John Stuart Mill regarded his writing in economics - which formed only a part of his larger intellectual enterprise - as primarily an exercise in synthesizing the findings of the classical tradition.
His professed objective was not to originate, but to consolidate classical analysis as it had evolved since Smith. In fact, however, his contribution to economics went well beyond this stated aim.
In the course of his work, he managed - while always protesting his loyalty to the classical tradition - to amend some of its premises and with consequences more far-reaching than he himself realized.Mill's revision of the premises of classical political economy was parallelled by his revisionist attitude towards the philosophical tradition in which he had been brought up. Schooled originally in the Benthamite tradition of the pleasure-pain calculus, he turned away from the cruder formulations of this doctrine. As he came to view matters, pleasures could not be as readily measured and aggregated as Bentham's version of utilitarianism required. Instead, Mill insisted, qualitative considerations should count fully as much as quantitative ones. He wished to draw attention to the different orders of pleasure, which he did emphatically when he asserted that it is 'better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied'. With this amendment, the props to Benthamite confidence in the felicific calculus as a guide to social policy were shaken.
The economic world Mill observed had also undergone considerable change from the state of affairs with which Ricardo and Malthus had been concerned. Many of the specific policy battles in which the earlier classicists had been engaged had been won, though not always in quite the form they had intended. By 1846 the Corn Laws had been repealed, banking and currency arrangements had been reorganized and effectively tied to gold as the international means of payment, and the Poor Laws had been amended to attack the restraints on labour mobility imposed by the earlier system of parish residence as a condition of eligibility for relief. England was close to becoming a nation dedicated to free trade, both in theory and in fact. Meanwhile the worst disasters of the years of deflation in the immediate post-Napoleonic war decades had passed.
Even so, the quality of life - as well as the means for its full enjoyment - left much to be desired for the bulk of the population. Laissez-faire, whatever its contribution to the growth of international trade and to the enlargement of the national product, seemed not to have meant that a substantial share of the gains were distributed to the benefit of the least advantaged groups in the community. Sensitivity to growing inequalities was clearly part of the political protest of the Chartist movement and it was also reflected in the stirrings of the trade union organizations (relieved after 1824 of many of their former legal disabilities with the repeal of the anti-combination laws) and of the cooperative movement.
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