John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was raised from an early age to be a famous philosopher. His father, the Scottish radical James Mill (1773–1836), taught his son Greek at three and Latin when the child was only eight years old. By the age of ten, Mill could read Plato in the original Greek. At age twelve, at his father’s urging, he began to study medieval scholasticism. To avoid distractions, the budding philosopher was forbidden from playing with other children.
This upbringing left Mill profoundly exhausted, and he suffered a prolonged nervous breakdown at age twenty. But, true to the elder Mill’s wishes, John Stuart Mill became one of the central philosophers of the nineteenth century and a leading advocate of an English philosophical tradition called utilitarianism.
After emerging from his bout of depression, Mill spent the remainder of the 1820s traveling. He met Harriet Taylor (1807–1858) in 1830; although she was married, the two began a relationship—much to the dismay of Mill’s father. The pair remained close for two decades and married in 1851, after the death of Harriet’s first husband.
Mill’s first major philosophical work, A System of Logic, was published in 1843. His Principles of Political Economy followed in 1848. The books established him as one of the leading Liberals and utilitarians in England. Utilitarians believed that the morality of an action could be judged solely by its contribution to the overall happiness of society at large; they are often associated with the motto “the greatest good for the greatest number.”
In practice, utilitarianism led Mill to adopt positions on many political issues that were considered radical at the time. He supported electoral reform, easing British policies toward Ireland, and economic and political rights for women—all stances that placed him on the fringes of nineteenth-century British politics.
Until 1858, Mill worked for the British East India Company, a corporation that controlled British trade with India. Mill then entered politics and was elected to the House of Commons in 1865, where he sponsored the first legislation to extend voting rights to women. (It failed.) He outlined his views on gender equality in a famous 1869 book, The Subjection of Women, which was published after he failed to win reelection to Parliament.
Mill died in France at age sixty-six.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Mill also served as the rector of the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland between 1865 and 1868.
- He was a godfather to the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970).
- Women in the United Kingdom were not fully enfranchised until 1928, more than sixty years after Mill first proposed equal suffrage.
