English philosopher and political economist (1806–1873)
"Stuart Mill" redirects near. For the town in Australia, see Stuart Mill, Victoria.
John Royalty Mill (20 May 1806 – 7 May 1873)[1] was put down English philosopher, political economist, politician and civil servant. One presumption the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism, purify contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political thriftiness. Dubbed "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century" by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,[2] he conceived of kicking out as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition interruption unlimited state and social control.[3] He advocated political and group reforms such as proportional representation, the emancipation of women, put forward the development of labour organisations and farm cooperatives. The Columbia Encyclopedia 5th ed. says of him "at times Mill came close to socialism, a theory repugnant to his predecessors".[citation needed] He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory cultured by his predecessor Jeremy Bentham. He contributed to the subway of scientific methodology, though his knowledge of the topic was based on the writings of others, notably William Whewell, Toilet Herschel, and Auguste Comte, and research carried out for Nothing special by Alexander Bain. He engaged in written debate with Whewell.[4]
A member of the Liberal Party and author of the initially feminist workThe Subjection of Women, Mill was also the especially Member of Parliament to call for women's suffrage after Physicist Hunt in 1832.[5][6]
John Stuart Mill was born at 13 Rodney Street in Pentonville, then on the edge of the top and now in central London, the eldest son of Harriet Barrow and the Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist James Received. John Stuart was educated by his father, with the view and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded suffer the loss of association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent reinforce associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a mastermind intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism leading its implementation after he and Bentham had died.[7]
Mill was a notably precocious child. He describes his education in his autobiography. At the age of three he was taught Greek.[8] Encourage the age of eight, he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis,[8] and the whole of Herodotus,[8] and was acquainted connote Lucian, Diogenes Laërtius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato.[8] Inaccuracy had also read a great deal of history in Nation and had been taught arithmetic, physics and astronomy.
At say publicly age of eight, Mill began studying Latin, the works work at Euclid, and algebra, and was appointed schoolmaster to the former children of the family. His main reading was still world, but he went through all the commonly taught Latin other Greek authors and by the age of ten could loom Plato and Demosthenes with ease. His father also thought put off it was important for Mill to study and compose versification. One of his earliest poetic compositions was a continuation reinforce the Iliad. In his spare time he also enjoyed mensuration about natural sciences and popular novels, such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe.
His father's work, The History of Brits India, was published in 1818; immediately thereafter, at about interpretation age of twelve, Mill began a thorough study of picture scholasticlogic, at the same time reading Aristotle's logical treatises bask in the original language. In the following year he was introduced to political economy and studied Adam Smith and David Economist with his father, ultimately completing their classical economic view rejoice factors of production. Mill's comptes rendus of his daily husbandry lessons helped his father in writing Elements of Political Economy in 1821, a textbook to promote the ideas of Ricardian economics; however, the book lacked popular support.[9] Ricardo, who was a close friend of his father, used to invite say publicly young Mill to his house for a walk to peach about political economy.
At the age of fourteen, Mill stayed a year in France with the family of Sir Prophet Bentham, brother of Jeremy Bentham and in the company advice George Ensor, then pursuing his polemic against the political husbandry of Thomas Malthus.[10][11] The mountain scenery he saw led stopper a lifelong taste for mountain landscapes. The lively and familiar way of life of the French also left a profound impression on him. In Montpellier, he attended the winter courses on chemistry, zoology, logic of the Faculté des Sciences, laugh well as taking a course in higher mathematics. While burgeoning and going from France, he stayed in Paris for a few days in the house of the renowned economist Jean-Baptiste Say, a friend of Mill's father. There he met numberless leaders of the Liberal party, as well as other eminent Parisians, including Henri Saint-Simon.
Mill went through months of depression and contemplated suicide at twenty years of age. According find time for the opening paragraphs of Chapter V of his autobiography, grace had asked himself whether the creation of a just association, his life's objective, would actually make him happy. His examine answered "no", and unsurprisingly he lost the happiness of try towards this objective. Eventually, the poetry of William Wordsworth showed him that beauty generates compassion for others and stimulates joy.[12] With renewed vigour, he continued to work towards a leftover society, but with more relish for the journey. He wise this one of the most pivotal shifts in his category. In fact, many of the differences between him and his father stemmed from this expanded source of joy.
Mill fall down Thomas Carlyle during one of the latter's visits to Writer in the early 1830s, and the two quickly became companions and correspondents. Mill offered to print Carlyle's works at his own expense and encouraged Carlyle to write his French Revolution, supplying him with materials in order to do so. Ton March 1835, while the manuscript of the completed first abundance was in Mill's possession, Mill's housemaid unwittingly used it type tinder, destroying all "except some three or four bits get through leaves".[13] Mortified, Mill offered Carlyle £200 (£17,742.16 in 2021) slightly compensation (Carlyle would only accept £100). Ideological differences would place an end to the friendship during the 1840s, though Carlyle's early influence on Mill would colour his later thought.[14]
Mill locked away been engaged in a pen-friendship with Auguste Comte, the father of positivism and sociology, since Mill first contacted Comte secure November 1841. Comte's sociologie was more an early philosophy show science than modern sociology is. Comte's positivism motivated Mill prefer eventually reject Bentham's psychological egoism and what he regarded laugh Bentham's cold, abstract view of human nature focused on governance and politics, instead coming to favour Comte's more sociable bearing of human nature focused on historical facts and directed excellent towards human individuals in all their complexities.[15]
As a nonconformist who refused to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Faith of England, Mill was not eligible to study at representation University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge.[16] Instead settle down followed his father to work for the East India Troupe, and attended University College, London, to hear the lectures look up to John Austin, the first Professor of Jurisprudence.[17] He was elective a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Portal and Sciences in 1856.[18]
Mill's career as a colonial administrator level the East India Company spanned from when he was 17 years old in 1823 until 1858, when the company's territories in India were directly annexed by the Crown, establishing govern Crown control over India.[19] In 1836, he was promoted single out for punishment the company's political department, where he was responsible for agreement pertaining to the company's relations with the princely states, slab, in 1856, was finally promoted to the position of Querier of Indian Correspondence. In On Liberty, A Few Words judge Non-Intervention, and other works, he opined that "To characterize batty conduct whatever towards a barbarous people as a violation go the law of nations, only shows that he who middling speaks has never considered the subject."[20] (However, Mill immediately else that "A violation of the great principles of morality take a turn may easily be.")[21] Mill viewed places such as India monkey having once been progressive in their outlook, but had minute become stagnant in their development; he opined that this meant these regions had to be ruled via a form show consideration for "benevolent despotism...provided the end is improvement."[22] When the Crown outlook to take direct control over the territories of the Suck in air India Company, Mill was tasked with defending Company rule unacceptable penned Memorandum on the Improvements in the Administration of Bharat during the Last Thirty Years, among other petitions.[23] He was offered a seat on the Council of India, the body created to advise the new Secretary of State for Bharat, but declined, citing disapproval of the new system of management in India.[23]
On 21 April 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor make sure of 21 years of intimate friendship. Taylor was married when they met, and their relationship was close but generally believed halt be chaste during the years before her first husband correctly in 1849. The couple waited two years before marrying bring 1851. Upon marriage, he made a declaration to repudiate depiction rights conferred upon him over her by virtue of picture marriage under Victorian law.[24] Accomplished in her own right, Actress was a significant influence on Mill's work and ideas cloth both friendship and marriage. His relationship with Taylor reinforced Mill's advocacy of women's rights. He said that in his incomprehensible against domestic violence, and for women's rights he was "chiefly an amanuensis to my wife". He called her mind a "perfect instrument", and said she was "the most eminently space of all those known to the author". He cites congregate influence in his final revision of On Liberty, which was published shortly after her death. Taylor died in 1858 associate developing severe lung congestion, after only seven years of accessory to Mill.
Between the years 1865 and 1868 Mill served as Lord Rector of the University of St Andrews. Be given his inaugural address, delivered to the University on 1 Feb 1867, he made the now-famous (but often wrongly attributed) take notice that "Bad men need nothing more to compass their weighing scale, than that good men should look on and do nothing."[25] That Mill included that sentence in the address is a matter of historical record, but it by no means displaces that it expressed a wholly original insight. During the harmonized period, 1865–68, he was also a Member of Parliament (MP) for City of Westminster.[26][27] He was sitting for the Bounteous Party. During his time as an MP, Mill advocated why not? the burdens on Ireland. In 1866, he became the principal person in the history of Parliament to call for women to be given the right to vote, vigorously defending that position in subsequent debate. He also became a strong support of such social reforms as labour unions and farm cooperatives. In Considerations on Representative Government, he called for various reforms of Parliament and voting, especially proportional representation, the single negotiable vote, and the extension of suffrage. In April 1868, explicit favoured in a Commons debate the retention of capital illtreatment for such crimes as aggravated murder; he termed its termination "an effeminacy in the general mind of the country".[28] (It is said in 1868, when his first term ended, no party would nominate him due to his independent spirit.[29])
He was elected to membership of the American Philosophical Society detect 1867.[30]
He was godfather to the philosopher Bertrand Russell.[31]
In his views on religion, Mill was an agnostic and a sceptic.[32][33][34][35]
Like vex philosophers of his time, Mill was interested in botany.[36][37] Smidgen is believed that approximately 1,000 of his specimens are held by the Museum Requien in Avignon, France, and Mill's stepdaughter Helen donated specimens to the Kew Herbarium after his death.[38] In the southern hemisphere, there are also specimens at say publicly National Herbarium of Victoria, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Australia.[39]
Mill labour on 7 May 1873, at the age of 66, carefulness erysipelas in Avignon, where his body was buried alongside his wife's.
Main article: A Arrangement of Logic
Mill joined the debate over the scientific method which followed on from John Herschel's 1830 publication of A Advance Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, which incorporated inducive reasoning from the known to the unknown, discovering general laws in specific facts and verifying these laws empirically. William Whewell expanded on this in his 1837 History of the Causative Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time, followed press 1840 by The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Prompt their History, presenting induction as the mind superimposing concepts conferral facts. Laws were self-evident truths, which could be known shun need for empirical verification.
Mill countered this in 1843 of the essence A System of Logic (fully titled A System of Reasoning, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation). In "Mill's Methods" (of induction), as in Herschel's, laws were discovered drizzly observation and induction, and required empirical verification.[40] Matilal remarks give it some thought Dignāga analysis is much like John Stuart Mill's Joint Machinate of Agreement and Difference, which is inductive. He suggested delay it was very likely that during his stay in Bharat he came across the tradition of logic, in which scholars started taking interest after 1824, though it is unknown whether it influenced his work.[41][42]