Some Biographical Notes
A biographical digression is proper here. James Mill, who was a close friend of David Ricardo and an economist himself, started to instruct his son John Stuart (born in London, 20 May 1806) in political economy when he was only about 13 years of age.
J.S. Mill’s Autobiography (Mill 1873 [1981]) is a legendary testimony of the extraordinary education he received under the spell of his father. We are told that he learned Greek and Latin from him in his childhood and read the main classical historians by the age of 8. Then he studied mathematics, philosophy, social science, and eventually political economy. His father (who attended the University of Edinburgh at the expense of Sir John Stuart - after whom the first son was to be named - in exchange for James’s teaching of Stuart’s daughter) wanted to methodically build a pure “thinking machine” out of him, making a tabula rasa of any preconceptions, unreasoned thinking, and even personal feelings, with the exception of love for knowledge; to this end, the young Mill was educated entirely at home, in the absence of boy companions. During their daily walks, James delivered to his son a complete course of political economy based on Ricardo’s recently published “great work” and asked him to write an account of each lecture the next day. Afterwards Mill read Ricardo’s and Smith’s treatises, sharing with his father the opinion that the latter was “more superficial” and the former had “superior lights” (Mill 1873 [1981]: 31). In May 1820 he went to Paris, with a letter of presentation from his father to J.-B. Say with whose family he spent nine days, before moving to the south, guest for over one year of Sir Samuel Bentham, the younger brother of Jeremy Bentham, the great master of James Mill. On returning to England, he worked on the manuscript of his father’s Elements of political economy (Mill 1821), writing short abstracts of every paragraph. Mill did not attend a university, even though Sir John Stuart bequeathed to him a sum of money for the express purpose of sending him to Cambridge: he “already knew more than he could learn” (Packe 1954: 49). A third phase of his economic apprenticeship began in 1825 with his participation in debating societies with economic interests (after his participation in the Benthamite “Utilitarian society”), in the spare time left by his clerkship at the East India Company (where he made an outstanding carrier until his retirement in 1858). The meetings of the “Grote group” were organized on the basis of reading systematic treatises, and the first choice was James Mill’s Elements.After a period he called a “mental crisis”, he returned to economic theory, writing the Essays. Afterwards his efforts were gradually absorbed by study of the philosophical problems of knowledge, which eventually led to the publication of the Logic. At the time of his “mental crisis”, the poetry of Wordsworth led him to appreciate the importance of feeling and sympathy in social relations, and the Benthamite attitude against sentimentality became intolerable to him. He cultivated new intellectual contacts and gradually became critical of the Philosophic radicals to whom he had been introduced by his father. The younger disciples of Coleridge aroused in him an interest in German romanticism. Thomas Carlyle, with whom Mill had a long, affectionate friendship, helped him to understand and appreciate the reasons of mysticism. In a letter of 1834 to Carlyle, Mill wrote: “if I have any vocation, I think it is exactly this, to translate the mysticism of others into the language of Argument” (Mill to Carlyle, 2 March 1834, in Mill 1963, XII: 219, original emphasis). The French Saint-Simonians, whom he met at the London Debating Society at the end of the 1820s, also influenced him significantly: “I read nearly everything they wrote. Their criticism on the common doctrines of Liberalism seemed to me full of important truth; and it was partly by their writings that my eyes were opened to the very limited and temporary value of the old political economy” (Mill 1873 [1981]: 173-5).
The death of James Mill in 1836 made his dissent from the strict Benthamite doctrine more explicit. However, the most important biographical source in the development of Mill’s social philosophy was his relationship from the early 1830s with Harriet Taylor, who became Mrs Mill in 1851. Mill took advantage of any occasion, and of his Autobiography in particular, to passionately acknowledge the influence of Harriet on his views of human progress. She strongly reinforced Mill’s favourable attitude toward the ethical aims of utopian socialism and encouraged him to give those aims a firmer logical ground. Hayek (1951) has provided a masterly reconstruction of the documental evidence of their intellectual and personal relationship, which ended with Harriet’s premature death in 1858 in Avignon; Mill died in the same town, on 8 May 1973.