently meant principally (though not exclu-
sively) ‘legally binding’, rather than vaguer ‘interests’ or ‘concerns’ – had
been violated.35 And when would this occur? Not, as is commonly sup-
posed, when we inflict physical harm to or damage upon others. But
instead, much more commonly, when our vices were financially unsup-
portable. When was this most likely to occur? When we have offspring
to maintain.36 The result is an account of harm in which the well-to-
do may indulge in a vastly greater range of vicious behaviour than the
necessitous. Gross acts of folly may demonstrate want of personal dignity
and self-respect. They may be inhibited to a degree by moral disapproba-
tion (which the wealthy find easier to avoid). But they are not punishable
because they remain self-regarding. Mill’s famous liberty principle, then, is
hemmed in to an astonishing degree by a class context, similarly ignored in
most accounts of the text,37 which is compounded and in the first instance
34 Wives could not demand support from husbands, whose sole obligation was to ensure they were
not forced to receive public relief.
35 Bentham had used the words ‘distinct and assignable’ in ‘The Principles of Judicial Procedure’ (The
Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 2, p. 19), but not in conjunction with ‘obligation’. Ryan states that
Mill ‘would clearly want us to intervene to protect the assignable rights of the family’ and that
while ‘other-regarding actions’ are ‘morally condemned’, violations of the rights of others ‘are to be
punished’ (The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, p. 249). The phrase otherwise remains something
of a mystery. It might loosely mean ‘clear’ or ‘evident’. Stephen assumes ‘distinctly assignable’ to
mean that a prior obligation has been established (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 130), by contrast
to merely ‘identifiable’ obligations. He also describes ‘assignable harm’ in the sense of evident and
verifiable (p. 131). Assignable may certainly be construed as possessing a normative dimension.
Honderich, however, declares that by ‘interest’ Mill meant two things: ‘rights in law’ and rights
supported by the community (‘The Worth of J.S. Mill On Liberty’, 165). Other interpreters have
stuck with a conception of harm as ‘perceptible damage’ (Riley, Guidebook, p. 98), which avoids the
circuitous problem of harm being solely a violation of legal right.
36 Himes thus concludes: ‘Under such circumstances would Mill not have been obliged to infer from
his general philosophy that so long as “improvident” partners did not affect adversely the interests
of others by marrying early on an inadequate income and producing children they could not care
for, the intimate associations of married people concerned themselves alone?’ (‘John Stuart Mill’s
Attitude towards Neo-Malthusianism’, 483).
37 E.g., Sullivan, ‘A Note on the Importance of Class in the Political Theory of John Stuart Mill’;
Broadbent, ‘The Importance of Class in the Political Theory of John Stuart Mill’.
crucially defined by familial obligation. Any attempt to explain the text
which ignores this dimension labours under a fundamental misapprehen-
sion about both Mill’s intentions and the application of his principle.
There are two parts to the argument here. The first concerns Mill’s
internal logical position in On Liberty respecting marriage restriction and
the self- versus non-self-regarding distinction. The second provides external
evidence, outside of the text, to lend plausibility to the interpretation given
here. And yet again this is a tale of and by two authors, and we will need
to revisit the henpecked argument once more.
superstition and family values

The heart of the Malthusian ethical injunction was the duty incumbent
upon men ‘not to bring beings into the world for whom he cannot find the
means of support’.38 Mill’s Malthusian credentials have already been out-
lined here. As early as 1825 he maintained that ‘that expectation on which
all our hopes of human improvement are founded [was] the expectation
of a gradual increase in prudence among the people . . . in proportion as
the people are better instructed, in that very proportion prudential habits
prevail’.39 Reviewing Thornton’s On Labour in 1845, he described several
continental states where ‘severe restrictions on marriage’ meant that no one
was ‘permitted to marry, unless he satisfies the authorities that he has a
rational prospect of being able to support a family’, adding that there was
‘no alternative but restriction on marriage’ if poverty were to be dramati-
cally reduced.40 (He may also have known of certain customs which pro-
duced a similar result in Scotland.)41 We recall again Mill’s letter to Edwin
38 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (vol. 2), p. 105. 39 CW 26, p. 304.
40 CW 4, pp. 374–5. The standard anti-Malthusian position on marriage held it to be a moral choice
and dismissed the idea that ‘political expediency’ had any bearing on it (e.g. Weyland, Jr., The
Principles of Population and Production, p. 470). Mill’s critics regarded this discussion as ‘incautious’,
and one noted both that it was guilds of artisans and traders who supported such policies, and
reiterated that the illegitimacy rate in Munich was nearly that of the legitimate birth rate (Rogers,
A Manual of Political Economy, p. 69).
41 ‘A certain kind of immorality, which undoubtedly prevails among the rural classes of Scotland, is the
fruit of a system which is in other respects advantageous. The system raises the rate of bastardy, but
it keeps down pauperism. For example, in the country districts of England, many of the labourers
who work upon the farms, and earn from nine to twelve shillings a week, live in little houses of their
own; which encourages them to marry. In Scotland, the labourers for the most part live with their
masters in the farm-house, and take their wages partly in board and lodging. It is thus a disadvantage
for a Scotch ploughman to be married; he cannot take his wife to his master’s house; and a house
for her own use would be an unnecessary expense, even if a small dwelling suitable for her could be
obtained. The consequence is, that farm-servants in Scotland generally remain unmarried. The evil
results will be obvious; but you do not find whole families in a district throwing themselves upon
the parish’ (Halliday, Town and Country, p. 284).
Chadwick of this period, anticipating great changes in social attitudes
towards marriage and evidently approving a ‘much more direct controul’
over births in the future. The Principles contended once again that any
substantial improvement in the conditions of the working classes hinged
not upon ‘the absolute amount of accumulation or of production’, but
‘the proportion between those funds and the numbers among whom they
are shared’. Any welfare proposal which ignored this was denounced as
a ‘delusion’.42 Book 2, chapter 11, paragraph 6 was entitled ‘Due restric-
tion of population the only safeguard of a labouring class’. Mill here
asserted that ‘prudence’ or ‘the social affections’ had helped regulate pop-
ulation growth in Norway and Switzerland, both being ‘countries of small
landed proprietors’. In various places, however, where ‘prudence and fore-
thought . . . might not be exercised by the people themselves’, these were
‘exercised by the state for their benefit; marriage not being permitted
until the contracting parties can show that they have the prospect of a
comfortable support’. Without such restraint, Mill emphasised, ‘nothing
permanent can be done for them; the most promising schemes end only
in having a more numerous, but not a happier people’. Mill was emphatic
that ‘not bringing children into the world unless they can be maintained in
comfort’ was ‘one of the most binding of all obligations’. Parents owed to
society ‘to endeavour to make the child a good and valuable member of it’,
and owed their children ‘such education, and such appliances and means,
as will enable them to start with a fair chance of achieving by their own
exertions a successful life’. To these, he added, ‘every child has a claim; and
I cannot admit, that as a child he has a claim to more’.43
Clearly we should underscore Mill’s use of the word ‘obligation’ here.
It was a corollary to the right to life itself that ‘no one has a right to
bring creatures into life, to be supported by other people’. For ‘the sake
of every purpose for which government exists’, measures restricting mar-
riage to those able to provide for their offspring were justifiable.44 The
42 CW 2, p. 343. 43 CW 2, p. 154–9, 221, 283.

44 CW 2, pp. 358, 372. This conclusion some have regarded as ‘inadmissible’ (Schwartz, The New
Political Economy, p. 136). It is to a degree an inversion of Malthus’s position. He had argued that ‘if
any man chose to marry, without a prospect of being able to support a family, he should have the
most perfect liberty so to do. Though to marry, in this case, is in my opinion clearly an immoral
act, yet it is not one which society can justly take upon itself to prevent or punish; because the
punishment provided for it by the laws of nature falls directly and most severely upon the individual
who commits the act’ (An Essay on the Principle of Population, vol. 2, p. 140). Bentham had asked
whether marriage might be restricted on the basis of utility, addressing incest in particular, but does
not seem to have considered poverty to be germane to restriction as such (The Works of Jeremy
Bentham, vol. 1, pp. 350–1). See generally Sokol, Bentham, Law, and Marriage.
success of schemes guaranteeing the right to work were also ‘bound in self-
protection . . . to provide that no person shall be born without its consent’,
and required ‘as a condition legal measures for repression of population’.
If ‘the ordinary and spontaneous motives to self-restraint’ were removed,
others would have to be substituted. ‘Restrictions on marriage, at least
equivalent to those existing in some of the German States, or severe penal-
ties on those who have children when unable to support them’, would then,
Mill insisted, ‘be indispensable.’45 As we have seen, however, this might
not be necessary – a caveat generally ignored by his later supporters46 – if
‘women were admitted . . . to the same rights of citizenship with men’.47
(Harriet Taylor’s role was possibly quite important here.)48
We can see why Mill would have readily welcomed the prospect of being
able to avoid having to justify such interference. The issue here implied
impinging dramatically on the behaviour of mature adults in a civilised
society respecting issues enshrouded in prejudice, taboo and superstition.
But there was a grey area here. The Principles asserted that while normally
‘individuals are the proper guardians of their own interests, and that gov-
ernment owes nothing to them but to save them from being interfered
with by other people’, this did not apply ‘to any persons but those who
are capable of acting in their own behalf ’, such as the infant, lunatic or
imbecile. Here the ‘law surely must look after the interests of such per-
sons’, not necessarily through its own officers, but often by devolving ‘the
trust upon some relative or connexion’. But, Mill asked, ‘in doing so is its
45 CW 2, p. 359. (In the ms. this last passage began: ‘I can conceive a society in which the state . . . ’,
clearly implying that Mill thought it advisable to move in this direction.) Hence the misconception
that ‘it might perhaps be maintained that such moral restraints are dependent for their working on
the individual responsibility for the support of a family; and this idea might be difficult to preserve
in the Socialistic theories to which in many parts of his work he gives such weight’ (Courtney, Life
of John Stuart Mill, p. 107).
46 E.g., The Malthusian, no. 38 (March 1882), 297. Himmelfarb complained that Mill offered no
evidence that On Liberty was about the ‘woman question’ (On Liberty and Liberalism, p. 181), but
comes round to acknowledging the case (pp. 205–6). He had already answered this question in the
Principles.
47 CW 2, p. 373. Mill wrote that it was never (later changed to ‘seldom’) the woman’s choice ‘that
families are too numerous’ (CW 2, p. 372). The implication here is presumably that women would
gain a right to refuse intercourse, an idea Mill or Taylor might have picked up from Richard Carlile,
who probably derived it from ‘Walking’ John Stewart (Every Woman’s Book; or, What is Love?, p. 24).
See my ‘“The Only Man of Nature That Ever Appeared in the World”’. Some have argued that Mill
here assumed that women would have the same burden as men in supporting their children and that
this would become the chief motive for birth control (e.g. Kinzer, J.S. Mill Revisited, p. 96). But both
Mill and Taylor may simply have presumed that given the choice between having larger families
or entering into employment, many women would opt for the latter, an assumption abundantly
proven by later experience. The ‘Enfranchisement of Women’ contended that ‘numbers of women
are wives and mothers only because there is no other career open to them’ (CW 21, p. 403).
48 See generally Krouse, ‘Patriarchal Liberalism and Beyond’, pp. 145–72.
duty ended? Can it make over the interests of one person to the control
of another, and be excused from supervision, or from holding the person
thus trusted, responsible for the discharge of the trust?’49 The answer was
clearly not. Mill had hoped when young, he recalled in the Autobiography,
that ‘universal education, leading to voluntary restraint on population’50
would solve the problem. Now he seemed much less sure. Indeed this is
perhaps what this passage is intended to convey: ‘democracy’ implies non-
interference, giving way to ‘socialism’, the interference proclaimed more
often in Mill’s later years.51 Yet we recall that Mill inserted the word ‘volun-
tary’ to modify the Autobiography’s description of his youthful Malthusian
enthusiasm. Small wonder that some agonise over Mill’s consistency: he
may have been unsure himself just exactly what he should approve. And
he may have changed his mind about how restraint might best occur.
It appears, then, that the Principles commends voluntary restraint on
population guided by public opinion, with legal sanctions introduced only
as a distant and broadly consensual possibility. But scholars disagree as to
Mill’s meaning. Himmelfarb assumes that he proposed preventing parents
‘in advance from bearing children’, and wonders why he did not assume
the same need for a ‘distinct and assignable obligation’ to be violated
as in some of his other examples.52 But this overlooks Mill’s invocation
of ‘expediency’. Mill hoped that when ‘the opinion were once generally
established among the labouring class, that their welfare required a due
regulation of the numbers of families, the respectable and well-conducted
of the body would conform to the prescription’. A justification would
then ‘exist for converting the moral obligation against bringing children
into the world who are a burthen to the community, into a legal one’,
particularly where ‘recalcitrant minorities’ refused to go along with the
sensible ‘large majority’.53 Public opinion, in other words, would prepare
49 CW 3, p. 803. 50 CW 1, pp. 238–9.

51 Hence Himmelfarb’s evidently accurate observation that Mill had apparently ‘decided that education
and population were too crucial for the welfare of mankind to be left to the circuitous workings of
liberty’ (On Liberty and Liberalism, p. 125).
52 Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism, pp. 119–21.
53 CW 2, p. 372. William Graham thought that Mill’s view was that ‘introducing more children than
a certain permissible number was the cause, and must be discouraged first by opinion and finally
by law’ (Graham, The Social Problem, p. 432). He also noted that a ‘relaxation of the rule is also
allowed to those who are best off in each class, or to those sufficiently well off to afford the luxury
and to incur the responsibility’ (p. 434). Others felt Mill wanted ‘legal prohibition of improvident
marriages’ (Maccunn, Six Radical Thinkers, p. 62). Thomas presumes that Mill thought ‘that there
should be laws forbidding marriage unless the parties to it showed they had the means to support
a family’ (Mill, p. 97), as does Street (Individualism and Individuality, p. 111). Semmel argues that
Mill ‘would grant’ the state the right to deny marriage to those unable to support children (John
Stuart Mill, pp. 170–1), which leaves space for ‘expediency’, but does not imply that Mill wanted
the ground for the introduction of legal restraints. Despite the clear risk
of tyranny of the majority here, this does seem to tilt towards a sense
of the inevitability of ultimate legal sanctions which would clearly be
viewed as coercive by dissenting minorities. (The Mormon parallel might
apply here, though likely not: polygamy was more self-regarding than
begetting unsupportable children.) In the first and second editions of
the Principles, Mill added: ‘Whether a legal sanction would be ultimately
required, or moral sanctions, and the indirect influence of law and policy,
would suffice – and if legal measures were necessary, of what nature it
would be advantageous that they should be, it would be premature, in
the present state of the question, to discuss.’54 In the third edition (1852),
however, this was replaced by the assertion that ‘legal sanctions would
be unnecessary if women obtained the franchise, for women would then
introduce such restraint themselves’. Feminism had now moved to the
centre of Mill’s social philosophy and now bore much of the burden of
general social advancement. This dramatic alteration, it has been claimed,
Harriet Taylor may have suggested, though some later feminists in turn
to cede such a right. Mueller presumes that Mill sought ‘a voluntary restriction of the population’
(John Stuart Mill, p. 241). G.W. Smith sees Mill as prepared to accept ‘by law if need be’ ‘extensive
intervention’ to restrict population, but adds that he did ‘not in fact pursue’ the issue, either from
a reluctance to violate individual independence, or because it might unduly modify his general
theory of freedom (‘J.S. Mill on Freedom’, pp. 210–11). Ryan contends that Mill thought that to
‘control the procreation of children by whatever means is a legitimate activity of the state’ ( J.S. Mill,
p. 154). Britton says Mill’s view is that the state should see that ‘parents do not have more children
than they can support’ ( John Stuart Mill, p. 104). Habibi writes that Mill only wished ‘voluntary’
restraint, without state intervention ( John Stuart Mill, p. 233). Riley intriguingly concludes that Mill
argues that society can ‘force couples to use suitable birth control devices’ to prevent unsupportable
children, and that marriage ‘may be legally prohibited’ between parties lacking the means to raise a
family (Mill On Liberty, pp. 139, 205). He does not however mention Mill’s concession that sexual
equality may obviate such steps. Justine Burley contends that provided it was ‘legally expedient’
Mill supported constraints on population being imposed by the state (‘Mill, liberty, and “genetic”
experiments in living’, in C.L. Ten, ed. Mill’s On Liberty, p. 202). Van Holthoon holds that Mill was
much too optimistic in supposing that moral restraint alone would reduce family size, presuming
thus that Mill did not wish to enforce the principle legally (The Road to Utopia, p. 104). Hollander
argues that Mill offers a ‘case for legal control’ particularly applicable in ‘emergency situations
where [pleas for] educational programmes have fallen on deaf ears, and general wages are seriously
threatened’ (The Economics of John Stuart Mill, vol. 2, p. 741). Bain curiously (suspiciously, perhaps)
wrote that both Mills opposed ‘any definite scheme of sexual reform’ and instead ‘urged that personal
freedom should be extended, with a view to such social experiments as might lead to the better
fulfilment of the great ideal that the sexual relation has in view’ ( J.S. Mill, p. 108). Himes, in a better
position to judge than most, but still with an axe to grind, stated that Mill ‘urged legislation against
improvident marriages on the ground that the procreation of children was not a “self-regarding”
act’ (‘John Stuart Mill’s Attitude towards Neo-Malthusianism’, 483).
54 CW 2, p. 372. Halliday interprets this passage as implying that Mill approved ‘authoritative govern-
ment’ (‘sanction and legal prohibition’) ‘when a choice has not been made which ought to have been
made’. But it is crucial that this is modified by Mill’s view that first the opinion sanctioning ‘due reg-
ulation of the numbers of families’ had to be ‘generally established’ (‘Some Recent Interpretations’,
7).
rejected it.55 It was a race, then, by 1852, between the advance of popular
Malthusianism and achieving female enfranchisement. The significance of
this striking addition, clearly anticipated as we have seen in Taylor’s earlier
writing on the subject (c. 1832), is taken up below.56 But this hardly qualifies
it as a ‘henpecked’ opinion. Mill seems, instead, to have been genuinely
persuaded by a convincing argument which was quite in keeping with the
trajectory of his own ideas, as it solved the otherwise pressing problem of
the conflict between maximising liberty and restraining population. For
feminism – here the self-restraint of two instigated primarily by one – now
becomes the solution to the Malthusian quandary and can now also be
seen correspondingly as making socialism considerably more plausible.57
We can now see thus why ‘maternalism’ might suitably describe Mill’s
position here. Female responsibility now plays the central role in resolving
the most important social problem of all, over-population. Maternalism
becomes the antidote to paternalism: paternalism starts with the problem
of uncontrolled paternity, with the blame lying chiefly with reckless men
and ends with controlled maternity, chiefly instigated by thoughtful and
prudent women. But the general gain to all women was clearly Mill and
Taylor’s goal. In 1852 Mill insisted to a correspondent who thought that
‘no one ought to be blamed for having an inordinately large family if he
produces, & brings them up to produce, enough for their support’ that
‘this with me is only a part & even a small part of the question’. A ‘much
more important consideration still’, Mill noted, was ‘the perpetuation of
the previous degradation & slavery of women, no alteration in which
can be hoped for while their whole lives are devoted to the function of
producing & rearing children’. This was ‘in itself so enormous an evil,
55 CW 2, pp. 372–3; Banks and Banks, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England, pp. 24, 9,
121. Another critic noted that even if all men became Malthusians ‘the ladies to the last woman would
vote against Malthus. Mill seems to think differently, but I cannot help thinking him astray in this
important point in the question. They are at least much more pledged to the institution of marriage
than men’ (Graham, The Social Problem, p. 442). Still another thought that Mill ‘anticipated that
great numbers of self-supporting women would forego marriage altogether’, but failed to see ‘that
the really important influences lie in the conditions that determine, not whether women shall marry
at all, but at what age they shall marry’ (Giddings, Democracy and Empire, p. 173).
56 This appears also to obviate the objection that the use of public opinion to control over-population
implied a ‘very great’ degree of ‘community prescience and authority’, indeed perhaps, ‘a high degree
of central control – a command economy’ (Hollander, The Economics of John Stuart Mill, vol. 2,
p. 953). Packe treats this formulation as ‘almost certainly Harriet’s’ (The Life of John Stuart Mill,
p. 314). She had presumed that if women were educated and legally and politically equal to men,
‘women would not then have children without considering how to maintain them’, and no one
would marry in any case. See Jacobs, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, pp. 22–3.
57 This requires a refinement in Hollander’s supposition that Mill’s solution rested on ‘a reform of
public opinion’ (The Economics of John Stuart Mill, vol. 2, p. 951).
& contributes so much to the perpetuation of all other evils by keeping
down the moral & intellectual condition of both men & women that the
limitation of the number of children would be in my opinion absolutely
necessary to place human life on its proper footing, even if there were
subsistence for any number that could be produced’.58 Thus the progress
of civilisation rested upon feminism and dictated an absolute restriction on
population growth and family size, rather than one relative only to food
supply, average wage-levels or personal wealth.59 A feminist argument thus
augmented a Malthusian premise and displaced some of the suggested
unfairness of restraints based on income. Mill also felt that in ‘all the
most populous countries’ all of the advantages of population growth in
terms of ‘co-operation and social intercourse’ had already been attained.
The possibilities of solitude, of contemplating the wildness of nature, too,
were fast disappearing. Mill, who loved the countryside, and was rarely
happier than on long botanical rambles, thought this a cause for regret. He
wrote that as a result there was ‘very little reason’ for any further increase
of population.60 And he did not thereafter depart from these positions.
In a private diary note of March 1854 he prudishly stressed that no great
improvements in life could be expected ‘so long as the animal instinct of sex
occupies the absurdly disproportionate place it does therein’. What sexual
relations individuals engaged in ‘should be deemed to be an unimportant
and purely private matter, which concerns no-one but themselves’. But
if children resulted, ‘then indeed commences a set of important duties
towards the children which society should enforce much more strictly than
it does now’.61 We have, then, in place before 1859, a clear statement of
duty and of not only the right of social interference, but an injunction
on Mill’s part, consistent with his now key letter to Edwin Chadwick, to
interfere ‘much more strictly’.
On Liberty helped to explain how this might be done. Mill told his
friend George Grote that the book concerned ‘what things society forbade
that it ought not, and what things it left alone that it ought to control’.
When Grote relayed this to Alexander Bain, the latter recalled that he had
‘instantly divined what the new restraints would be’, without saying what
these were, but evidently presuming that this was obvious to anyone who
58 CW 14, pp. 88–9.
59 Some later neo-Malthusians praised this interpretation, e.g., The Malthusian, no. 80 (Nov. 1885),
650.
60 CW 3, p. 756.
61 CW 27, p. 664. Victorian family law gave custody of children born out of wedlock to the mother,
but also obliged fathers to support their children until they were able to care for themselves. See
Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, p. 132.
knew Mill.62 Mill here in several instances demonstrates the centrality of
familial duties to his conception of justifiable restrictions on liberty. But
when was an improvidently large family non-self-regarding? We need here
to have Mill speak for himself:
If, for example, a man, through intemperance or extravagance, becomes unable to
pay his debts, or, having undertaken the moral responsibility of a family, becomes
from the same cause incapable of supporting or educating them, he is deservedly
reprobated, and might be justly punished; but it is for the breach of duty to
his family or creditors, not for the extravagance . . . Again, in the frequent case
of a man who causes grief to his family by addiction to bad habits, he deserves
reproach for his unkindness or ingratitude; but so he may for cultivating habits
not in themselves vicious, if they are painful to those with whom he passes his life,
or who from personal ties are dependent on him for their comfort. Whoever fails
in the consideration generally due to the interests and feelings of others, not being
compelled by some more imperative duty, or justified by allowable self-preference,
is a subject of moral disapprobation for that failure, but not for the cause of it,
nor for the errors, merely personal to himself, which may have remotely led to it.
In like manner, when a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-regarding,
from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on him to the public, he
is guilty of a social offence.63
Moreover, he adds:
idleness, except in a person receiving support from the public, or except when it
constitutes a breach of contract, cannot without tyranny be made a subject of legal
punishment; but if either from idleness or from any other avoidable cause, a man
fails to perform his legal duties to others, as for instance to support his children,
it is no tyranny to force him to fulfil that obligation, by compulsory labour, if no
other means are available.64
This injunction, we presume, would not be disabled by extending the
franchise to women. Further, Mill says, with respect to education:
It is in the case of children, that misapplied notions of liberty are a real obstacle
to the fulfilment by the State of its duties. One would almost think that a man’s
children were supposed to be literally, and not metaphorically, a part of himself,
so jealous is opinion of the smallest interference of law with his absolute and
exclusive control over them; more jealous than of almost any interference with his
own freedom of action: so much less do the generality of mankind, value liberty
than power . . . to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able,
not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a
62 Bain, John Stuart Mill, p. 104. 63 CW 18, p. 282.

64 CW 18, p. 295. Note, however, how Mill’s ultimate proposals to restrict inheritance to compel all to
work might trump the principle defended here.
moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society; and . . . if
the parent does not fulfil this obligation, the State ought to see it fulfilled, at the
charge, as far as possible, of the parent.65
So much, then, for existing children. What about the unborn? Mill
describes ‘causing the existence of a human being’ as ‘one of the most
responsible actions in the range of human life’. Producing a child who
would not ‘have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence’ was ‘a
crime against that being’. In countries ‘either over-peopled, or threatened
with being so’, having children ‘beyond a very small number, with the
effect of reducing the reward of labour by their competition’, was a ‘serious
offence against all who live by the remuneration of their labour’. Laws
which ‘forbid marriage unless the parties can show that they have the
means of supporting a family’ did ‘not exceed the legitimate powers of
the state: and whether such laws be expedient or not (a question mainly
dependent on local circumstances and feelings), they are not objectionable
as violations of liberty’. Such laws were ‘interferences of the State to prohibit
a mischievous act – an act injurious to others, which ought to be a subject
of reprobation, and social stigma, even when it is not deemed expedient
to superadd legal punishment’. Yet, Mill reflected, existing ideas of liberty,
which often limited individual freedom ‘in things which concern only
himself, would repel the attempt to put any restraint upon his inclinations
when the consequence of their indulgence is a life or lives of wretchedness
and depravity to the offspring, with manifold evils to those sufficiently
within reach to be in any way affected by their actions’. It was almost as if
‘a man had an indispensable right to do harm to others, and no right at all
to please himself without giving pain to any one’.66 Here, then, too much
negative liberty was clearly mistaken.
Mill thus unequivocally construed irresponsible child-bearing as vio-
lating the harm principle.67 Restricting it was a matter of expediency,
impeded only by what Mill termed the ‘superstition’ that ‘no person’s dis-
cretion ought on any pretence to be interfered with’.68 It certainly fell
65 CW 18, p. 302.
66 CW 18, p. 305. Critics responded that ‘Mr. Mill appears to regard these instances of legislative
interference with personal rights and responsibilities without disapprobation, and he even intimates
that some such enactments might, in default of voluntary self-restraint, be advantageously imported
among ourselves’ (Rickards, Population and Capital, p. 243).
67 And possibly harm to self as well as some form of ‘benefit-to-others’ principle (see Feinberg, Harm to
Others, pp. 26–7). A ‘startling qualification of civil liberty’ was one typical reaction, by the Duke of
Somerset, who also said the proposal ‘would favour the rich and punish the poor, regulating society
by the invidious test of wealth, and establishing a property qualification for marriage’ (Monarchy and
Democracy, p. 128). The context here is the argument that democracy was unfavourable to liberty.
68 CW 20, p. 350.
within the scope of his general theory of punishment as the protection
of ‘the just rights of others against unjust aggression by the offender’.69
The maxim itself is not intrinsically paternalist in that it concerns harm to
others, not to oneself. Yet such intervention also enforced the individual’s
own duties. If it could ‘be clearly seen that parents ought to do or forbear
for the interest of children, the law is warranted, if it is able, in compelling
to be done or forborne, and is generally bound to do so’.70 But this moral
burden became a legal obligation only after children appeared.71 Acts ‘hurt-
ful to others, or wanting in due consideration for their welfare’ which did
not violate ‘any of their constituted rights’ were ‘amenable to moral disap-
probation in the proper sense of the term’, and might ‘be justly punished by
opinion, though not by law’. Clearly Mill did not class irresponsible child-
bearing with instances of ‘rashness, obstinacy, self-conceit’, the inability to
live within moderate means, or to restrain ‘hurtful indulgences’. But when
and how might legal interference by the state be justified here? Acts ‘inju-
rious to others’, such as encroaching on their rights, inflicting damage on
them, using falsehood or duplicity in dealings with them, were sometimes
‘fit objects of moral reprobation’ and in ‘grave cases’, of ‘moral retribution
and punishment’. But Mill drew no firm line between when one form of
reaction was appropriate and when another. In a vital sentence he equivo-
cates, telling us that the man who ‘through intemperance or extravagance,
becomes unable to pay his debts, or, having undertaken the moral responsi-
bility of a family, becomes from the same cause incapable of supporting or
educating them’ is ‘deservedly reprobated, and might [my italics] be justly
punished; but it is for the breach of duty to his family or creditors, not for
the extravagance’. We note here that ‘intemperance or extravagance’ might
or might not describe a normal life of poverty in relation to child-bearing.
But similarly we are left with the choice of morality or law in the much
better known example that no person ‘ought to be punished simply for
being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being
drunk on duty’. Here, whenever ‘there is definite damage, or definite risk
of damage, either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of
the province of liberty, and placed in that of morality or law’.72
Morality or law? (Or: morality then law, if morality fails.) Disappro-
bation or punishment? The ‘severe penalties’ of public disapproval or
69 CW 9, pp. 458–60. 70 CW 3, p. 952.

71 Hamburger unaccountably denies that this form of obligation is to Mill ‘distinct and assignable’,
and hence essentially non-self-regarding, contending that ‘the family was not in itself the occasion
for an obligation’ (‘Mill and Tocqueville on Liberty’, p. 116).
72 CW 18, pp. 276, 281, 278–9, 281–2.
prosecution? ‘Selfish indifference’ or pretending that ‘human beings have
no business with each other’s conduct in life’73 was not an option. In
actions ‘prejudicial to the interests of others, the individual is accountable
and may be subjected either to social or to legal punishment, if society is
of opinion that the one or the other is requisite for its protection’.74 Here
ethical confrontation, as Jeremy Waldron terms it, was ‘indispensable’ for
moral progress.75 Nosy-parkers peering out from behind the front-room
curtains, indeed, might play a vital role in policing morals. For public
opinion had to decide whether to punish idleness amongst those receiving
public support or to enforce ‘compulsory labour, if no other means are
available’ upon those unwilling to support their children otherwise.76 Just
how far Mill thought such actions might stretch is questionable. Brown
terms Mill a great believer in enforcing morality.77 Wollheim has stressed
that a large range of behaviour might be classed as not trivial but nox-
ious, without directly affecting the interests of others.78 But, depending
upon one’s sensitivity to others’ criticisms (we may recall Mill’s own acute
anxieties here), even mild forms of reproachful disapproval might them-
selves constitute substantial ‘harm’. Mill opposed, for instance, limiting the
number of beer-houses as a means of restricting consumption amongst the
working classes. But would he have approved standing outside to protest
against the disruptive behaviour resulting from drunkenness? For he clearly
resented very deeply his friends’ and family’s reproaches over Harriet Taylor
across the course of many years.
Clearly there is a wide range of behaviour at issue here. To public
opinion fell the task (right or duty) as to whether the upturned nose or
raised eyebrow, the turned back or cold shoulder, the double-take, the
grimace, the snigger, the withering stare, tut-tutting, polite denunciation,
the rude or sarcastic aside, the curse, the formal verbal dressing-down,
written requests to desist, or downright ostracism, the pillory, and bricks
through the front window – to run the gamut from mild to severe – most
suited the affront,79 as moral coercion escalated (at the end visibly towards
social tyranny), targeting ‘fit objects of moral reprobation’ and ‘in grave
73 CW 12, pp. 276–8. 74 CW 18, p. 292. 75 Waldron, Liberal Rights, p. 123.
76 CW 18, p. 295. In this proposal there is perhaps a hint of Carlyle. See Latter-Day Pamphlets, no. 1,
‘The Present Time’, pp. 36–8.
77 Brown, ‘Mill on Liberty and Morality’, 146–50.
78 Wollheim, ‘John Stuart Mill and the Limits of State Action’, 6.
79 Rashness, obstinacy, self-conceit and the ‘pursuit of animal pleasures at the expense of those of the
feeling and intellect’ are amongst the possibilities named (CW 18, p. 278). See Stephen’s discussion
of this possible interpretation of Mill’s principles, where public opinion can be deployed both
to protect the good of the person being ‘restrained’ and the ‘common good’ (Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity, p. 135).
cases’ enforcing ‘moral retribution and punishment’. Eventually the law
steps in with authoritative intervention.80 (We should recall however Mill’s
assertion that in England ‘the yoke of opinion is perhaps heavier, that
of law lighter, than in most other countries of Europe’.) Mill did insist
that in the case of a deviant individual’s purely self-regarding conduct we
should not ‘make his life uncomfortable’ (here was his own case). But
if he had ‘infringed the rules necessary for the protection of his fellow-
creatures, individually or collectively’, society ‘must inflict pain on him for
the express purpose of punishment, and must take care that it be sufficiently
severe’.81 At this point, then, moral coercion could pass beyond persuasion
to abridge autonomy (though some might view all persuasion as a form of
moral coercion). This aspect of Mill’s proposals has received little attention
from modern scholars, though contemporaries reacted to it.82
Mill’s chief aim in this respect in On Liberty was to promote disapproval
of large families. Little improvement in morality, he had written in 1849,
could be expected ‘until the producing large families is regarded with the
same feelings as over-fondness for wine, or any other physical excess’.
While ‘the aristocracy and clergy are foremost to set the example of this
kind of incontinence’, he lamented, ‘what can be expected from the poor?’83
Others were also attempting to shift public opinion in this direction around
80 The Principles proclaimed that all had the right to express their opinions as to ‘what is good or bad,
admirable or contemptible’, ‘but not to compel others to conform to that opinion; whether the force
used is that of extra-legal coercion, or exerts itself by means of law’ (CW 3, p. 938). Much clearly
hinges on the meaning of ‘coercion’ here. On Liberty discusses ‘considerations to aid his judgment’
and ‘exhortations to strengthen his will’ being possibly ‘offered’ or even ‘obtruded’ as falling short
of ‘the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good’ (CW 18, p. 277). On
the issue of moral coercion see Hamburger, Mill on Liberty and Control, pp. 166–202, and my ‘Mill,
Moral Suasion, and Coercion’.
81 CW 18, pp. 223, 279–80.
82 Bain wrote that On Liberty ‘was exposed to a good deal of carping in consequence of Mill’s admitting
unequivocally that a certain amount of disapproval was proper and inevitable towards persons that
behaved badly to themselves’ (John Stuart Mill, p. 108). He added that Mill ‘might have gone farther
and drawn up a sliding scale or graduated table of modes of behaviour, from the most intense
individual preference at the one end to the severest reprobation at the other. At least fifteen or
twenty perceptible distinctions could be made, and a place found for every degree of merit and
demerit’ (p. 109).
83 CW 2, p. 369. These sentences are attributed to Taylor by Jo Ellen Jacobs (The Voice of Harriet
Taylor Mill, p. 215). But we recall that such excesses were not punishable as such according to Mill’s
drunken policeman or soldier examples, only when they conflicted with other legal obligations. This
also indicates that he preferred social disapprobation of large families as such to legal regulation of
marriage (as is assumed by, e.g., Rickards, Population and Capital, p. 196). Rickards responds that
‘as long as they do not exceed his means of maintaining them’ a man had every right to raise a large
family (p. 211). But we need to distinguish here, then, between the ‘moral obligation’ both to delay
marriage and limit children within it, thus not producing unsupportable children, and the legal
obligation to support them once they existed, where moral disapprobation alone is clearly not an
option. In On Liberty Mill clearly championed both ideals, albeit obliquely.
the same time.84 Humboldt had also argued that if large families were
stigmatised as immoral the state could withdraw from all interference in
marital relations.85 Utilitarian calculations were gradually assisting such
opinions in the middle classes.86
Yet this discussion left Mill out on a limb and potentially in an extraor-
dinarily embarrassing position, and he knew it. His propositions stank of
class hypocrisy. In 1856 an elector publicly asked him on what grounds he
thought the working classes had no right to large families, like the higher
classes. Mill replied that ‘he never had said that the working classes had
not as much right as the higher classes, but that they had no more right.
Neither had a right to have more children than they could support and
educate . . . No class who might be called rich had a right to have more sons
and daughters than they could provide for, because if they could not leave
them well off they might be quartered on the public.’87 Yet the fallacy here is
obvious. The rich of course had a ‘right’ to more children precisely because
they could support them. ‘Rights’ were not natural, but were commodities
acquired like anything else. Hence just as Mill justified taxing stimulants
such as alcohol in the full realisation that the poor would be disadvantaged
thereby compared to the rich, he applied the same principle here, with one
key difference: luxury goods were to be taxed more heavily than necessities.
But luxury children, so to speak, were not to be treated differently from
necessary children.88 We see, then, how far this key example drives a coach
and horses through the assumption that the liberty principle was meant
here to apply to individuals qua individuals: its familial context was crucial.
Some contemporaries saw this as a perfectly plausible reading of Mill,
but feared the moral anarchy which might result if it were carried to one
extreme. As we have seen, the harm principle can be read as contingent on
financial assumptions. A man with much legal (and considerable Indian)
84 John Ruskin, in Time and Tide (1867), commended no marriages before the ages of seventeen
for women and twenty-one for men, while requiring governmental consent to marry, with those
receiving permission having a fixed income from the state for seven years thereafter (The Works of
John Ruskin, vol. 5, pp. 136–41). George Combe had commented favourably upon restrictions in
Württemberg in his immensely popular The Constitution of Man (pp. 386–7). In a Millite vein,
George Miles suggested that lovers only mate with the consent of a ‘responsible’ third person
(Economy of Life, pp. 119–20).
85 Quoted in Drysdale, The Life and Writings of Thomas R. Malthus, p. 62.
86 Henry Fawcett would write that the middle and upper classes did ‘not like to sacrifice the comforts
to which they have been accustomed, consequently they do not usually marry until they believe
that they have a fair chance of being able adequately to maintain a family’ (Pauperism, p. 117).
87 CW 28, p. 36. Indeed some asserted at the time that Mill intended to restrict marriages if elected to
Parliament (Kinzer, Robson and Robson, A Moralist In and Out of Parliament, pp. 53–4, 66).
88 CW 18, p. 298. As we have seen, he also supported efforts by the state opium monopoly in India to
prevent the sale of opium at a lower price (CW 30, p. 106).
experience, and Mill’s leading Victorian critic, James Fitzjames Stephen,
caustically noted that, according to Mill, when a party of people got drunk
together at a public-house, public opinion ‘ought to stigmatize those only
who could not afford it. The rest are “trying an experiment in living” which
happens to suit their taste, and no one else has anything to say to it.’89 Sim-
ilarly, he introduced the scenario of a debauched young duke embarking on
another such ‘experiment’ with four mistresses. On Mill’s principles, this
was ‘beyond the capacity of society to restrain, even when his acts of seduc-
tion and adultery are brazenly advertised by way of published pamphlets.90
W. H. Mallock caustically if quite logically suggested (with the Parnell
case in mind) that two couples cohabiting adulterously could plausibly
describe their relationship as a Millite ‘experiment in living’ if no ‘chil-
dren to complicate the question’ resulted.91 One writer complained that on
Mill’s view bankrupts would be punished not for their extravagance, but
only for injuring their creditors.92 Another said of ‘a drunken scoundrel, a
single man, nobody dependent upon him’, that ‘Mr. Mill can do nothing
for him; he does not interfere with the liberty of others’.93 Francis Mon-
tague maintained that every ‘action, although in its origin self-regarding,
is social in its result’. Mill’s distinction between the mere drunkard and
the drunkard ‘unable to pay his debts or to maintain his children’ was thus
utterly spurious.94 Fearing that such ideas would effectively ‘unmoralise’
the state (as his brother Leslie put it), J. F. Stephen applied this to a wide
range of ‘gross and outrageous’ behaviour.95 George Vasey, too, attacked
Mill in Individual Liberty (1867) on the financial issue, focussing on the
89 Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, pp. 129, 124. Stephen’s own conclusion was that the ‘wise
minority’ were in some circumstances quite justified in ‘coercing the foolish majority for their own
good’, particularly where the maintenance of religion, morality and systems of government (all areas
in which the majority were largely ignorant) were concerned (pp. 32, 15, 29). His key distinction
from Mill thus lies in his defence of liberty as ‘the absence of injurious restraint’ (p. 185). For
commentary see Smith, James Fitzjames Stephen, pp. 160–214. A similar line of criticism is L[eslie]
S[tephen], ‘Social Macadamisation’, 157.
90 Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 131. From this followed Stephen’s suggestion that if the
inconvenience of compulsion were overbalanced by the good produced, utilitarianism justified
compulsion in certain instances. Interestingly, John Morley interrogates Stephen on some of these
issues, particularly pressing home the question as to whether ‘the practice of seducing young women’
was ‘self-regarding’ (Nineteenth-Century Essays, p. 132). Morley in fact thought correctly that Stephen
denied that any acts were solely self-regarding, and pointed out that Mill on the issue of health
had followed Comte in making protection a social issue (p. 130). This example is also discussed in
McCloskey, John Stuart Mill, pp. 114–15.
91 Mallock, Studies in Contemporary Superstition, p. 146.
92 [Keene], Chabeena. Trivial Talk on Indian Subjects, p. 27.
93 The National Reformer (12 Dec. 1875), 379.
94 Montague, The Limits of Individual Liberty, pp. 186–7.
95 Stephen, The Life of James Fitzjames Stephen, p. 333; Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 163.
consequences of intemperance.96 To Mill drunkenness was ‘of no conse-
quence so long as you pay for your liquor, and keep out of debt. Dissipation
and extravagance may be indulged in with impunity, if you take care to
honour your bills and provide for your family.’ So long as ‘his tradesmen
have agreed to give him a certain amount of credit – he is irreproachable
as long as the credit endures, even though extravagant and a drunkard’.
If, however, ‘when his bills become due – he is unable to meet his lia-
bilities’, then ‘he is deservedly reprobated, and might be justly punished’.
But according to Mill this was ‘for the breach of duty to his creditors –
not for the extravagance, which was the cause of it’.97 This logic, Vasey
held, extended to all infringements of morality and was doubly damning
insofar as we must punish equally the merely unlucky bankrupt investor
with the worthless profligate and spendthrift. Consequences are everything
and motive evidently nothing. Public censure might of course fall upon an
unmarried person who subsequently becomes a public burden. But it was
much more likely to occur when familial obligation existed. These inter-
pretations of Mill need to be taken seriously once again. For here we see
that the family was commonly understood as providing the foundation for
Mill’s assessment of how the self- versus non-self-regarding distinction was
to operate, a contrast many such critics simply rejected as one of degree.98
But to Mill it was clearly not: acts in themselves self-regarding, such as
drunkenness and fornication, became social in nature when they affected
other duties. To draw a line between the two was essential, even if it meant
providing one rule for the rich and another for the rest.
The issue of class – independence, or ‘autonomy’ – was thus central
here. How widely should we extend the internal logic of Mill’s position?
What about other vices, like gambling, drunkenness, drug addiction and
so forth? How might they be affected by the same principle? The answer
is, substantially. We have only to consider the case of heroin addiction.
Despite its destructiveness such a state we may fairly safely presume to be,
on Mill’s basic principle, prima facie self-regarding, if abominably so. What
if the addict has children? Here we see the crux of the matter. The poor
addict, with little opportunity to maintain both a drug habit and familial
obligations, will quickly face non-self-regarding interference. A wealthy
addict, even with multitudinous offspring, will not: addiction becomes
punishable only when we cannot sustain our habit. Setting a bad example,
96 See also, e.g., Fothergill, Liberty, Licence, and Prohibition.
97 Vasey, Individual Liberty. Legal, Moral, and Licentious, p. 86.
98 E.g., Montague, The Limits of Individual Liberty, pp. 186–7, which fruitfully traces Mill’s distinction
to social contract theory.
even to our children, is insufficient grounds for describing an act, even
a prolonged and morbid condition, as non-self-regarding, no matter how
much reproach, disapprobation, and censure we may feel it justifies,99 no
matter how much our ‘nobility of character’ and sense of dignity are sapped
thereby. This will hold for any other vice. The poor, by definition, are
enjoined to greater prudence and restraint than the wealthy, and these will
be enforced exactly in proportion to their familial obligations. The idea of
the ‘virtuous poor’ takes on an entirely new meaning here. To be poor is to
be compelled to be virtuous. A huge range of activity which is self-regarding
for the wealthy, even if, as beneath our dignity, not morally condonable, is
non-self-regarding as such for the poor: such are the results of a resolute
consequentialism. Mill has, willy-nilly, both mirrored and accounted for a
hypocritical and duplicitious Victorian standard of morality to a surprising
degree.
It is difficult to avoid concluding that the notion that the distinction
between self- and non-self-regarding acts provides an ethical distinction
which treats individuals qua individuals, cutting across class boundaries,
is manifestly preposterous. Mill’s account of obligation is overwhelmingly
legal and financial in its implications and rooted in a familial rather than
an individualist model. Mill has often been supposed to have provided a
defence of the leading role of an intellectual aristocracy or clerisy to shore
up standards in advance of a tidal wave of democratic mediocrity. In fact,
outside of the chapter on ‘Individuality’, he has given us the justification
for a dual system of morals which is far more elitist. For, far from being
based on moral worth, like, for instance, Godwin’s ethical system, it is
based solely on financial well-being. Or, if we do not accept this view,
Mill’s Victorian critics suggested, we can punish all immorality equally,
paternalistically, and throw out the self-regarding category entirely, on the
basis that no man or woman is an island.
It might be objected that while Mill insisted that the population question
was usually ‘treated chiefly as a labourer’s question’, he intended it to apply
to ‘not only the labouring classes, but all persons, except the few who
being able to give to their offspring the means of independent support
during the whole of life, do not leave them to swell the competition for
employment’.100 This in fact only underscores the interpretation offered
here. Class pre-eminently underpins Mill’s hypothesis. Individuals who
99 And all of these, arguably, are much more easily tolerated by the wealthy, who are much less
dependent upon the kindness of others.
100 CW 2, p. 372 [1848]. But this of course again precedes the mandatory work provisions in Mill’s
later inheritance proposals.
produce children they cannot support should clearly be subject to social
disapprobation, more than in any other instance of behaviour which was
immoral but not illegal.101
Whatever we make of the henpecked claim that On Liberty’s leading
ideas were ‘mostly’ Harriet Taylor’s,102 this is not apparently true respect-
ing Mill’s prospective marriage restrictions, which seem greatly at variance
with the spirit of her early essay on ‘Toleration’. It is possible, given Mill’s
insistence that she had virtually dictated the ‘Probable Futurity’ chapter,
which asserted that the poor ‘cannot any longer be governed or treated
like children’, that Mill was somewhat at loggerheads with her on this
issue, though the chapter did advise ‘provident habits’ to reduce popu-
lation. Yet this may have been a reason why Mill did not bring familial
responsibility more to the fore in On Liberty, or push harder for legal
sanctions.
On Liberty nonetheless defends this example as the strongest case for
paternalism in a civilised society. Yet is this strictly speaking ‘paternalist’,
if interference intends not to benefit the individual, at least not directly
or chiefly, but children firstly, secondarily labourers as a class, and ulti-
mately, society? And how should we view this vis-à-vis Mill’s supposed
general antipathy to paternalism in the labour market, which Samuel Hol-
lander acknowledges appears contradictory to Mill’s injunction?103 Mill
himself, we should emphasise, does indeed apply the term ‘paternal’ here,
insisting that those European governments saw their duty as caring for
‘the physical well-being and comfort of the people . . . paternal care is con-
nected with paternal authority’, with restrictions on marriage resulting.
Legal controls were ‘exercised by the state for their benefit’. Far from allow-
ing the working classes, then, to suffer ‘the natural consequences of their
mistakes in life’, Mill wished ‘society to guard against the mistakes, by
prevention or punishment’.104 He indisputably considered such legislation
as ‘paternalist’. Yet the literature on Mill and paternalism has ignored this
issue almost entirely, focussing on his treatment of children’s rights rather
than the far more prominent duties of parents, and the state’s obligation
101 Hence one logically consistent approach to the well-known seat-belt example would be that married
persons or those with dependants, including parents who might require support in old age, should
be obliged to wear seat-belts. The maxim is of course thus unpoliceable, unless wealth again trumps
obligation, in which case an unpalatably chilling case of class privilege would result. Whether the
operative health-care system was private or publicly sponsored would again complicate the issue,
for in the latter case a presumptive obligation to take reasonable care of one’s health might be
implied.
102 E.g., Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, p. 399.
103 Hollander, The Economics of John Stuart Mill (vol. 2), p. 953. 104 CW 4, p. 374.
to guarantee them.105 The argument that Mill merely advocated a ‘weak
paternalism’ now seems odd: this is a very robust form indeed.106 And the
issue here, we should recall, is not expediency: it is Mill’s theory of justice,
and its impact upon his theory of liberty.
Mill did not thereafter abandon these claims. In 1865 he reiterated that
‘restrictions on marriage’, like other actions ‘directly injurious to others
than the agents themselves’, were not ‘objectionable on the principle of
Liberty’. Individuals were morally liable respecting such actions and might
subsequently be made legally culpable. He clarified his position, however,
noting that he had ‘expressly guarded myself against being understood
to mean that legal restrictions on marriage are expedient’. This was, he
added, ‘an altogether different question, to which I conceive no universal
& peremptory answer can be given’.107 But the issue of expediency does
not affect in the least Mill’s conviction that marriage restrictions did not
infringe the liberty principle. Indeed this passage seems to convey the
meaning that such restrictions were indeed desirable if they could be made
expedient. This perspective upon On Liberty, however, cannot comfortably
be incorporated into a heroic narrative of Mill’s liberal virtues, at least not
as these have been traditionally conceived.
Mill’s Malthusianism, then, was a leading, not a peripheral, feature in his
thought. Contemporaries recognised that amongst the political economists
Malthus’s ideas had been accepted ‘by none more unreservedly than by the
greatest of them all, J.S. Mill’.108 Yet cognoscenti will recognise that the
issue here is not merely Malthusianism, but a stronger formulation for
restricting the right to marriage than Malthus had proposed.109 The first
edition of the Essay on Population merely suggested that the labourer who
married ‘without being able to support a family, may in some respects
be considered as an enemy to all his fellow-labourers’. The second more
strongly emphasised the ‘duty of each man not to marry till he has a prospect
of supporting children’.110 These were deductions in turn from the principle
that no one had a right to claim subsistence from society whose labour ‘will
not purchase it’.111 Marriage otherwise was ‘an immoral act’, if ‘not one
105 E.g., Hodson, ‘The Principle of Paternalism’, 61–9. 106 Ten, Mill On Liberty, p. 110.
107 CW 16, p. 1124. 108 [?Greg], Malthus Re-Examined by the Light of Physiology, p. 7.
109 Hence critics insisted that any attempt to reduce family size had met with Malthus’s ‘vehement
disapproval’, and accused the neo-Malthusians of indulging sensuality (Newman, The Corruption
Now Called Neo-Malthusianism, p. 7).
110 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1978), p. 86; An Essay (vol. 2), p. 94.
111 Ibid., p. 128. Malthus continued that ‘there is one right which man has generally been thought to
possess, which I am confident he neither does, nor can possess – a right to subsistence when his
labour will not fairly purchase it. Our laws indeed say that he has this right, and bind the society to
which society can justly take upon itself to prevent or punish’. Instead the
laws of God would doom any resulting children to starvation.112 But if it
had not been ‘the inference originally drawn from the truth propounded
by Mr. Malthus’, Mill thought Malthus had provided ‘thoughtful men’
the argument that the economical condition of the labouring class was
‘susceptible of permanent improvement’.113 Moreover, Malthus presumed
that restricting the birth rate required delaying marriage and remaining
celibate. Mill thought restraint within marriage, including, most likely,
artificial measures, a more realistic option. Malthus would not acknowledge
sexual impropriety as an outlet for the frustrations incumbent on such
a scheme. Mill, for all his antipathy to the ‘animalism and sensuality’ of
bodily appetite,114 implies embracing a mistress was a self-regarding activity,
perhaps indeed by tri- or quadripartite consent, even within marriage. (He
had, after all, some experience of the scenario himself.) But again, there
may be a less than symbiotic relationship here between the directions in
which Mill’s principle pointed and his own judgements about what was
morally appropriate behaviour. For a less licentious person than John Stuart
Mill, who may have gone to his grave a virgin, it is hard to imagine.115 Yet
furnish employment and food to those who cannot get them in the regular market; but in so doing,
they attempt to reverse the laws of nature; and it is in consequence to be expected, not only that
they should fail in their object, but that the poor who were intended to be benefited, should suffer
most cruelly from this inhuman deceit which is practised upon them’ (An Essay on the Principle of
Population, vol. 2, p. 127). Malthus’s proposal to introduce legislation to deny children born after a
certain date any right to subsistence from the parish may ironically have been inspired by William
Godwin (see my The French Revolution Debate in Britain, pp. 155–9).
112 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (vol. 2), p. 140. But Malthus also insisted that the
‘obligation on every man to support his children, whether legitimate or illegitimate, is so clear and
strong, that it would be just to arm society with any power to enforce it which would be likely to
answer the purpose’ (p. 143). Cf. also: ‘All that the society can reasonably require of its members is
that they should not have families without being able to support them. This may be fairly enjoined
as a solemn duty’ (p. 151). And p. 218: ‘the sole reason why I say that the poor have no claim of
right to support is the physical impossibility of relieving this progressive population.’
113 CW 4, p. 366.
114 CW 14, p. 26. By contrast, Bentham did not think that sexual gratification as such belonged ‘to the
department of morality’ (Williford, ‘Bentham on the Rights of Women’, 172), and compared it to
tobacco use, in the sense, evidently, of being enjoyed as a matter of individual discretion; he even
said it was the ‘highest enjoyment’ nature had bestowed on man (Dinwiddy, Bentham, p. 41). It
is not known what if anything Bentham smoked. But it seems unlikely that he remained celibate.
Thanks to Philip Schofield for clarifying these issues. On Mill’s distaste for the erotic, chalked up
partly to Taylor’s account, see Ryan, ‘Sense and Sensibility in Mill’s Political Thought’, p. 136. In
the Autobiography Mill remarked that his father had regarded the ‘perversion of the imagination
and feelings’ occasioned by ‘the physical relation and its adjuncts’ as ‘one of the deepest seated and
most pervading evils in the human mind’ (CW 1, p. 108), and that in the character of a cynic he
had had ‘scarcely any belief in pleasure, at least in his last years’ (CW 1, p. 48). This reeks of the
implication that James Mill had a powerful sense of guilt about his own youthful desires.
115 See Stafford, John Stuart Mill, p. 96. It had been conjectured that Mill practised birth control, and
thus had no children, or had no desire for intercourse (Mazlish, James and John Stuart Mill, pp. 111,
287). Jacobs’ research seems to have put paid to this interpretation.
to a Malthusian the neo-Malthusian – even the Saint of Rationalism – will
nearly always appear licentious.
Could there have been other sources, besides Malthus, for Mill’s pro-
posed restrictions on marriage? Bentham had described marriage as ‘the
bond of society, the foundation of civilization’, and thought society had
‘the strongest claim’ on parents to maintain their children.116 James Mill
was an unreserved Malthusian.117 But they do not seem to have provided
the chief inspiration for Mill’s formulation of this issue. Certainly ‘util-
ity’ influences this restriction, though Malthus is not always branded a
‘utilitarian’,118 and it has been noted that the ‘uncritical acceptance of
Malthusianism by the Utilitarians remains an unsolved problem’.119 (If we
recall that Francis Place had fifteen children and James Mill nine, this seems
less odd.) The emphasis Mill gives to this theme in On Liberty does under-
score utilitarian arguments. Yet other earlier utilitarians had not moved
towards Mill’s position. David Hume had conceded that men, in begetting
children, were ‘bound, by all the ties of nature and humanity, to provide
for their subsistence and education’.120 William Godwin famously aspired
to the eventual abolition of marriage but equally the supersession of undue
sensual indulgence (a position curiously close to Mill’s in some respects).121
William Paley, however, upheld the virtues of the institution, and con-
demned fornication, prostitution, cohabitation and adultery as tending to
discourage marriage. But Paley also agreed that neglecting parental duties
should be condemned ‘with the utmost severity’, noting particularly the
need to enforce a conscientious sense of obligation ‘in stations of life, in
which the wants of a family cannot be supplied without the continual hard
labour of the father, and without his refraining from many indulgences and
recreations which unmarried men of like condition are able to purchase’ –
an interesting foreshadowing of Mill’s position. The parent’s duty to main-
tain the child was enjoined by the Scriptural injunction that if ‘any provide
not for his own, especially for those of his own household, he hath denied
the faith, and is worse than an infidel’ (l Tim. v. 8).122 Besides utilitarianism,
other political economists also contemplated proposals similar to Mill’s; the
116 The Works of Jeremy Bentham (vol. 1), p. 349 (Principles of the Civil Code); p. 25. Bentham here
considers various restrictions which might be placed upon marriage, such as marriage to near
relations, but poverty is not amongst his criteria for such restrictions.
117 Mill, Essay on the Impolicy of a Bounty on the Exportation of Grain, pp. 23–4.
118 Ernest Albee, for instance, does not mention him in his A History of English Utilitarianism, while
Stephen classifies him as ‘one of the prophets, if not the leading prophet, of the Utilitarians’ (The
English Utilitarians, vol. 2, p. 138).
119 Sowell, ‘Malthus and the Utilitarians’ (vol. 1), p. 215.
120 Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (vol. 1), p. 231.
121 Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (vol. 2), pp. 243–7.
122 Paley, The Works of William Paley (vol. 1), pp. 210–11, 213.
emigration proponent Edward Gibbon Wakefield, whose work Mill knew
well, for instance, playfully suggested that if contracting marriage without
making a provision for the resulting children were made a transportable
offence, the entire expense of the transportation system could be met.123
Yet of course, again, this was clearly inexpedient. All such discussions
required great delicacy, and Mill’s reticence here is easily explicable. He
had gotten into trouble in 1865 over his views, with the Standard attacking
as ‘dangerous and disgusting’ his theories on population and marriage.124
In private correspondence, even, Mill was equivocal about his position.
Writing to Gustave D’Eichthal in 1869, for instance, he noted of George
Drysdale’s anonymously published Elements of Social Science (which he mis-
takenly thought written by his brother Charles), that ‘Without having read
the entire book, I became acquainted with some of it when it first appeared.
I found in it some excellent things, with others less pleasing to me. I think
the author, in any case, an enlightened man, and very zealous in most of the
best causes.’ The following year, however, he flatly reversed himself, relating
to an English correspondent that he had ‘never on any occasion whatever, in
public or private, expressed any approbation of the book entitled Elements
of Social Science’, adding: ‘[N]or am I likely ever to have done so, inasmuch
as I very strongly object to some of the opinions expressed in it.’125 And a
year later, in a letter to the leading neo-Malthusian Charles Bradlaugh, who
had evidently linked Mill’s name to the Elements in public meetings, Mill
again denied ever having commended the work.126 This gives us a clearer
sense of his hypersensitivity to the subject, his tendency to obscure his own
message by using ‘incontinence’ and ‘intemperance’ when discussing birth
control and his extreme reluctance to be publicly associated with these
issues.127 (But privately in 1868 he lauded Bradlaugh’s courage in promot-
ing Malthusianism in the face of working class prejudices.)128 The social
ostracism he had suffered so painfully through his early relationship with
Harriet Taylor, as well as his youthful arrest, doubtless heightened his own
reluctance to pronounce his own views too loudly, as did his acute awareness
123 Wakefield, Letter from Sydney, pp. 87–8. He at the same time denied that the poor had any right to
marry if this meant ‘throwing a heavy burden on the parish by their families’. Again a disjuncture
between right and punishment is evident.
124 CW 16, p. 1075. 125 CW 17, pp. 1611, 1768. Original in French; my translation.
126 The Amberley Papers (vol. 2), pp. 243–4.
127 CW 32, pp. 225–6; CW 14, p. 21. Himes underscores this point and concludes that Mill ‘deliberately
determined’ on a policy of not discussing the issue publicly, for fear that no one would pay any
attention to anything else he wrote (‘John Stuart Mill’s Attitude towards Neo-Malthusianism’,
478–84). Miles insists that Mill ‘always repudiated’ expressing a belief in the necessity of birth
control in public (Francis Place, p. 149).
128 CW 16, p. 1450.
of his growing role as a public figure and his unwillingness to jeopardise
other causes with which he was associated, particularly feminism.129 He
was fully aware, as a hostile contemporary study put it, that Malthusianism
now met ‘with but doubtful approval, to say the least’. The controversy
became especially heated in the last years of his life, as he was dragged, as
we will see, inadvertently into a neo-Malthusian quagmire by the doctrine’s
activists.130 Some gap remained, then, between Mill the private moralist
and Mill the public moralist. This disjunction, more than anything else,
has led to his Malthusianism being overlooked or downplayed.131
Before we turn to how Mill’s arguments were taken up by others, we
must consider briefly how The Subjection of Women (1869) relates to the
argument presented so far.132 It has sometimes been presumed that Mill’s
feminism was a kind of (Taylor-driven) afterthought once his leading lib-
eral principles had been established.133 Many of Mill’s friends, including
Alexander Bain, disliked the Subjection’s assertion that women were men-
tally men’s equals. Its Malthusian context is hardly ever discussed, though
we have seen here that it was central to Mill’s general account of progress. It
is highly likely that this was the book projected under the theme of ‘family’
which Mill and Taylor had discussed in 1854 when planning their joint
output (which implies a greater conceptual intimacy between On Liberty
and the Subjection than is usually presumed).134 But its origins lie much
earlier, for around 1832–33 both Taylor and Mill had written out separate
statements of their ideals of marriage, with Taylor not only plumping for
‘placing women on the most entire equality with men, as to all rights and
privileges, civil and political’, but then asking ‘what evil could be caused
by . . . then doing away with all laws whatever relating to marriage?’, and
immediately concluding: ‘Then if a woman had children she must take
charge of them, women could not then have children without considering
129 As emphasised by Collini, Public Moralists, p. 124, who draws out the linkages with Mill’s occasional
paranoia (p. 129).
130 Ussher, Neo-Malthusianism, p. 2.
131 His disciples were similarly demure; Henry Fawcett, for instance, condemned the poor’s expectation
that they had ‘a right which ought not to be disputed, that they should marry whether they are in
a position to support a family or not, and they consider that maintenance ought to be provided for
as many children as they choose to call into existence’, but offered no remedy (Pauperism, p. 10).
132 See, most recently, Morales, Perfect Equality, esp. pp. 115–80, and Morales, ‘Rational Freedom in
Mill’s Feminism’.
133 For a summary of changing views of the text, see Annas, ‘Mill and the Subjection of Women’ and
Shanley, ‘Marital Slavery and Friendship’. Some writers do, however, link it to Mill and Taylor’s
broad quest for equality, and to socialist principles. See, e.g., Okin, ‘John Stuart Mill’s Feminism’
and Krouse, ‘Patriarchal Liberalism and Beyond’.
134 So assumes Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, pp. 368–9. Taylor had been working on an account
of women’s disabilities two years earlier.
how to maintain them . . . on this plan it would be the womans interest
not to have children – now it is thought to be the woman’s interest to
have children as so many ties to the man who feeds her.’135 This demon-
strates dramatically how interwoven the issue of duties to children and
feminism were to Taylor at this early stage. And Mill’s views, even at this
stage, were probably not too dissimilar. He had been exposed to Owenite
views of marriage (and its possible abolition) from the mid 1820s.136 He
may have drawn from his spirited discussions with Auguste Comte a sense
of the vital centrality of the family in forming the individual’s first sense
of moral identity and loyalty, before any conceptions of higher duties to
neighbourhood or nation had been formed.137 Comte was wholly wrong
about women, but not about the family as a moral nursery.138 This gave
Mill, negatively at least, an account of the family as the source of ideas of
either dependency, patriarchy and inequality, or self-dependency, equality
and mutual assistance.
It was the transition from the former to the latter which was the great
theme of The Subjection of Women. Here, as with Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the family was portrayed as
a miniature polity.139 Ruled autocratically, it was ‘the nursery of these
vices of character’ which characterised political despotism, namely the
‘wilfulness, overbearingness, unbounded self-indulgence, and a double-
dyed and idealized selfishness’ of the husband and father. Yet it could be
the opposite. The family, Mill stressed in 1868, ‘offers a type and a school of
the relation of superiors and inferiors, exemplified in parents and children;
it should also offer a type and a school of the relation of equality, exemplified
in husband and wife’.140 ‘Citizenship, in free countries, is partly a school
135 CW 21, p. 376. This ms. is in Taylor’s hand and is elsewhere reprinted as hers (Jacobs, The Complete
Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, p. 23).
136 Stefan Collini notes that it is not known whether Mill discussed such issues at this period (CW
21, p. lix), but Owen had long been linked to neo-Malthusian ideas, and given Mill’s knowledge
of Carlile and Place’s views on the matter, it seems impossible that he could not have heard about
Owen’s theories on marriage, freedom of divorce and the like.
137 A plausible speculation, but without proof; Raeder (John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity),
for instance, makes no such assertion. Britton goes so far as to write that Mill cared ‘nothing at all’
for the ‘existence of the family as a centre of personal loyalties’, and never succeeded in taking the
family seriously (John Stuart Mill, pp. 107, 110). Comte did agree that limiting families to three
children was sensible.
138 But Mill did believe, respecting the issue of divorce, that children were usually better off if families
remained together (CW 21, p. 47). Duties towards children here clearly trumped rights of parents.
On the family and the learning of morals, see, e.g., Britton, John Stuart Mill, p. 69.
139 The parallels between the texts are so striking that one can infer that Mill and Taylor had it before
them when the Subjection was composed.
140 CW 28, p. 286.
of society in equality’, the Subjection stressed, ‘but citizenship fills only a
small place in modern life, and does not come near the daily habits or
inmost sentiments. The family, justly constituted, would be the real school
of the virtues of freedom.’ A society aspiring to equality and founded
upon an ideal of mutual friendship,141 could not found domestic life upon
relations so ‘contradictory to the first principles of social justice’, which
had ‘a perverting influence’ of great magnitude. Other attempts to ‘efface
the influences on character of the law of force, and replace them by those
of justice’ would remain ineffectual ‘as long as the citadel of the enemy is
not attacked’. We see here how closely, then, the Subjection was linked to
the chief themes of On Liberty: freedom, ‘the first and strongest want of
human nature’, could not be achieved where the ‘love of power and the
love of liberty are in eternal antagonism’. Where there was least liberty,
the passion for power was ‘the most ardent and unscrupulous’. But this
‘desire of power over others can only cease to be a depraving agency among
mankind, when each of them individually is able to do without it: which
can only be where respect for liberty in the personal concerns of each is
an established principle’. The ‘moral regeneration of mankind’ thus could
‘only really commence, when the most fundamental of the social relations’,
the family, was ‘placed under the rule of equal justice, and when human
beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in rights
and in cultivation’.142 The Subjection was thus Mill and Taylor’s strongest
statement of a right to and the value of autonomy conceived of as self-
development.143 This in turn may be construed principally as absence of
dominion, or having a master, or alternatively, self-dominion, republican
liberty, or ‘independence’. Yet of course there remain tensions between
these ideals. Self-dominion and self-development are simply not the same
things, for we may not, though in full possession of our faculties and
our selves, be inclined to advance further along the path of self-realisation
construed as moral self-improvement.144 We may also revel in some form of
‘hero-worship’ – raising ourselves by revering our superiors. But there are
many dangers here, too, not least that we lapse into passive acquiescence
141 Usually regarded as Mill and Taylor’s own conception (e.g. Reeves, John Stuart Mill, p. 439), though
with classical foundations.
142 CW 21, pp. 288–9, 294–5, 325–6, 336–8.
143 This follows the argument presented in Donner, ‘John Stuart Mill’s Liberal Feminism’. Mill
and Taylor may, paradoxically, here have subscribed to specifically masculine virtues, disdaining
specifically the ‘submission’ of ‘yielding to the control of others’ which women had been trained
to aspire to. See Jones, ‘John Stuart Mill as a Moralist’, 302.
144 On the distinction between having no master and mastering oneself, see Skinner, ‘A Third Concept
of Liberty’, pp. 244–5. Skinner portrays Mill and Taylor’s position as embracing ‘a wholeheartedly
republican conception of freedom’ (‘On the Liberty of the Ancients and the Moderns’, 71, 131).
and fail to attain the active type of character Mill so prized. But benevolent
paternalism was not an option in the family any more than the outside
society: equality was to prevail in both.
Whatever their inclinations in the 1830s, Mill and Taylor did not, like
many socialists of the period, seek in later decades to abolish the family, but
wished rather to transcend its patriarchal limitations. Unlike Comte, Mill
and Taylor also saw feminism as a crucial means of reducing population
growth. But we are again driven back to ‘henpecked’. It is difficult not to
concur with Packe, here, that Malthusianism furnished ‘the foundation of
the entire social philosophy of Mill’.145 But Packe also argues that Taylor’s
‘increasing absorption’ around 1852 in the ‘particular injustice’ of the dis-
abilities of women was ‘sharply reflected’ in Mill’s work as well. Her ‘almost
hypnotic’ control over Mill led him to incorporate it ‘as a vital part of the
population problem, and it became the fundamental issue of his entire
social philosophy, a theme repeated and developed in one way or another
in practically everything he subsequently wrote’. The wedding of feminism
and Malthusianism, in other words, was chiefly Taylor’s accomplishment.
As evidence for this, Packe cites the insertion in the third edition (1852) of
the Principles of a new paragraph on checking thriftless breeding, quoted
earlier. In 1848 and 1849 Mill had written that it would be ‘premature to
discuss’ whether ‘a legal sanction would be ultimately required, or moral
sanctions, and the indirect influence of law and policy, would suffice’. In
1852, as we have seen, he replaced this with the assertion that legal sanctions
would not be required if women gained the same rights of citizenship as
men.146 To Packe, passages like these, ‘almost certainly Harriet’s’, outlined
‘the conceptions later contained in the Liberty and Subjection of Women –
the same conceptions she had faintly defined in her incompleted essays
twenty years before’. To Packe, as we have seen, they now ‘became the
most evangelical of Mill’s convictions, and the basis of his claim to be con-
sidered a progressive, original sociologist’.147 This represents a very different
variation on ‘henpecked’. Harriet Taylor had saved Mill from succumbing
to the authoritarian threat of controlled breeding by ‘legal sanctions’, had
moved feminism to the centre of his intellectual agenda and had rooted
146 CW 2, pp. 372–3. Mill would write a correspondent in 1871 that he had ‘long been of the opinion
expressed by you “that the cause of over-population” or at all events a necessary condition of it “is
woman’s subjugation, & that the cure is her enfranchisement”’ (CW 17, p. 1801). Richard Soloway,
however, denies that Mill thought that feminism was linked to smaller families (Birth Control and
the Population Question in England, p. 133).
147 Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, p. 315. Some regard Taylor’s possible contribution to the
Malthusian proposals in the Principles to be an ‘open question’ (Rossi, Essays on Sex Equality, p. 55).
‘self-dependence’ in the family. Both Mill’s own assertion and Helen Tay-
lor’s subsequent acknowledgement that the ideas of On Liberty were essen-
tially Harriet’s now seem more meaningful than ever.148 Rather than chiefly
tilting Mill towards socialism, Harriet now seems to have rescued him from
authoritarianism and shifted his entire social philosophy markedly in the
direction of feminism. If On Liberty, generally agreed to show no evidence
of Mill’s ‘increased sympathy for socialism’,149 was Harriet’s brainchild, she
can hardly be conceived of chiefly as the ‘socialist of the family’ as such,
unless the feminist egalitarianism of the new familial relationship was con-
ceived as anticipating an eventual wider social egalitarianism of a socialist
kind, in which case there may be an interesting tension between On Liberty
and the Subjection of Women. In either case, if Packe is correct, Harriet was
the father to the most conspicuous of Mill’s mature ideals, providing the
seed, with he the mother, germinating them.
mill’s malthusian reputation

The argument offered so far respecting Mill’s Malthusianism has been
based mainly on a scrutiny of his own writings. It can be bolstered by
considering his reputation in this area both during his life and in the
half century or so after his death.150 Had Mill not promoted his ideas,
Malthus’s reputation would, it has been proposed, probably have declined
‘rapidly in importance’ in this period.151 Mill’s insistence that restrictions on
child-bearing did not violate the liberty principle was widely accepted by
those sympathetic to the cause. The evidence of a later generation, when
such matters could be discussed much more openly, not only indicates
that this was a plausible reading of Mill, but that it was the plausible
reading. Here moving off the beaten track by examining reception-history
helps us to understand both the context of a writer’s work and the range
of legitimate meanings attached to it, many of which may have been
subsequently lost sight of, including some logical inferences from Mill’s key
propositions.
Mill certainly had his critics in these years, however. Gladstone was
shocked in 1873 to find Mill ranked among the supporters of birth control.
148 Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, p. 399. 149 CW 18, p. lxi.
150 This is notably omitted in much of the literature on the reception of Mill’s works in the more
respectable periodical press, e.g., Rees, Mill and His Early Critics and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty,
pp. 78–105. Most assessments of Mill’s ‘respectable’ reputation as a ‘political thinker’ simply ignore
this dimension entirely (e.g. Collini, Public Moralists, pp. 311–43).
151 Stigler, Essays in the History of Economics, p. 172.
Others accused him of being ‘deficient in his sympathy for the poor man’
in asserting that it was ‘a crime on the part of the poor to marry’, and
suggested that Mill insinuated that abortions would be ‘laudable’ for poor
women.152 Frederic Harrison doubted if many adopted ‘the theories of Mr.
Mill on Reproductive Abstinence’, even if they did lie ‘at the root of all
his doctrines on Industry’.153 The individualist William Maccall accused
him of wanting to introduce ‘the inquisition of the Political Economist’ to
control population.154
Late Victorian Malthusianism was led by Charles Drysdale, the first
President of the Malthusian League (founded 1877), who saw the chief
difficulties in the theory of liberty as lying in the realm of ‘marriage and
parentage’,155 and his brother Dr George Drysdale, author of the best-
selling Elements of Social Science (1861), which cited Mill frequently.156
George Drysdale described Mill as having been the first to be ‘strongly
in favor’ of ‘direct legislation restrictive of the size of families’, namely ‘a
statute limiting the size of families, and forbidding anyone, whether rich or
poor, to have more than a certain small number of children’.157 The League
printed as one of its first leaflets John Stuart Mill on Small Families (1877),
and often advertised Mill’s views.158 Its journal, The Malthusian, quoted
Mill on its masthead, and aimed chiefly to promote the view that public
opinion could help convert a moral obligation to restrict family size, into a
legal one. It specifically disagreed with Mill about female enfranchisement
removing the difficulty, arguing that ‘the most weighty reasons in favour
of legislation on this subject’ would remain.159 Yet it also published an
152 A Liberal, A Review of Mr. J.S. Mill’s Essay ‘On Liberty’, pp. 11, 18.
153 Harrison, National & Social Problems, p. 288. He added elsewhere, however, that Mill had agreed
with Comte respecting ‘the social grounds for limitation of the population’ (On Society, p. 218).
154 Maccall, The Newest Materialism, p. 18. 155 The Malthusian (March 1882), 297.
156 E.g., The Elements of Social Science, pp. 315–23. Various editions of the work had a quote from Mill
on the title page. It described the Principles as having the doctrine ‘of population as its keystone’
(Elements, 1884, p. 316), and gave a lengthy summary of Mill’s account of marriage regulation
(pp. 316–23). Drysdale called Mill ‘the most advanced social philosopher of this or any other age’
(p. 467) and ‘the most eminent economist and sociologist of the age’ (p. 507). On the League
generally see Ledbetter, A History of the Malthusian League 1877–1927.
157 [Drysdale], The State Remedy for Poverty, pp. 9, 1.
158 E.g., Malthusian Tracts, no. 3: The Limitation of Families (1868), p. 1. See also Holyoake, Large or
Small Families?, which cites Mill.
159 The Malthusian (March 1879), 14. Other journals linked to the cause also supported the view that
‘a condition of things is possible which might make such an enactment necessary’, and debated
the argument that those with larger earnings should have the right to larger families because the
children would be better brought up and the ‘superior qualities of their parents would tend to be
reproduced in increased proportion’. Some thought, too, that Mill was ‘strongly in favour’ of legal
penalties, though others objected that these would prove ‘an irritant, and result in rebellion’ (The
National Reformer, 15 Dec. 1878, 372).
ingenious satirical novel, The Strike of a Sex, which described women as
achieving equal rights only after a lengthy refusal of sexual intercourse to
men.160 George Drysdale emphasised that legal regulation of marriage (he
proposed a small fine on large families) was not possible until the majority
of the nation strongly favoured it.161 Charles suggested that having more
than four children per family should be ‘looked upon as a vice’, as Mill had
suggested, and discouraged ‘by disgrace and the loss of public esteem’.162
In An Individualist’s Utopia, a leading League member and ardent disciple
(but also critic) of Mill, the Privy Council civil servant Joseph Hiam Levy,
described a society where the less fit breed less, the more fit more and
‘parents took good care to have no more than they could bring up well in
all respects, so that they might have a fair prospect of being happy and useful
members of society’. Here state interference with marriage extends only to
‘uphold a minimum of parental responsibility’, and ‘domestic democracy’
prevails in the family.163 Another League member, William Coupland,
published a pamphlet entitled The Principle of Individual Liberty, which
justified state restrictions on childbirth.164 Others thought a ‘slight penalty
on the producing of large families’ might do the trick, and pointed out
that the state already punished men and women by separating them in
the workhouse.165 Mill’s ideas indeed permeated the League’s proceedings,
which were also debated frequently in the London Dialectical Society,
160 Miller, The Strike of a Sex, pp. 6–7. The outcome of rights gained for women was to be that ‘her
children, if she has any, will be only children which are desired, and to the bearing of which she has
joyfully consented’ (p. 31). The scheme is also supported in [Ogden], Fecundity versus Civilisation,
pp. 38–43.
161 [Drysdale], The Extinction of War, Poverty, and Infectious Diseases, p. 67. The fine was to be kept
small to discourage abortion and infanticide (C. Drysdale, The Life and Writings of Thomas R.
Malthus, p. 112).
162 The Malthusian (July 1886), 51; C. Drysdale, The Life and Writings of Thomas R. Malthus, p. 101.
But he added that Mill seemed ‘to favor the framing of a statute directed against the production of
large families’, and emphasised that Mill thought it ‘a confusion of ideas to style the bringing into
life of another human being, an act purely self-regarding’ (p. 111).
163 Levy, An Individualist’s Utopia, pp. 8, 220, 14. Private property in land has been abolished here, and
inheritance laws greatly altered, with bequests becoming moderate ‘without political interference’
(p. 13). Cooperation and gender equality exist, but there are no franchise restrictions. The remuner-
ation of labour is ‘distributed equally’ without the need for state intervention (p. 13). Levy described
his philosophical aim as creating ‘an amended and extended Millism’, specifically invoking Mill’s
views on women, parentage and land (The Individualist, no. 249, Dec. 1903, 82). The discourse
on breeding the ‘best kind of people’ and not permitting the human race to ‘dwindle and degen-
erate’ is pre-Darwinian (e.g., Morality: And Its Practical Application to Social Institutions, p. 13).
By the 1870s these debates had merged, with Mill being quoted on the regulation of family size
alongside proposals for qualitative regulation (e.g. Palmer, Individual, Family and National Poverty,
pp. 3–7).
164 Coupland, The Principle of Individual Liberty, How Far Applicable to the Relations of the Sexes, p. 24.
165 The National Reformer (12 Jan. 1875), 20.
founded in 1864 to discuss the principles of On Liberty.166 On one such
occasion, in July 1868, the question ‘On the Happiness of the Community
as Affected by Large Families’ was discussed, with an inspector of schools,
James Laurie, citing Mill’s Principles against producing ‘hereditary paupers’
and favouring small farms. Lord Amberley – Bertrand Russell’s father, and
tutored by Laurie – was the focus of an outcry when this discussion was
leaked, but himself believed that ‘women would naturally have a stronger
feeling against large families, had they any say in the matter, and if their
opinions were more heard’.167 Some radical papers, notably Bradlaugh’s,
took up these themes.168 The suspicion of Malthusianism also hovered over
many later Victorian feminists and suffragettes.169 But, as George Standring
put it in the mid-1880s, it does not seem that the ‘advocacy of State coercion’
was ‘generally approved’ even by ‘the Malthusian party’.170 Some socialists
did clearly follow Mill in proposing to regulate childbirth.171 But many did
not, and even some of Mill’s liberal admirers thought he only ‘advocated a
voluntary restriction’, and dismissed even this as ‘a quite unpractical and
impracticable proposal’.172 Some contemporaries inferred that while Mill
seemed here to propose ‘some sort of voluntary renunciation’, this was
combined with the need for ‘compulsory submission’ from ‘any refractory
portion of the community [which] dissented from the compact’, a scheme
which might well be regarded as ‘the imposition of an odious tyranny’.173
The idea is supported by some of his later followers, however.174
Some other later writers also took up Mill’s leadership on related issues.
G. A. Gaskell suggested that the state provide work for all in return for
endowing ‘legitimate motherhood’ and assume the expense of rearing and
educating children in return for ‘responsible’ procreation.175 Jane Hume
Clapperton probably followed Mill in proposing a ‘Spartan’ control over
childbirth as a ‘public event’, while leaving marriage, ‘a private matter’,
untouched.176 The author W. R. Greg, who had some influence on Darwin,
took up Mill’s views on population, insisting that the poor had no right
166 C. Drysdale, The Population Question According to T.R. Malthus and J. S. Mill, p. 62; The Indi-
vidualist, no. 328 (Nov.–Dec. 1913), 83. Charles Drysdale belonged to the Society, as did Charles
Bradlaugh and G. J. Holyoake.
167 The Amberley Papers (vol. 2), pp. 168–70; London Dialectical Society 1868–69, p. 31; Packe, The Life
of John Stuart Mill, pp. 436–7.
168 E.g., The National Reformer (9 June 1860), 7. 169 The Amberley Papers (vol. 1), p. 36.
170 Quoted in Soloway, Birth Control, p. 76. 171 E.g., Nemo, Labour and Luxury, p. 171.
172 Mackay, A Plea for Liberty, p. 54.
173 Walsh, The Practical Results of the Reform Act of 1832, pp. 23–4.
174 Smith, False Hopes; or, Fallacies Socialistic and Semi-Socialistic, Briefly Answered, p. 26.
175 Gaskell, Social Control of the Birth-Rate and Endowment of Mothers, pp. 10–11.
176 Clapperton, Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness, p. 320.
to marry ‘till they have made some provision for the maintenance of the
expected family’.177 The founder of eugenics, Francis Galton, though he
was certainly acquainted with Mill’s works, apparently did not refer to
Mill in his own brief utopia, ‘Kantsaywhere’, which proposed regulating
marriage along eugenics lines by a system of marriage certificates.178 His
chief disciple, Karl Pearson, did however mention Mill on the relationship
between socialism and population. Citing the Principles, he insisted both
on the state’s right to interfere in childbirth, and the evolution of marriage
towards a form of friendship in which child-bearing would play a lesser
role, and where free sexual unions also existed outside of marriage.179 Such
views became relatively common in the closing years of the century and
were thereafter popularised by, amongst others, the immensely influential
H. G. Wells.180 From the 1880s onwards, they were often interwoven with
eugenics proposals, such that reducing family size per se came to conflict
with the principle of creating ‘fit’ types through inherited characteristics
and discouraging the less fit.181
In the heyday of late Victorian Malthusianism, then, Mill’s proposals
were far more acceptable than much of Mill scholarship has acknowledged.
This is not to say that all Malthusians agreed with Mill. Some thought, for
instance, that it was not peasant-proprietorship in several European coun-
tries which lowered their birth rate, but prudence and delayed marriages.182
And there were critics who derided birth control as a ‘quack remedy’
favoured by laissez-faire zealots in particular.183 But Mill was certainly the
central figure in late Victorian and Edwardian Malthusianism, and with
good reason.
conclusion
Despite its title and some of its leading themes, On Liberty portrays the
family, not the individual, as the foundational unit in society, and the right
to bear children as conditional upon recognising a basic duty to maintain
them. Mill’s justification for restricting this right was deeply indebted to
177 Greg, Mistaken Aims and Attainable Ideals of the Artizan Class, p. 103.
178 But the remaining ms. has been heavily censored.
179 Pearson, The Ethic of Freethought, and Other Addresses and Essays, pp. 324, 423.
180 ‘Socialism denies altogether the right of any one to beget children carelessly and promiscuously,
and for the prevention of disease and evil births alike, the Socialist is prepared for an insistence
upon intelligence and self-restraint quite beyond the current practice’ (Socialism and the Family,
p. 58).
181 E.g., [Coste], Towards Utopia, p. 53. 182 H., Poverty: Its Cause and Cure, p. 8.
183 ‘Justitia’, Emigration and the Malthusian Craze in Relation to the Labourers’ Position, p. 1.
Malthusianism, and presented the strongest instance of his application of
paternalism to adults in a civilised society. But it was in his view entirely
commensurate with the liberty principle. He wanted irresponsible breed-
ing to be understood as non-self-regarding and any subsequent neglect of
our duty to raise our family properly to be seen as converting otherwise
‘self-regarding’ acts into ‘non-self-regarding’ acts. Mill did not see individ-
uals as being ‘best judges’ in this instance, and thought public opinion
utterly deluded on this vital issue. This implies clearly, too, that Mill’s
famous distinction was ring-fenced by financial obligation as such, and
resulted, as a number of his critics indicated, in one standard of morals for
the rich and another for the poor, defined in the first instance by familial
obligation. Did Mill’s position represent a form of ‘moral totalitarianism’,
as Cowling suggested, rooted in a desire to see Christianity supplanted by
the ‘liberal, rationalistic utilitarianism which went by the name of the Reli-
gion of Humanity’ and which eventuated in only one definition of the true
and good?184 Mill certainly condoned certain forms of moral confrontation
or engagement as conducive to promoting virtue. But if Mill is ‘illiberal’
in On Liberty (a charge he would not have accepted in this context) it is
not for the reasons Cowling suggests, but for his approach to the family
and to children, which Cowling does not even treat. The argument pre-
sented here does not in any case undermine Mill’s promotion of liberty
and autonomy both as intrinsic goods and essential components in happi-
ness. Mill regarded undue population pressure as one of the greatest threats
to both. Neither the working classes nor society generally could progress
without solving this issue: the greatest happiness hinged upon it more than
any other.
184 Cowling, Mill and Liberalism, p. xiii.

Conclusion
The aims of liberty and paternalism: equal association
and radical meritocracy
In the less advanced states of society, people hardly recognise any relation with
their equals. To be an equal is to be an enemy. Society, from its highest place to
its lowest, is one long chain, or rather ladder, where every individual is either
above or below his nearest neighbour, and wherever he does not command he
must obey. Existing moralities, accordingly, are mainly fitted to a relation of
command and obedience. Yet command and obedience are but unfortunate
necessities of human life: society in equality is its normal state. Already in
modern life, and more and more as it progressively improves, command and
obedience become exceptional facts in life, equal association its general rule.
The morality of the first ages rested on the obligation to submit to power;
that of the ages next following, on the right of the weak to the forbearance
and protection of the strong; . . . We are entering into an order of things in
which justice will again be the primary virtue; grounded as before on equal,
but now also on sympathetic association; having its root no longer in the
instinct of equals for self-protection, but in a cultivated sympathy between
them; and no one being now left out, but an equal measure being extended
to all. [The Subjection of Women, 1869]1
the argument restated

The quotation given above gives a better sense of Mill’s mature intellectual
conclusions than any other from his later works. Here Mill seems to have
taken seriously the Aristotelian maxim that true society is only possible
between equals, and then imagined that such society might be realised on a
considerable scale. ‘Equal association’ – almost a type of friendship2 –
described, after a fashion, Mill’s central mature ideal in one phrase,
1 CW 21, p. 294.
2 Maria Morales reaches similar conclusions about Mill’s ultimate ideal (Perfect Equality, pp. 129–30,
166–74). At times Mill also pushed this ideal towards cosmopolitanism, writing in his ‘Utility of
Religion’ essay, for instance, that considering ‘how ardent a sentiment, in favourable circumstances
of education, the love of country has become, we cannot judge it impossible that the love of that
larger country, the world, may be nursed into similar strength, both as a source of elevated emotion
and as a principle of duty’ (CW 10, p. 421).
211
embracing feminism, the renovated family and cooperative production.
‘Society between equals’, Mill insisted, could ‘only exist on the under-
standing that the interests of all are to be regarded equally’, and required
‘the fact of co-operating with others, and proposing to themselves a col-
lective, not an individual, interest’. Such cooperation meant that ‘their
ends are identified with those of others’, and brought ‘at least a temporary
feeling that the interests of others are their own interests’. The result would
be that the ‘strengthening of social ties, and all healthy growth of society,
give to each individual a stronger personal interest in practically consulting
the welfare of others; it also leads him to identify his feelings more and
more with their good, or at least with an ever greater degree of practical
consideration for it’.3 This ideal, we have seen, was constructed by Mill
gradually from the late 1820s onwards. In the sense of being an image of
the best attainable future, it was in Mill’s own words a ‘utopia’, and would
have looked something like the following:
Co-operative labour, with workers electing their supervisors, predomi-
nates in industry. No-one is subject to the arbitrary will of a master; there
is no servitude. The need for benevolence, soup-kitchens and poor relief
has been minimised, with a marked decline in poverty and the punitive
sanctions associated with it. Working conditions and wages have greatly
improved. All wasteland and probably a substantial amount of large pro-
ductive estates are now largely or wholly owned by the public. Natural
monopolies are regulated and in some instances owned by the state. (But
municipal management is preferred wherever possible.) Everyone labours,
in varying degrees, for their livelihood; living wholly upon inherited wealth
is impossible. Most contribute to governmental and administrative func-
tions at some level. Population growth has been restrained. Economic
expansion has greatly diminished since a high standard of living exists.
Liberty of thought and action have been maximised, with individual moral
autonomy and independence, to the degree commensurate with all pos-
sessing such rights. The sexes are equal in all fundamental social particulars.
Marriage is doubtless a much more flexible institution. The educational
system constantly seeks to enrich cultural and intellectual experience. It also
encourages a general ethos of public duty without militantly enforcing one
ideal of sociability upon the population. Anglo-Saxons have become more
European and perhaps also, in their capacity for leisure, more African, as
Mill understood the concept. Work is not the end of life, but life, increas-
ingly, is the end of work. We will not all, certainly, have become Socrates sat-
isfied. But the many will certainly be less unhappy than they are at present.
3 CW 10, p. 231.
Conclusion: the aims of liberty and paternalism 213
And the few will be gratified by the fact that they have helped to create a
much better society, and that greater equality gives them access to a vastly
greater range of peoples and experiences, and thus of personal development.
These attributes, admittedly, are nowhere outlined together in one pro-
grammatic statement. Mill tinkered with the minutiae associated with all
of them constantly. He worried endlessly about what means suited which
ends. But the ends themselves, cooperation, abolishing wage-labour, fem-
inism, greater equality, meritocracy, remained largely unaltered from the
late 1840s onwards. Those who suppose, then, that Mill ‘offers a picture of
human life in which common purposes have no valid place, in which they
appear more often as potential obstacles to individual self-development’,
fail to see how far Mill had settled upon a viable ideal which suited human-
ity as a whole.4 The notion that Mill’s excessive individualism needed
correction by Green, Ritchie, Bosanquet and others, too, now seems itself
to be in need of revision. Ritchie, we recall, thought Mill took ‘liberty
in the merely negative sense of “being left to oneself ”’. This now looks
wholly implausible, despite the ambiguities in On Liberty indicated at the
outset here. In fact Mill did aim, both through and outside the state, at
what Ritchie wanted, ‘the realisation of the best life by the individual’.
On Liberty did not define this clearly because it was not mainly concerned
with the state.5 But Mill certainly would have agreed with Ritchie’s for-
mulation that an advance in this direction required that at each step ‘the
duties and virtues of the individual are determined by a conception of the
common good’.6 His brand of utilitarianism prescribed exactly this and
described as a key end of society the ‘proposing to themselves a collective,
not an individual, interest, as the aim (at least for the time being) of their
actions’. Particularly in Utilitarianism, Mill portrayed a progressive move-
ment towards a greater sense of equality and of harmony of interests. In an
‘improving state of society’, Mill insisted, such influences were ‘constantly
on the increase’ and tended ‘to generate in each individual a feeling of unity
with all the rest; which feeling, if perfect, would make him never think of,
or desire, any beneficial condition for himself, in the benefits of which they
are not included’.7 And between the state and society, he furnished the
means for instilling this sense of the common good in all citizens. This was
the utilitarianism which On Liberty described as dedicated to ‘the perma-
nent interests of man as a progressive being’.8 It required, as we have seen, a
comprehensive agenda of social and political reform in which government
played a leading role. Generalisations such as ‘Mill did not assign the state
4 Taylor, ‘Religion in a Free Society’, pp. 109–110.
5 Ritchie, The Principles of State Interference, pp. 83–8, 102.
6 Ritchie, The Principles of State Interference, p. 106. 7 CW 10, pp. 231–2. 8 CW 18, p. 224.
an important role in economic development . . . it was the function of the
state to provide and preserve a milieu within which economic individual-
ism could flourish’9 succeed only by ignoring such examples and policies.
Those who conclude that Mill ‘moved the boundaries of governmental
intervention’ beyond those of most liberals are nearer to the mark.10 Mill
the shepherd did aim to protect the sheep from the wolves and was willing
to go a great distance to do so.
We see here, then, the resolution to one of the most vexed of the ‘two
Mill’ problems: did Mill’s liberty principle conflict with his utilitarianism?
The answer provided here, we have seen, is broadly, no. This only becomes
clear, however, once we abandon the unhistorical approach of plucking
quotes and texts which randomly suit our argument from Mill’s oeuvre,
and approach his writings contextually. In this case we must in particular
cease to treat On Liberty as an authoritative, stand-alone text. The domain
of self-regarding behaviour defined in the Principles and then in On Liberty
was not one of all-consuming libertarianism and the absolute sovereignty
of the individual, but one which defined private moral behaviour, and
this chiefly in relation to society rather than the state. Here utility defined
long-term aspirations, but in a ‘progressive’ sense: we should aim to aspire
to higher forms of individuality and character wherever possible. Where
public, common or social-regarding behaviour was at issue, this form of
utilitarianism was to be central to evaluating behaviour. Here the interests
of man as a ‘progressive being’ indicated that competency was required to
define the long-term goals of society (an argument taken up by various
later utilitarians).11 In matters like education and population control, as
much as possible was to be done to raise the long-term knowledge and
ambitions of the whole society, wherever such interventions were deemed
expedient. The ‘united authority of the instructed’, Mill hoped, by and
large, would transform prejudice and superstition into rational consensus,
especially respecting the population question.12 Even within the sphere of
liberty, the need for progress dictates that it is not short-term but long-
term utility which is to be preferred. Yet expediency was also to prevail in
social-regarding behaviour: what any society – or at least a ‘large majority’
thereof – could not yet acknowledge to be right could not and should not
be imposed upon it.
Hence the absolutely crucial importance of free, open, balanced, unprej-
udiced and well-informed debate, of education generally, and of a leading
9 Spengler, ‘John Stuart Mill on Economic Development’, pp. 143, 150.
10 Paul, Moral Revolution and Economic Science, p. 198.
11 E.g., John Hobson, in defending the competency argument, in The Crisis of Liberalism, pp. 79–80.
12 CW 19, p. 382 [1861].
role for educated elites. For Mill left no road open but persuasion to
attain these goals. Thus Mill’s principle of utility even within On Liberty
dictated substantial intervention to improve the behaviour of individuals
and to assist in making them more virtuous, in the knowledge that they
would become more valuable thereby to both themselves and others. Non-
coercive moral exhortation played a key role here. All had the duty of ‘for
ever stimulating each other to increased exercise of their higher faculties,
and increased direction of their feelings and aims towards wise instead of
foolish, elevating instead of degrading objects and contemplations’.13 The
utility of preserving from interference a wide range of moral behaviour
was also crucial to cultivating that individuality which remained one of
Mill’s most essential aims. Yet Mill did not embrace a principle of auton-
omy in order to neglect the well-being of the poor in the name of lib-
erty. Instead, he argued, if ‘public spirit, generous sentiments, or true
justice and equality are desired, association, not isolation of interests, is
the school in which these excellences are nurtured. The aim of improve-
ment should be not solely to place human beings in a condition in which
they will be able to do without one another, but to enable them to work
with or for one another in relations not involving dependence’.14 Associ-
ation, in other words, was crucial to collective independence, which Mill
thought would bring both greater happiness and greater liberty to the
many.
Neither Mill’s insistence upon the value of these goals nor his meth-
ods for achieving them were ‘authoritarian’, at least in the sense of ‘anti-
democratic’, even in light of Mill’s later views on the franchise. Nor is
the hypothesis of a ‘liberal’ and an ‘illiberal’ Mill more palatable. Mill
did not regard it as ‘liberal’ to permit the working classes to wallow in
degradation merely on the grounds that they ‘freely’ chose to have more
children than they might support, or than the wage-system could justify.
Mill’s Malthusianism did not involve the depressing spectre of inevitable
poverty associated with an earlier generation of Malthus’s disciples. Popu-
lation restraint involved the conscious assumption by the working classes
as well as women generally of collective control over their own destiny.
Restricting child-bearing by majority public opinion was potentially a
non-self-regarding, short-term violation of the negative liberty of a few
(if the Mormon parallel was held not to apply). It brought about the
possibility of a much greater long-term liberty, as well as many other
benefits. Here collective social control promoted liberty even where indi-
viduals might not realise it. It was not, pace Himmelfarb and others, a
13 CW 18, p. 277. 14 CW 3, p. 768.

‘violation’ of the ‘liberty principle’ as such.15 This Malthusianism was at
the core of Mill’s liberalism, which envisioned much greater liberty and
equality than many liberals have contemplated. And Mill realised, as we
have seen, that there was an issue of fairness here and (perhaps too privately,
once again) acknowledged that for the sake of women all families should
be kept small in principle.
We may then choose to disagree with either Mill’s premises or his con-
clusions. But that does not make them ‘illiberal’, even if it does mean that
we help others to help themselves rather than leaving them to suffer the
consequences of their ignorance, which may be abetted to some degree by
their oppressors. ‘Liberalism’ has never been confined descriptively solely
to the more extreme advocates of negative liberty. And it cannot be so
applied in Mill’s case. The fact that Mill rejected such ideas makes him not
less liberal, but a liberal of a different type, and more of a communitarian,
and an advocate of enhanced but not suffocating sociability, than is usu-
ally suggested.16 But regardless of the label we choose here, it is clear that
Mill regarded liberalism without Malthusianism as essentially rudderless,
exuding, perhaps, good intentions, but without a semblance of science to
guide it. While unlike Marx in so much else, here, curiously, Mill too felt
that an empirical grasp of history supported his central assumptions. But
in Mill’s case it was the mastery of the passions which would provide the
key to a better future for the working classes.
The claim, then, that Mill was ‘less willing than Bentham to subor-
dinate the individual to the aggregate or collectivity’ now seems wholly
misplaced.17 The idea that Mill’s utilitarianism imposed ‘no obligation on
anyone to maximize welfare’ is similarly wide of the mark.18 Even more
misleading is the assertion that ‘Mill rejected the notion of a collective
good’, and that ‘what we pursue both for ourselves and for others is auton-
omy’, such universal autonomy being for Mill the only ‘ultimate common
good’, with ‘freedom (understood as autonomy or self-government) as the
only intrinsic end, with laissez-faire justified as a means to it’.19 Mill’s utility
15 Himmelfarb’s claim that Mill’s feminism drove him towards the stronger negative liberty formula-
tions in On Liberty thus stands in need of revision (On Liberty and Liberalism, pp. 206–7). For it had
almost the opposite effect respecting the duties of marriage and child-bearing. Since Mill admitted
that On Liberty ‘was more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears
my name’ (CW 1, p. 257), it seems clear that Harriet Taylor upheld his views on marriage restrictions
unreservedly.
16 Hamburger reaches a similar conclusion, albeit from a different route (John Stuart Mill on Liberty
and Control, p. 231).
17 Flathman, The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom, p. 251. 18 Gray, Mill on Liberty, p. 51.
19 Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, pp. 211–15. Collini is much closer to Mill’s spirit here (Public Moralists,
pp. 70–1).
holds out the prospect of increasing virtue and nobility of character. Even
as a boy, he later recalled, ‘zeal for what I thought the good of mankind
was my most predominant sentiment’, and this remained true for the rest
of his life.20 Mill proclaimed that there should be ‘a standard of altru-
ism to which all should be required to come up, and a degree beyond it
which is not obligatory, but meritorious. It is incumbent on every one to
restrain the pursuit of his personal objects within the limits consistent with
the essential interests of others.’21 Being a citizen required weighing the
interests of others, ‘guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule
than his private partiality; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims
which have for their reason of existence the common good: and he usually
finds associated with him in the same work minds more familiarized than
his own with these ideas and operations, whose study it will be to supply
reasons to his understanding and stimulation to his feeling for the gen-
eral interest’.22 ‘Association’, as we have seen, was crucial to creating this
identity. Unless labourers and employers could alike ‘perform the work
of industry in the spirit in which soldiers perform that of an army’, he
wrote, industry would ‘never be moralized’.23 These are not the reflections
of someone lacking a strong conception of the common good: they are the
maxims and aspirations of the utilitarian republican.
At the personal level, then, the success of these policies depended more
than anything else on the increasing virtue of individuals, and their will-
ingness to become more sociable and less self-interested beings without at
the same time losing their individuality. John Stuart Mill the moralist was a
man of extraordinarily great ethical expectation. Henry Sidgwick thought
it was ‘the high ideal of human well-being which burns like a flame at the
core of his social philosophy . . . that has given [Mill] so large a share in
forming the thought of the present generation’.24 Every person’s happiness
would be a good to every other human being, as, Mill had written, ‘in a
good state of society and education it would be’.25 Virtue would be pursued
for its own sake, though we recognise it as intertwined with utility. A sense
of community or common purpose would be instilled as a chief aim of
the educational system, which would raise the working classes to the level
of full participants in the democratic process and strengthen social ties
between all classes, the more so as all became more equal.
These conclusions respecting the role of the state and of society vis-à-
vis both the individual and collective progress defy easy classification in
20 CW 1, p. 112. 21 CW 10, p. 337. 22 CW 19, p. 412. 23 CW 10, p. 341 [1867].
24 From an obituary notice, May 1873, quoted in Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism, p. 24.
25 CW 16, p. 1414.
modern political terms. Mill’s hints at population control by restricting
marriage and suspending the franchise rights of welfare recipients might
seem downright tyrannical to many. His willingness to enforce labour upon
the idle poor places him amongst the more extreme conservatives of our
own times. His curtailment of all substantial inheritance, proposed from the
late 1820s onwards but deepened in the 1870s, on the other hand, places him
to the left of most social democrats today. If this was not a subversion of the
system of individual property but an improvement on it, it was nonetheless
an extraordinarily radical departure from the liberalism of both Mill’s day
and ours. The combination of Mill’s theory of property, with its emphasis
upon a just reward for labour, and its radical corollary, that idleness and
idly-won gains alike should be minimised, provided the basis for Mill’s
theory of radical meritocracy. Though the end sought – autonomy – can
be loosely described as the same, the means were dramatically altered, and
the end, too, was conceived much more clearly in terms of equality than
had been the case in his youth. Amongst all the leading modern liberal
writers of his epoch, indeed, Mill entertained a greater respect for equality
as a social, political and moral end than any other. We recall his insistence
that it was ‘eminently desirable’ to ‘counteract the tendency of inherited
property to accumulate in large masses’.26 Crucial to this transformation
was the realisation that capitalism, too, fostered a system of servitude which
had to be superseded by one based both upon greater self-dependence
and increasing cooperation. For inequality bred dependency, the opposite
of autonomy. The fact that Mill wished to retain aspects of capitalism,
notably competition, does not deflect from his fundamental renunciation
of a market-driven ideal of distribution: this ideal is ethically driven. This
rejection occurred during and after the Revolutions of 1848, and Harriet
Taylor was crucial to Mill’s acceptance of it, which is why the henpecked
argument (and its refutation) remains so important.
Mill was also more concerned with the ultimate well-being of the work-
ing classes than any other major liberal writer of his epoch, and more
willing to permit the state to assist in their prosperity than most. He wor-
ried constantly, however, that such interventions would weaken the moral
fibre of those so assisted. This is the great tension which runs throughout
all his writings on the subject. A culture of dependence benefitted no one:
not the poor, not anyone who laboured, not the wealthy whose consciences
were falsely assuaged by charity, not the ethos of society as a whole. The
happiness of the poor, Mill thought, depended ultimately on ‘the energy,
26 CW 2, p. 224.
common sense and foresight of the proletarians themselves’.27 Work helped
provide self-identity, and even when state-initiated, justified the contribu-
tion of others to the well-being of the poor. But Mill felt equally that a
failure by the more educated to promote progressive measures would fatally
undermine any prospects for genuine improvement.
Nowhere was this more true than in the case of population control.
It has been contended here that Mill’s Malthusianism provided a crucial
test case for his theory of liberty, and was more intimately interwoven
with his feminism than is usually assumed. Mill repeatedly urged the
view that population control was the single most important issue which
concerned him. He firmly believed that no unlimited right of procreation
existed. He admired, with reservations, systems which restricted marriage,
believing that they did not infringe liberty unduly, while hoping that
they would not be necessary. He also maintained that while the ‘higher
and middle classes might and ought to be willing to submit to a very
considerable sacrifice of their own means, for improving the condition of
the existing generation of labourers, if by this they could hope to provide
similar advantages for the generation to come’, there was no point in them
being ‘called upon to make these sacrifices, merely that the country may
contain a greater number of people, in as great poverty and as great liability
to destitution as now’.28 But introducing restrictive measures in Britain
was untimely. And not only did Mill not push the issue; if anything he
retreated from it. He clearly welcomed, however, the possibility that female
enfranchisement might remove the difficulty without the need for further
legal constraints; as we have seen this was probably one of Harriet Taylor’s
more powerful suggestions, though it was commensurate with the drift of
Mill’s own thinking. But he also recognised, without forcing the point,
that the price of having much more liberty in some areas might well be its
diminution in others, albeit by voluntary and rational restraint wherever
possible.
mill and paternalism

How, then, does the account developed in this book affect our understand-
ing of Mill’s approach to paternalism? Post-Darwinian writers complained
that ‘Mill’s notion of a state which should help the individual to “fight
against necessity” is a little out of harmony with the scientific thought of
our day’.29 But Mill’s utopia would not be realised as the natural outcome
27 CMC, pp. 382–3. 28 CW 4, p. 375. 29 Donisthorpe, Individualism, p. 124.
of social progress. ‘Things left to take care of themselves inevitably decay’,
he once wrote.30 None of his ideals would be achieved quickly, or solely
by negative liberty. All required substantial public commitment, and as
collective an agreement amongst the many, the rich and the wise alike,
as to both goals and means, as could be hammered out. Some of Mill’s
critics feared that this would entail a massive dose of paternal medicine.
The educated would have to be re-educated, the uneducated educated, and
by persuasion, not coercion, led forward. But all the educated could claim
here, Mill insisted, was ‘freedom to point out the way’. Compelling others
towards particular ends was ‘inconsistent with the freedom and develop-
ment of all the rest’.31 Yet public opinion might act to restrain population,
as we have seen, and in this there is indisputably, at least potentially, a
coercive element where dissenting minorities were concerned.
We saw at the outset here that there has been little consensus as to an
exact definition of ‘paternalism’. In the degree to which such restraints
were collectively agreed upon, however, i.e. democratically consented to,
they would not strictly speaking be ‘paternalist’ according to some widely
accepted definitions. Where they were imposed they clearly would be.
Wrongs may therefore be done to those held to consent only tacitly in a
democracy. Yet democracy could not survive if they were not. The same is
true for Mill’s proposals respecting the taxation of inheritance and other
measures aimed at promoting egalitarianism. Hence if a wealthy minority
resisted such measures as coercive, the latter would be termed ‘paternal-
ist’. And if legislation aiming to promote citizens’ collective well-being
is branded as ‘paternalist’, then so too must most of Mill’s agenda and
philosophy be described as minimally dedicated to a ‘soft’ paternalism.
There was, then, Mill thought, much that the well-to-do and more
competent could do to help the less fortunate without dooming the latter
to greater dependency, by way of being helpful, of opening up alternatives,
of maximising dignity, of educating towards independence, towards more
rational and refined desires, towards enhanced competence, and towards
cooperation. The educational side of this agenda, relying chiefly upon
constant exhortation to self-improvement, was essentially non-coercive, if
perhaps paternalist in a weaker sense. It relied strongly upon an ingrained
sense of duty in the educated to assist the less fortunate. This duty, driven
by an ideal of sagesse oblige (allied perhaps to some sense of richesse oblige),
which would replace the old doctrine of noblesse oblige, was every bit
as important as that of the parent to the child. Indeed, though such
30 CW 19, p. 386. 31 CW 18, p. 269.
a sternly moralistic sense of public duty seems archaic to us today, in
an epoch jaundiced by the celebration of selfishness, it formed the core
of Mill’s mature ethical system. But this regard for the welfare of the
less fortunate had always to be tempered by a desire to reduce, rather
than to increase, dependency, the traditional by-product of paternalism.
Much that we can do to benefit others does not subvert them by unduly
undermining their moral autonomy and it would not be simplistic or far-
fetched to characterise all of these as liberty-maximising qualities. Mill’s
great contribution was not to oppose paternalism per se, but to recognise
that paternalistic behaviour had to be balanced with liberty- and autonomy-
enhancing and consent-maximising qualities wherever possible. The old
aristocratic paternalism, which aimed to perpetuate servitude, was indeed
dead. The new democratic paternalism, which was to enhance equality,
had yet to be born.
We cannot here, then, ‘solve’ the question as to whether Mill was a
‘paternalist’ as such, for there is no agreement as to the central term at
issue, which means many potentially quite contradictory things to different
writers. It is clear, however, that the language of paternalism cannot be
confined solely to the private, moral sphere, but also pervades attempts to
improve society, and particularly the circumstances of the less fortunate.
We may distinguish, however, between negative paternalism, which aims to
prevent harm to individuals, and positive paternalism, which may promote
both individual and social well-being, including autonomy and deliberative
capacity. Interference with property rights was an essential part of the
latter, but might be achieved with or without consent, though in both
cases it might still be classed as ‘paternalist’ insofar as it aimed at long-term
improvement. To Humboldt, the state violated right by removing our
‘possessions’ without our consent. To Mill, where taxation was concerned,
it did not. Society was ‘fully entitled to abrogate or alter any particular right
of property which on sufficient consideration it judges to stand in the way
of public good’.32 In proposing restrictions on the rights of landholders,
Mill showed that the intervention of the state in economic affairs bore no
relevance to the apparent dismissal of state intervention where no ‘harm’
existed, in On Liberty. Property rights might be interfered with wherever
it was expedient to do so and (educated or not) public opinion dictated
expediency for the most part. Forcing people to remain in poverty through
legislation which constantly favours the wealthy is much more invasive
than making people wear seat-belts. What was valuable in property rights
32 CW 5, p. 753.
was that labour was justly rewarded. But Mill believed that the undue
exercise of such rights could cause extensive damage to any society. The
laissez-faire maxim was therefore never intended to cover property rights as
such, but to describe the optimal means of maximising production through
competition.
If no libertarian, Mill was no less an apostle of liberty for all this. Every-
thing he sought would have to be accomplished voluntarily, at least by
majority consensus. Virtue was to be recommended by example, by the
fairness of proportionate sacrifice, not by the threat of the firing squad.
The less competent were to be assisted towards competency, not dragooned
into submission by and to the supposedly more competent. The latter did
not have a right to rule, but a duty to assist others to rule themselves well.
Things better done by individuals would still be left to individuals. Help-
ing others does not mean compelling them to live by our own moral stan-
dards respecting self-regarding acts. Augmentation of government power
should be avoided. The mental education of the populace should always
be borne in mind. A greater sense of dependency in the poor should always
be avoided, with the aim of raising them to an eventual state of collective
autonomy and self-management. It would require an increasing degree
of negative liberty in self-regarding moral affairs. The outcome would
however bring about both greater happiness and greater liberty for the pop-
ulation as a whole than the existing social and economic system, and was
quite justifiable both on utilitarian grounds and as a defence of the value
of liberty.
Balancing many of these principles amidst the dense complexity of mod-
ern life is bound to be inordinately tricky at the best of times. But we have
seen here that the limited definition of paternalism as interference in self-
regarding actions, which focusses almost entirely on a few arguments in
On Liberty, fails completely to describe the scope of governmental and
societal intervention which Mill commended. The generalisation that Mill
taught that ‘state interference in individual action should be regulated by
the Liberty Principle’ is thus not just misleading but simply wrong.33 Him-
melfarb’s complaint that On Liberty evidently confined the state’s activity to
protecting against ‘force and fraud’ while the Principles counselled a much
wider intervention similarly diminishes in force when we consider that the
latter text concerns a much broader domain than the former and that Mill
is concerned essentially with society’s interference with individuals in the
33 Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, p. 107.

former and the state’s duties in the latter.34 This is a difference in empha-
sis, but not in the substantive application of the liberty principle, which
still aims at maximum freedom in self-regarding activities, but appropri-
ate regulation of social-regarding actions. We have seen, too, that existing
accounts, notably by Hamburger, to portray Mill as less devoted to liberty
than has usually been assumed tell only part of the story by failing to detail
Mill’s conception of the wider duties of the state and the educated portion
of the population, and by not following through the implications of some
of Mill’s liberty-restricting proposals, notably respecting population. Gov-
ernment and public opinion alike had the duty to promote progress, and if
this implied maximising negative liberty in purely self-regarding matters,
it also entailed the positive promotion of population control, coopera-
tion, universalising the burden of labour and redistributive taxation to
increase social equality, where the public good was central. By compar-
ison with, for instance, requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets, which
has been described as ‘embarrassing to the liberal’, and as providing ‘the
strongest of the arguments for hard paternalism’,35 such measures are vastly
more intrusive into the lives of many more people. Yet Mill upheld them.
Undoubtedly an essentially utilitarian rationale – the long-term interests of
progressive humanity – underpinned these policies. Mill wished to build
safe bridges much more than to prevent people from crossing unsafe ones.
Some modern readers will doubtless object to seeing taxation in particular
as not involving a restriction of liberty; to some it is the most barefaced
coercion commonly undertaken by the state. Yet we should note, if we
move for a moment from the normative to the empirical domain, that
surveys routinely tell us that relatively more equal countries with extensive
and successful health care and welfare systems and relatively high taxes
score much higher on ‘happiness’ and well-being quotients than those with
minimal welfare provisions and lower taxes.36 Rampant inequality does not
promote, but rather undermines, social happiness, and libertarianism in
economic affairs clearly promotes exactly such inequality. Mill might yet
have felt satisfied that history had exonerated some of his postulates.
Mill thus never retreated from his mature conclusion that moral auton-
omy and self-responsibility were extraordinarily important aspects of the
34 Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism, pp. 132–3. But Himmelfarb caricatures Mill’s description
of the viability of governmental action here (p. 135), making him appear much more positive while
he actually remains cautious, and still prone to upholding non-governmental activity in general
wherever possible.
35 Feinberg, Harm to Self, p. 135.
36 Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level. Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.
good life and that achieving them collectively could only ensue on the basis
of the ideal we have here termed ‘egalitarian meritocracy’. This delicate bal-
ance between liberty and equality became the key focus of his life’s work.
What has been central to the argument here, however, is that from the
mid 1840s onwards he shifted dramatically in his view as to how these ends
were to be universalised. More than any other great liberal writer of his age,
he realised that women would have to play a central role in the process. As
we have seen, however, describing his ultimate vision as ‘socialist’ can be
unhelpful in several respects, for there was as much in it that was un- and
even anti-socialist as not. What Mill sought was to use collective power to
achieve higher moral and social ends, without weakening the individuals
who were ultimately to benefit from it. Yet Mill doubtless thought that the
equality he ultimately aimed at, with the unity of purpose which under-
pinned it, were effectively the goals most socialists worth studying were
pursuing.
Throughout this book judgement has been reserved respecting the plau-
sibility of Mill’s vision. If there is one pervasive weakness in the general
argument he had settled on by the 1860s, however, it might well be seen as
an inability to foresee that widespread manipulation of opinion in democ-
racies might undermine and possibly negate the educative role elites, the
‘aristocracy of scribblers’, had necessarily to play in reforming society. We
are all seemingly slower learners than Mill imagined. But not only has
much of the rest of humanity failed to match up to Mill’s ideals. Our
extraordinary gullibility and capacity for self-delusion have not dimin-
ished, but merely become susceptible to new forms of manipulation in
the later stages of commercial society. In politics, in particular, emotion,
style and image often take precedence over substance and programme. Mill
hoped the multitude would choose the wisest to rule them. They often
choose those most like themselves, and are more resentful and suspicious
of the better educated, curiously, than of the wealthy. Widely disseminated
by the popular media in particular, anti-intellectualism often saps our will
to improve or even to maintain our educational standards. The compelling
allurement of the lower pleasures often proves more powerful. Mill hoped
the many could at least discern wisdom in the few. But often here there is
lack of both will and competency. Nor have the educated few usually risen
to the high standards of moral propriety and public duty Mill expected of
them. They have not become a Carlylean priesthood, and, as Mill him-
self concluded, probably ought never to have been expected realistically
to fulfil such a role. They have not coalesced around a common agenda
of rational progress which trumps the biases of class and exerted a ‘united
authority’ to ensure its success. The plutocratic wolves, indeed, have far
more scribblers as allies than the sheep. Mill hoped that ‘when the opinions
of masses of merely average men are every where become or becoming the
dominant power, the counterpoise and corrective to that tendency would
be, the more and more pronounced individuality of those who stand on
the higher eminences of thought’. Here, most especially, he hoped, ‘excep-
tional individuals, instead of being deterred, should be encouraged in
acting differently from the mass’.37 There is little sign of such a trend,
however. Mill’s mistrust of the ‘sinister interests’ of existing ruling classes
and the propensity of power to corrupt new ones seems instead to be true
of most professional elites as well. Mill placed great faith in educational
institutions – effectively a substantial part of the later modern quasi-
organised pouvoir spirituel – to remake humanity. Often, increasingly mod-
elling themselves on capitalist corporations (in some cases indeed becoming
reliant upon them), they have settled for far lesser goals and given greater
prominence to technical skills over humanitarian education. Journalists
and others have equally fallen well short of the high standards a progressive
open society requires, and their ability to sponsor governmental policy on
key issues , or to topple governments they oppose, has if anything increased.
To such sources millions look vainly for moral guidance, or, perhaps even
worse, cease to seek it. This has meant that the agents Mill expected to
introduce his reforming agenda, the more selfless and intelligent members
of both the working and middle classes, have often fallen well short of
his expectations. Even near the end of his life he wondered respecting the
progress of moral opinion whether ‘the causes of deterioration which have
been at work . . . have not more than counterbalanced the tendencies to
improvement’.38 We might well pose the same question. Yet Mill was, if
often frustrated by developments, an immensely patient man. Revolution
was anathema to him, the violent imposition of opinions, by minorities
or majorities, utterly abhorrent. The path of moral suasion, indeed, was
much longer, but it was also safer. Mill hoped his abler successors would
tread it in their turn; it was a noble wish, and remains one. He would not,
probably, have been very happy with the world we have wrought. For that
reason alone his unique vision remains as pertinent to our own times as
ever it was to his.
37 CW 18, p. 269. 38 CW 1, p. 244.
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Index
aims Bahmueller, Charles F. 20

of education 87–8 Bain, Alexander 10, 36, 74, 75, 163, 174
of Mill 11–12 Barker, Ernest 125
see also ideals of Mill Baum, Bruce 127
of society 212–13, 214 Belgium, population control in 114
alcohol abuse 89 Bentham, Jeremy 161, 178, 199
Amberley, Lord (John Russell) 208 Mill influenced by 16–21, 79
America, slavery in, and foreign state Berger, Fred 51, 73–4
intervention 95 Berlin, Isaiah 5, 54–5
anti-intellectualism, in politics 224–5 birth control 22
anti-paternalist reputation of Mill 1, 10, 11–12, Mill’s support for 22–3, 25
42–3, 45, 59 see also population control
and On Liberty 11–12, 46–8, 58–9 Borchard, Ruth 36, 38
Appeal on Behalf of One-Half the Human Race Bosanquet, Bernard 175
(Thompson) 128–9 Britain
Archard, David 51 India ruled by 99–108
aristocracy 29 Ireland ruled by 108–18
‘new’ 26 national education system in 84
paternalism by 44–5 opium trade imposed on China 95
Arneson, Richard 51 Poor Laws in 22
association 215, 217 Mill on 78, 79
Auguste Comte and Positivism (Mill) Brown, D. G. 190
31–2 bureaucracies 67
authoritarianism
of Bentham 20–1 Capaldi, Nicholas 120, 121, 126,
of Carlyle 26 176–7
of Comte 31–2 capitalism 168–9, 218
authoritative state intervention 57–8, 60 final stage of 141–2
Mill on 62–3 Carlyle, Jane Welsh 36
Autobiography (Mill) 18 Carlyle, Thomas 161
Comte criticised in 32 Mill influenced by 26–8, 130–1
on education 84 on Mill’s relationship with Taylor 36
on population control 183 Catholicism, in Ireland 109
on Saint-Simonism 131 centralisation 90–1
on socialism 123–4, 151 ‘Centralisation’ (essay, Mill) 67
on Taylor 35–6, 152 Chadwick, Edwin 78
autonomy 2–3 ‘Chapters on Socialism’ (unfinished publication,
Mill on 203–4, 215 Mill) 162–3, 165–6
and inequality 218 characters, national 17–18
and paternalism 56–7, 58, 59 Chartism 42
Mill on 221 child labour 89–90
249
250 Index
China, opposition to British imposed opium democracy 32, 81–2
trade 95 and paternalism 220
civil service/government, native Indians eligible and state intervention 67–8
for 103 despotism
civilised nations 94–5 interference in states governed by 94–5
‘Civilization’ (essay, Mill) 95 progress hindered by 97–8
The Claims of Labour (Helps), Mill’s review of uncivilised nations best ruled by 96–7, 98
42–3 guidance to self-governance 97, 100
Clapperton, Jane Hume 208 India 99–108
class distinctions 74 Dicey, Albert Venn 21
and harm principle 194–5 Drysdale, Charles 206, 207
and population control 191–2, 195–6 Drysdale, George 200, 206, 207
coercion Duffy, Charles Gavan, on Taylor 36
and Mill’s paternalism 53–6, 59–60 Dupont-White, M. 67–8
moral 189–91 duties
in population control 183–5, 186 breach of, moral coercion justified 189–91
Cole, G. D. H. 125 of educated elite, Mill on 220–1
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 134–6 family related 173, 202–3
collective paternalism 64–5 and liberty 178–80, 186–8, 203–4, 209–10
Collini, Stefan 11 to labour 16
colonialism 107–8 social 49
communism of Mill 143–5, 169 Dworkin, Gerald 51, 58
see also socialism of Mill
competency 54–5 East India Company
and paternalism 84–5 India ruled by 103–4, 105
competition 152–3, 163 Mill’s employment at 101–2
Comte, Auguste, Mill influenced by 29–33, 166, economics
169, 202 and anti-protectionism 65
‘The Condition of Ireland’ (article, Mill) paternalism applied to 55–6, 85
110–12 and state intervention 61–2, 89–90
consent to intervention, and Mill’s paternalism educated elites, role of 194–5, 220–1, 224–5
53–6, 59–60 education
Considerations (on Representative Government) Bentham on 17
(Mill) in France 84
on communism 169 Mill on 83–7, 88, 129, 220–1
on despotism as best rule for uncivilised and paternalism 84–5
nations 96–7, 100 and population control 86–7
on rights to vote 82 egalitarianism of Mill 14–15, 16, 138, 146,
on state intervention 64–5 211–12
Constitutional Code (Bentham) 18–19 Elements of Social Sciences (Drysdale) 200
consumers, cooperation among 137 elites, educated 194–5, 220–1, 224–5
cooperation/cooperatives elitism 194–5
of consumers 137 England and Ireland (Mill) 116–17
Mill’s support for 136–9, 140–1, 142–3, 145–6, English character 17–18
150–1, 153–5, 163–4 ‘enlightened despotism’ 98, 100
in landownership and farming 135–6, in India 99–108
155–8 equality
and socialism 166 and happiness 223
of working classes 136–9 Mill on 45–6, 211, 218
in Owenism 128–30 and liberty 223–4
Coupland, William 207 and state intervention 68–9, 119
Cours de Philosophie Positive (Comte) and taxation of inheritances 73–6
30 Essay on Population (Malthus) 21, 197
Cowling, Maurice 5–6, 210 exclusions, from right to vote 79–81, 83
criminals, treatment of 19 exertion, rewarding of 160–1
Index 251
Fabianism, and Mill 125 Harrison, Frederic 88, 175, 178, 206
family values/duties 173, 202–3 Hart, H. L. A. 51
and liberty 178–80, 186–8, 203–4, 209–10 Hayek, Friedrich 37, 151, 152
famine in Ireland (1840s) 110 health administration, management of 90–1
Feinberg, Joel 51, 58 Helps, Arthur, Mill’s criticism of 42–3
feminism of Mill 14–15, 32–4 Himmelfarb, Gertrude 10, 11–12, 88, 175, 183,
and liberalism 41 222–3
and population control/Malthusianism 24, History of the French Revolution (Carlyle) 26
79, 184–6, 201–2, 204, 219 Hobhouse, Leonard 21
Taylor’s influence on 39–40, 184–5, 204–5, 219 Hollis, Martin 13
‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’ (article, Holthoon, F. L. van 167
Mill) 93 housing, for working classes 90
financial well-being Humboldt, Alexander von 192, 221
and harm principle 192–5 Hume, David 199
see also wealth Husak, Douglas N. 51
foreign state intervention 93–9
Fourierism of Mill 144, 165 ideals of Mill 212–13
France meritocratic 71, 134–5, 142
1848 revolution in 139, 143 see also utopianism of Mill
organisation of labour 146–7 illiterate, excluded from right to vote 81, 82
right to work 147 independence
education in 84 despotism in uncivilised nations leading to
population control in 114 97, 100
franchise, limitations on 79–83 of India 102–3, 119–20
free trade 65 of Ireland 109, 115–16, 117–18, 119–20
free will 130 India
freedom see liberty British rule of 99–108
civil service open to native Indians 103
Galton, Francis 209 and peasantry/landownership 104, 106–7,
gambling 89 119
Gaskell, G. A. 208 independence of 102–3, 119–20
Gladstone, William Ewart 205–6 individual liberty 65–6, 182–3, 213
Godwin, William 199 and equality 223–4
good, promotion of 216–17 individual virtue 217
and education 87–8 An Individualist’s Utopia (Levy) 207
and paternalism 56–7, 60 inheritances, taxation of 71–6, 159–60
‘good despotism’ 98, 100 intelligence, authority of 134
in India 99–108 interference/interventions
Gray, John 52, 57, 63, 175 consensual, and Mill’s paternalism 53–6,
‘greatest happiness of all’, Bentham on 18–19 59–60
Greg, W. R. 208–9 and liberty 9, 173–4
non-consensual 55
Halliday, R. J. 175 samaritan 48
Hamburger, Joseph 6, 10, 176, 223 see also state intervention
happiness international arena, state intervention in 93–9
ensurance of, Bentham on 18–19 Ireland
promotion of British rule of 108–18
equality as means to 223 independence of 109, 115–16, 117–18, 119–20
Mill on 87–8 landownership in 109, 110
hard paternalism 55 need for reform of 110–12, 113–15, 116–17,
harm principle 48, 49–50 119
and financial well-being 192–5 poor relief in 112
and paternalism 52–3
and population control 188–9 John Stuart Mill on Small Families (Malthusian
and state intervention 63 League) 206
252 Index
just inheritances 72 Malthusian League, Mill’s influence on 206–8
justice, social 14, 161 Malthusianism of Mill 15, 21–5, 142, 197–9
and class distinctions 191–2, 195–6
Kamm, Josephine 36–7 and education 86–7
Kurer, Oskar 119 and feminism 184–6, 204, 219
and harm principle 188–9
labour 27 influence of 205–9
child 89–90 and interference/state intervention 14, 180–2,
duty to 160–1 183–5, 186, 188
enforced, and poor relief 77–8 and Ireland 109
laws on protection of 89–90 and liberty 188, 197, 209–10, 215–16, 219
organisation of 146–7 neglected in interpretations of On Liberty
see also work 174–8
laissez-faire principle of Mill 63–4, 118–19, 136, and paternalism 43–4, 196–7
222 problems caused by 200–1
Land Tenure Reform Association, Mill’s and right to work 148
introductory statement at 157–8 and socialism 172
landownership marriage restrictions proposals of Mill 180–2
by communities/cooperatives 135–6, 155–8 and Malthusianism 197–9
in India 104, 106–7, 119 and utilitarianism 199–200
in Ireland 109, 110 Martineau, Harriet 37
need for reform of 110–12, 113–15, 116–17, maternalism of Mill 185–6
119 meritocratic ideals of Mill 71, 134–5, 142
by state 133–4, 161–2 Mill, James (father of John Stuart) 20, 99–100,
Laurie, James 208 199
legal paternalism 52 monopolies of states 91–2
Letwin, Shirley 10 Montague, Francis 193
Levy, Joseph Hiam 124, 156, 207 Moore, Thomas 173
liberalism of Mill 216, 217–18 moral aims, of education 87–8
and feminism 41 moral coercion 189–91
liberty Morley, John 3, 52
Mill’s conception of 1–3, 14, 16, 161, 173, 222 Morris, William 124
and equality 223–4 Murphy, Jeffrie G. 51
and family values/duties 178–80, 186–8,
203–4, 209–10 national characters 17–18
and free trade/protectionism 65 nationalisation, of land 161–2
individual liberty 65–6, 182–3, 213 nations see states
and interference/state intervention 9, negative liberty 1–3, 4
173–4, 188, 222–3 Mill on 61–2
non-absolute nature of 3–4, 6–8 negative paternalism 221
and population control/Malthusianism 188, neo-Malthusianism 22
197, 209–10, 215–16, 219 of Mill 22–3, 24
uncivilised nations unfit for 96 non-authoritative state intervention 62–3
and utilitarianism 214–15, 216–17 non-consensual intervention 55
and paternalism 56–7, 59–60, 122 non-intervention principle see Laisser-faire
and property rights 20, 155 non-self-regarding acts 194
Logic see System of Logic and financial well-being 194–5
London, local government of 91–2
obligation
Maccall, William 206 theory of 28
McCloskey, H. J. 51, 63, 92, 121, 175 see also duties
Mackay, Thomas 125 Olivier, Sydney 124–5
Maine, Henry 107 On Heroes and Hero-Worship (Carlyle) 27
Mallock, W. H. 193 On Labour (Thornton), Mill’s review of 137, 180
The Malthusian (journal) 206 On Liberty (Mill) 1–2, 5, 7
Index 253
anti-paternalism in 11–12, 46–8, 58–9 Poor Laws (England) 22
Comte criticised in 31 Mill on 78, 79
on despotism as best rule for uncivilised poor relief
nations 96 Bentham on 19–20
on family values/duties 178–80, 186–8 in Ireland 112
and Mill’s other writings 11–12, 13–14 Mill on 44–5, 76–9
misinterpretations of 173–4, 214–15 and enforced labour 77–8
neglect of Mill’s Malthusianism 15, and franchise limitations 82
174–8 see also poverty
on paternalism 48–9, 55–6, 60 population control
and population control 196–7, in Belgium 114
209–10 in France 114
privileged in interpretations of Mill 12–14 Mill’s support for 15, 21–5, 142, 197–9
on state interventions 88–9, 222–3 and class distinctions 191–2, 195–6
Taylor’s influence on 39, 152 and education 86–7
and utilitarianism 11–12, 213 and feminism/women’s rights 24, 79,
On the Possibility of Limiting Populousness 25 184–6, 201–2, 204, 219
opium trade, Mill on 95, 104 and harm principle 188–9
Owenism and On Liberty/liberty 174–8, 188, 197,
collapse of 137 209–10, 215–16, 219
Mill’s encounters with 128–30 and paternalism 43–4, 196–7
problems caused by 200–1
Packe, Michael 36, 37–8, 39, 204–5 and right to work 148
Paley, William 199 and socialism 172
Pappe, H. O. 38 and state interference 180–2, 183–5, 186, 188
Past and Present (Carlyle) 26 Taylor’s influence on 39–40, 184–5, 196,
paternalism 51–2, 220 201–2
and autonomy 56–7, 58, 59 positive liberty 8–9, 57
collective 64–5 positive paternalism 56–7, 60, 221
hard 55 pouvoir spirituel (Saint-Simonism) 131–2
and liberty 56–7, 59–60, 122 poverty
of Mill 10–11, 16, 42, 52–3, 55, 56–7, 58, 122, Mill on eradication of 25, 85
219–20, 221–2 see also poor relief
and autonomy 221 and obligation to be virtuous 195
and competency 84–5 The Principle of Individual Liberty (Coupland)
and democracy 220 207
in economics 55–6, 85 Principles (Mill) 11–12
influences on: of Bentham 16–21, 79; of on civilised nations 95
Carlyle 26–8; of Comte 29–33; ‘futurity’ chapter of 35, 44, 139, 140
Malthusian 14, 15, 21–5, 43–4, 196–7; on individual liberty 65–6, 182–3
Saint-Simonian 28–9 on landownership 113–14, 155
interpretations of 53–6, 92–3 and On Liberty 13–14
in On Liberty 48–9, 55–6, 60, 196–7, on paternalism 56
209–10 on population control 25, 183–5
in Principles 56 on self-dependence 44
and property rights 221–2 on state intervention 57, 62–4, 222–3
and taxation of inheritances 74–5 Taylor’s influence on 148–9
see also anti-paternalist reputation of Mill prisons, Bentham on 19
positive 56–7, 60, 221 profit-sharing 138
Pearson, Karl 209 progress/progressiveness 8, 130, 214, 225
peasantry and state intervention 69–70
in India 104, 106–7, 119 property rights
in Ireland 109, 110–12, 113–15, 116–17, 119 and liberty 20, 155
Place, Francis 22 Mill on 145
politics, anti-intellectualism in 224–5 and paternalism 221–2
254 Index
property rights (cont.) Skorupski, John 11
and socialism 145, 156 slavery
see also landownership in America, and foreign state intervention 95
prostitution 89 interference permitted when selling oneself
protectionism 65 into 55–6
Smith, Adam, Mill influenced by 70
race/racism 119 social classes see class distinctions
railways 91–2 social duties 49
Rees, John C. 175 social justice 14, 161
Reeves, Richard 7, 38, 121, 127, 176 social security contributions 58
Religion of Humanity ideas (Comte), Mill’s Social Statics (Spencer), Mill’s criticism of 66
criticism of 31–2 socialism of Mill 15, 123–4, 127–8, 139–40, 143,
republicanism 170–2 146, 151, 162–6, 167, 223–4
restrictions on right to vote 79–83 and capitalism 168–9
revolutions 225 interpretations of 124–7, 163, 167–8, 169–70
in France 139, 143 and population control 172
organisation of labour 146–7 and property rights 145, 156
right to work 147 Taylor’s influence on 37–9, 148–50, 151–3,
rights 163
to property see also communism of Mill
and liberty 20, 155 societies
Mill on 145 aims of 212–13, 214
and paternalism 221–2 progress in, and increased need for state
and socialism 145, 156 intervention 69–70
see also landownership Socrates 3
to vote 79–81, 83 soft paternalism 220
of women 24, 41 Spahr, Margaret 51
to work 78–9, 147 Spencer, Herbert, Mill’s criticism of 66
and population control 148 ‘The Spirit of the Age’ (article, Mill) 29, 132
Ritchie, David 213 spiritual power of philosophers 31–2
Robbins, Lionel 126 Standring, George 208
Robson, John 38, 40, 125 state intervention
Rochdale experiment 153 authoritative 57–8, 60
Russell, Bertrand 125 Mill on 62–3
Russell, John (Lord Amberley) 208 Mill on 14–15, 61, 64–5, 66–7, 88–93, 120–1,
Ryan, Alan 92, 121, 155, 176, 177 213–14, 215
and democratic institutions 67–8
Saint-Simon, Henri de/Saint-Simonism, Mill in economic sphere 61–2, 89–90
influenced by 28–9, 71, 130–4 and education 83–8
samaritan interventions 48 and equality 68–9, 119
sanitary laws 92–3 and franchise regulations 79–83
Schumpeter, Joseph 118–19 in international arena/foreign affairs 93–9
self-dependence, Mill’s theory of 44–6 and laissez-faire principle 63–4, 118–19, 136,
self-determination see autonomy 222
self-governance and liberty 9, 173–4, 188, 222–3
despotism in uncivilised nations leading to and organisation of labour 146–7
97, 100 and poor relief 76–9
of India 102–3, 119–20 and population control/Malthusianism 14,
of Ireland 109, 115–16, 117–18, 119–20 180–2, 183–5, 186, 188
self-harm and progress of societies 69–70
and paternalism 53 and property rights/landownership 156
see also harm principle and redistribution of wealth 70–1
self-regarding acts 194 and positive liberty 57
and financial well-being 194–5 states
Shaw, George Bernhard 125 civilised 94–5
Sidgwick, Henry 217 landownership by 133–4, 161–2
Index 255
monopolies of 91–2 and liberty 214–15, 216–17
uncivilised 95 and marriage restrictions 199–200
despotism best rule for 96–7, 98 utopianism of Mill 25, 30–1, 137, 140, 165, 212–13
guidance to self-governance 97, 100
India 99–108 Vasey, George 193–4
Stephen, James Fitzjames 20–1, 192–3 Village Communities in the East and West
Stephen, Leslie 124, 174–5 (Maine), Mill’s review of 107
The Strike of a Sex (Malthusian League) virtue 4–6
206–7 authority of 134
The Subjection of Women (Mill) 33, 41, 169 individual 217
on equality 211 and poverty 195
on family values 202–3 voluntary restraints on population 183–5
on liberty 203–4 voluntary spirit/actions 69–70
and population control 201–2 vote, rights to 79–81, 83
syndicalism of Mill 125–6
System of Logic (Mill) 5 Waithe, Mary 11
on free will 130 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 199–200
on utilitarianism 87 Wallace, Alfred Russel 158
Warren, Josiah 2
taxation 57–8, 70–1 water supply 91–2
of inheritances 71–6, 159–60 wealth
Taylor, Harriet 15, 36–7 and population control 191–2
Mill influenced by 34–6, 39–42, 139, 218 redistribution of 70–1
family values 202–3 see also financial well-being
feminism 39–40, 184–5, 204–5, 219 Webb, Sidney 125
population control 39–40, 184–5, 196, well-being
201–2 financial, and harm principle 192–5
socialism 37–9, 148–50, 151–3, 163 of working classes 218–19
utopianism 140 ‘What is to be done with Ireland?’ (essay, Mill)
Ten, C. L. 55, 175 112
Thompson, William 128–9 Wollheim, Richard 190
Thornton, W. T. 137 women
Tocqueville, Alexis de 18 Comte on subordinate position of 32–4
Mill influenced by 29 Mill on extending rights of 24, 41
right to vote 83
uncivilised nations 95 see also feminism
despotism best rule for 96–7, 98 work, rights to 78–9, 147
guidance to self-governance 97, 100 and population control 148
India 99–108 see also labour
Urbinati, Nadia 170 workhouses 79
Utilitarianism (Mill) 5, 7, 213 working classes
on education 87–8 cooperation among 136–9
on eradication of poverty 25 housing for 90
and On Liberty 11–12, 213 population control by 191–2, 195–6
theory of obligation in 28 well-being of 218–19
utilitarianism of Mill 4–5, 28, 87–8, 169, 213,
216–17 Zastoupil, Lynn 111

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Many discussions of J. S. Mill’s concept of liberty focus too narrowly

g r e g o r y cl a e y s is Professor of the History of Political Thought

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2013

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

isbn 978-0-521-76108-6 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

Introduction: Mill, liberty and paternalism:

I am grateful to the staff of the London Library; the Inter-Library Loan

mill, liberty and paternalism

Negative liberty and ideal character

5 Also construed as a ‘negative opportunity’ concept as opposed to a ‘positive exercise’ concept,

15 CW 10, p. 411; Tocqueville, Democracy in America (vol. 2), pp. 90–97.

The value, rights and duties of interference: the role of On Liberty

40 CW 2, pp. 104–5. 41 CW 26, p. 349. 42 CW 8, p. 926 [1843].

models of authority: bentham, malthus, carlyle, the

114 CW 1, p. 374 [1833].

156 CW 12, pp. 36, 363. 157 CW 1, p. 219.

evidence of authority: ‘henpecked’ restated

self-dependence: the critique of blind paternalism

228 CW 14, p. 544. 229 CW 4, p. xxvi.

237 CW 3, pp. 758–60.

240 CW 3, pp. 758, 764–5, 767–9.

243 CW 20, pp. 274, 383–4.

247 CW 18, p. 277.

284 See generally Murphy, ‘Incompetence and Paternalism’.

304 Hollis, ‘J.S. Mill’s Political Philosophy of Mind’.

Intervention, progress and the state –

mill and domestic reform

The scope of government

9 CW 3, pp. 945–6, 970, 944.

22 CW 3, pp. 938–943. 23 CW 15, p. 556. Original in French; my translation.

28 CW 19, pp. 590–1. 29 CW 16, p. 1261. 30 CW 19, p. 600–2 (italics added).

Taxation and inheritance

40 CW 3, pp. 810–11; CW 16, p. 339; CW 5, p. 491 [1852].

64 CW 3, p. 962. 65 CW 13, pp. 640–1.

73 CW 14, pp. 44–5. 74 CW 28, pp. 358, 312, 324.

82 CW 18, p. 200 [1840].

89 As Jones emphasises (‘John Stuart Mill as a Moralist’, 292–3).

110 CW 16, pp. 1347–8; CW 23, p. 210. 111 CW 29, p. 401.

Miscellaneous issues respecting state intervention

122 CW 10, pp. 217–18.

131 CW 23, p. 399. 132 CW 22, pp. 400–1.

141 CW 5, pp. 434–5; CW 3, pp. 955–6.

foreign intervention: india and ireland

152 CW 21, pp. 118–23. 153 CW 16, p. 1033.

172 CW 19, pp. 396, 401–3, 567–8.

India: ‘parental despotism’

191 CW 30, pp. 30, 34, 39, 49.

205 CW 11, p. xxxvi. 206 CW 2, pp. 237, 319–22.

Ireland and land reform

226 CW 22, p. 398. 227 CW 12, p. 365.

236 CW 13, pp. 710–11. 237 CMC, pp. 383–4.

240 CW 2, pp. 314, 324. 241 CW 3, p. 993.

263 CW 6, p. 538 (draft material). 264 CW 32, p. 214.

Mill, socialism and collective autonomy

Reflecting in the Autobiography on ‘the days of my most extreme Ben-

owenism and saint-simonism: from the mid 1820s to c. 1840

53 CW 12, pp. 37, 40–1, 47. 54 CW 1, p. 179.

from ‘coleridge’ (1840) to ‘the claims of labour’ (1845)

95 CW 20, pp. 351–2. 96 CW 3, p. 1013. 97 CW 20, p. 351.

100 CW 2, pp. 204–6.