The Saint of Rationalism
The intellectual stature of John Stuart Mill cannot be adequately measured only by the depth and persistence of his scientific achievements; nor can it be identified with one major discovery.
Rather, it should be measured mainly by the exceptional extension and open-mindedness with which the various questions were elaborated by his mind. In no field was he an apologist. It is characteristic of him that seemingly opposite doctrines stand together in harmony, not merely by virtue of a verbal artifice inspired by eclecticism, but because he discovered points of view which were better than the conventional ones. He was the champion of both liberalism and evolutionary socialism; he was consistently a theorist and a social reformer, an economist and a philosopher; as an economist, he presented at the same time a synthesis of old theories, their application to the main issues of his time, and a sketch of the logical kernel of theories to come. This all-embracing variety is mirrored by his personal life: outwardly it was singularly uneventful, but in respect of his inner experience it was of the most exceptional kind. He was at the same time a “thinking machine” and a candid man; he professed no religious beliefs, but set no limits to the dignity of human life and its improvability. In the words of Hayek, he wasa great moral figure... in whom even his purely intellectual achievements are mainly due to his profound conviction of the supreme moral value of unrelenting intellectual effort. Not by temperament but out of a deeply ingrained sense that this was his duty did Mill grow to be the “Saint of rationalism”, as Gladstone once so justly described him. (Hayek 1951: 16)
ArRIGO OpOCHER
See also:
British classical political economy (II); Income distribution (III); Thomas Robert Malthus (I); Alfred Marshall (I); Non-Marxian socialist ideas in Britain and the United States (II); David Ricardo (I); Henry Thornton (I).