Why another book on Mill? And, more specifically, why another companion volume, given the existence of the excellent 1998 Cambridge Companion to Mill, edited by John Skorupski? The questions are fair, but the answers are not hard to find. Mill has indeed already been the subject of many books of late. In just the last ten years – since 2006, which happens to be the year of his bicentenary – more than a dozen new monographs, at least a half‐dozen edited collections of new papers, and a new biography have appeared (in addition, of course, to countless articles in academic journals). While much of the scholarly attention has been focused on Mill’s moral, social, and political philosophy, as well as his place in the history of political thought, his theoretical philosophy has not been neglected: witness the publication of a significant work on the Mill–Whewell debate in the philosophy of science and an edited collection on the System of Logic, not to mention a number of nuanced articles considering Mill’s philosophy of language.
Yet the very fact that so much first‐rate work has been and continues to be produced about every aspect of Mill’s life and thought indicates that interest in him remains both widespread and intense, and this alone constitutes a rationale for another significant contribution to the literature – at least as long as it is of sufficient quality. Moreover, that the literature has grown so much in just the last decade, let alone since the publication of the last companion to Mill, suggests that this is an appropriate juncture for taking stock in a comprehensive fashion both of everything that we have learned and of the state of the debate over the many interpretative questions that remain unsettled. This is what this volume, whose contributors include most of the biographers and interpreters responsible for moving the conversation about Mill forward in recent years, aims to do.
Despite the advances that have been made in our understanding of Mill, there are still very basic disagreements about the nature of his thought. Writing in Skorupski’s Companion, Alan Ryan pointed out that despite the apparent simplicity of its prose, the nature of Mill’s On Liberty remains disputed.
[O]ught we not to know by now whether the essay’s main target is the hold of Christianity on the Victorian mind or rather the hold of a monolithic public opinion of whatever kind; whether its intellectual basis lies in utility as Mill claimed or in a covert appeal to natural right; whether the ideal of individual moral and intellectual autonomy is supposed to animate everyone, or only an elite; and so indefinitely on?
(Ryan 1998: 497)
Such debate continues between this volume’s contributors both here and on the pages of scholarly journals. We still lack consensus on even issues as fundamental as whether Mill is more profitably seen as a libertarian or a socialist. And if there are still disagreements about the basics of Mill’s political philosophy, the same can be said of many other aspects of his works. Whether Mill is better read as advocating a eudaimonistic or hedonistic conception of the good is still a live issue, as is how this theory of value relates to his account of morality. Even his orientation towards idealism or naturalism in metaphysics remains contentious.
It is tempting to say that such disputes are inevitable, given Mill’s self‐declared “many‐sidedness” (Autobiography, I: 171). His goal to unite the philosophies represented in his own age by Bentham and Coleridge plays out throughout his philosophy as no less than the attempt to reconcile Enlightenment and Romanticism, liberalism and conservatism, scientific explanation and humanistic understanding. This means that Mill’s work inevitably pulls in different directions. That is not to say that his philosophy is contradictory, but rather just to point out the obvious – that any satisfactory account of human beings’ relationship to the world and to one another must do justice to the complexity of those relationships. Mill’s sensitivity to such complexities makes him an invigorating philosophical companion. With the increasing spirit of pluralism within Anglo‐American philosophy, Mill’s desire to learn from “Germano‐Coleridgean” (Coleridge, X: 215) insights also provides a useful lesson in how to be open to traditions beyond one’s own, while remaining philosophically level‐headed.
The chapters in this volume consider many different aspects of Mill’s thought. Part I deals with biographical issues, broadly conceived. Mill’s life has always been a source of considerable interest. His remarkable education, his breakdown and discovery of poetry, his love‐affair with Harriet Taylor and his foray into parliamentary politics all make for absorbing stories – all the more for being set during a period when the British institutions of Church and State were undergoing pivotal change. Behind these episodes, however, lie questions about Mill’s relationship to his own intellectual heritage, and the extent to which Mill is a reliable narrator of the meaning and lessons of his own life. Part II of the book offers an account of various important influences on Mill’s thought. Providing a complete account is, of course, impossible – Mill’s reading was wide, and influence is an amorphous concept. The account here, therefore must be partial, and there are regrettable omissions from the story told here – regrettable all the more because they indicate genuine gaps in our knowledge of Mill’s background. We still know little in detail of Mill’s debt to the distinctive voices coming from Germany in his own period, the place of the Medievals in his philosophy is not well understood, and (perhaps most surprisingly) his relation to Scottish thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth century has not been fully investigated. Any of these topics, and more besides, could have been usefully included in a companion such as this.
Part III deals with what we have decided to title the “Foundations of Mill’s Thought.” These include aspects of his theoretical philosophy – though we do not mean to take a stand on the much disputed question of whether Mill’s theoretical philosophy is the groundwork, or rather a result of, his moral philosophy. Whatever the case, this aspect of Mill’s philosophy is rich and deep, and it is perhaps surprising that it has received so little attention when compared to that of Locke and Hume. Mill’s place in the history of philosophy means that he sees clearly the strengths and possibilities of British empiricism – but also its internal tensions. The growth of the physical, biological, and social sciences in his own time made it clear that a new account of humans’ knowledge of the world was necessary – but in the process of attempting to offer such an account, Mill runs into some of the most difficult problems of reconciling the mind seen as a natural object in the world and seen as the condition for our view on that same world. This leads him to struggle with how our minds are formed by our circumstances, the nature of our representations of the world, and the relativity of knowledge – issues which could only start to come clearly into focus in British philosophy after the Kantian turn. This section also deals with Mill’s view on issues – aesthetics, history, and religion – which, although not traditionally thought of as theoretical, are closely related to those issues.
Parts IV and V form the core of this volume, dealing with Mill’s ethics and social philosophy respectively. It is to these areas of Mill’s thought that most scholarly attention has been dedicated in recent years, and much has been learnt. It is now generally accepted that any full understanding of Mill’s ethics must place his account of morality within the broader context of his account of “the art of life.” Mill, to be sure, has much to say about distinctively moral categories of right, obligation, and justice – but it is an open question as to how these relate to his account of the value of utility, which grounds practical reason as a whole. Mill freely avails himself of notions of spontaneity, virtue, and cultivation – these too inform his theory of how it is best for an individual to live. The question of how to Mill’s mind it is best for a community to organize itself and act is equally as complex. It has taken a long time for it to be clearly appreciated how many issues are at stake in Mill’s “text‐book of a single truth” (Autobiography, I: 259). There are many arguments presented in that work and they must be carefully picked apart if we are to properly understand Mill’s argument for freedom. We must also see these arguments in the context of Mill worries and hopes for a nation’s ability to improve itself and other communities, as given in his lesser known works.
The volume concludes, in Part VI, with a consideration of Mill’s relation to later movements in philosophy: to modern liberalism, to modern utilitarianism, and to the Analytic/Continental divide. Mill’s influence, of course, continues. Many of the philosophic issues he struggled with remain alive today, and chapters on Mill’s relation to various other aspects of twenty‐first century philosophy could (and no doubt would) have been chosen for inclusion by other editors. We hope that the perceived gaps in this volume will spur others on to complete the work started here.