The Partnership

John Stuart Mill was the heir apparent of the British tradition of classical political economy. His father, the eminent James Mill, instructed him in Latin and Greek before the age of six, and helped him complete his first survey of political economy at age thirteen.

A certain nonconformity became apparent with his arrest in 1823 at the tender age of seventeen for distributing Francis Place's handbills of contra­ceptive advice. The young Mill was also drawn to arguments on behalf of female emancipation. Rather than courting a suitable merchant's daughter who would devote herself to his creature comforts (and provide him with income from her property), Mill fell in love with a married woman who loved political debate. He met Harriet Taylor in 1830, and devoted himself to a circumspect friendship and correspondence with her until her husband's death in 1849. After a decent mourning period, they married. Over the long course of their relationship, Taylor deepened Mill's sympathy for both socialist and feminist views.³

Mill made his formal intellectual debut in 1848 with the publication of his Principles of Political Economy, with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy. The book restated many of the principles of Ricardian and Malthusian theories of production but emphasized the need for more attention to the distribution of income. He clung to the basic utilitarian creed—promoting the greatest good of the greatest number. He noted that while laws of nature could not be changed, social institutions such as marriage and inheritance could be redesigned. He favored competition but criticized the accumulation of unearned property and privilege.

Historical context often determined whether Mill was called a socialist, a liberal, or an authoritarian, an issue on which eminent scholars have often disagreed.⁴ His socialist tendencies would have seemed more radical had publication of his Principles not coincided with the French Revolution of 1848. In the context of policies already being put into place in Paris, Mill's tone seemed cautionary.⁵ Left-leaning economists who characterized Mill as a timid wishful thinker ignored his radical arguments on behalf of contraception and women's rights writ large.⁶ Insistence that such issues lay outside the provenance of political economy made it easier to deprecate Mill's contributions.⁷

Mill's interest in gender equality led him to develop a more sophisticated analysis of self-interest than his predecessors. He and Taylor (with whom he discussed the writing of the Principles in some detail) agreed that classical political economists offered a simplistic view of human motivation. In a chapter devoted to a discussion of communism, Mill emphasized that individual values were culturally constructed and susceptible to change: ‘‘Mankind are capable of a far greater amount of public spirit than the present age is accustomed to suppose possible. History bears witness to the success with which large bodies of human beings may be trained to feel the public interest their own.''⁸

This idealistic pronouncement was reinforced by the shrewd observation that the existing capitalist system did not actually make very good use of self­interest, because it offered workers a wage determined by a prevailing market wage, rather than a share of the total product. An entirely rational worker would minimize his effort on the job, knowing that only his employer would benefit from it. A socialist system that adhered to the de Saint-Simonian principle ‘‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their work” might actually elicit higher productivity.

In Mill's view the very ubiquity of self-interest decreed the need for democratic guarantees of individual rights. He invoked Ricardo's analysis of landlords, capitalists, and workers in terms that paralleled his analysis of relations between men and women:

All privileged and powerful classes, as such, have used their power in the interest of their own selfishness, and have indulged their self­importance in despising, and not in lovingly caring for, those who were, in their estimation, degraded, by being under the necessity of working for their benefit. I do not affirm that what has always been must always be, or that human improvement has no tendency to correct the intensely selfish feelings engendered by power, but though the evil may be lessened, it cannot be eradicated, until the power itself is withdrawn.⁹

Mill's comments on gender inequalities in the Principles converged with his larger economic analysis. The traditional patriarchal family, he observed, was outmoded because it was inconsistent with large-scale production and more complex forms of economic organization.¹⁰ Owen was right— despotism within the family would invariably lead to despotism without. Self-interest could be a positive force, Mill implied, only in a world of equal rights for all.

The most striking chapter of the Principles called for a transition to more cooperative modes of production that could preserve the benefits of compe­tition. It also predicted that the future well-being of the working class would depend on improvements in women's position. Mill described the sexual division of labor in paid employment, which crowded women into a small number of occupations, as inefficient and unfair. He argued that many women were forced prematurely into marriage and motherhood.¹¹ He predicted that greater economic independence for women would lead to fertility decline.

This prediction was hardly noticed by Mill's readers. It enjoyed far less attention from economists than Malthus's prediction that population growth would keep wages at subsistence level, or Ricardo's prediction that economic growth would inevitably level off. Yet fertility decline, already underway in many areas, would accelerate in Britain, France, and the U.S. in the late nineteenth century, long before the advent of modern contraceptives. Combined with technological change, the expansion of education and increases in women's labor force participation, fertility decline helped bring significant improvements in working class standards of living (though not, it should be emphasized, without a fight).

Mill's awareness of the force of economic self-interest always tempered his utopian impulse. In one of the very few disagreements with Harriet docu­mented in their correspondence, he wrote:

I cannot persuade myself that you do not greatly overrate the ease of making people unselfish. Granting that in ‘‘ten years'' the children of a community might by teaching be made ‘‘perfect'' it seems to me that to do so there must be perfect people to teach them. You say ‘‘if there were a desire on the part of the cleverer people to make them perfect it would be easy''—but how to produce that desire in the cleverer people?¹²

Mill made it clear in his Autobiography that he looked forward to a time when people would be more willing to work for the common good. But he did not believe that time was imminent.

He had more confidence in the project of freeing women to pursue their own interests, and he and Harriet concentrated much of their joint intellec­tual energy on this task. Excited by reports of conferences on equal rights held in America in 1850, they began work on an essay entitled ‘‘The Enfranchisement of Women'', which appeared in the Westminster Review in July 1851. The particularly bold tone of this article suggests that Harriet may actually deserve more credit for it than her husband, and Mill himself explained later that he had done little more than edit the piece (for this reason it is sometimes attributed to Taylor even though it did not appear under her name).1³ The substance of the argument reveals more confidence in the principles of liberal individualism than had been apparent in the Principles.

The motive may have been strategic. The intellectual influence of political economy was expanding and individualism becoming more acceptable. Mill and Taylor appealed to the predominant theory of laissez faire when they wrote ‘‘[S]o long as competition is the general law of human life, it is tyranny to shut out one-half of the competitors.”¹⁴ They applied the now-familiar rhetoric of ‘‘no taxation without representation,” as well. Mill and Taylor pushed the limits of respectability by suggesting that the rules of reason should be applied to family-size decisions.

They also insisted that married women could attain full equality only if they earned an income outside the home. Otherwise, their bargaining power within marriage would be limited: As they put it, ‘‘Even under the present laws respecting the property of women, a woman who contributes materially to the support of the family, cannot be treated in the same contemptuously tyrannical manner as one who, however she may toil as a domestic drudge, is a dependent on the man for subsistence.’’¹⁵ Mill inserted a similar phrase in the 1852 edition of his Principles of Political Economy, though he backed off somewhat in a later revision.¹⁶ Women’s bargaining power within marriage received virtually no more attention from economists until the 1980s (see discussion in Chapter 20).

‘‘The Enfranchisement of Women’’, published in the year of the author’s marriage, was the finest product of their direct collaboration. Taylor, plagued by poor health probably related to tuberculosis, died seven years later. Mill was devastated. ‘‘The spring of my life is broken,’’ he wrote, announcing he had no further interest in life but to fulfill her wishes. 17 Having retired from his post at the India House, he began work on an essay he and Harriet had planned to write together.