MILL, JOHN STUART

(1806–1873)

John Stuart Mill, English political economist and philosopher, was the son of James Mill, the utilitarian economist, who was responsible for his son's precocious upbringing, described in the latter's autobiography. Much of Mill's career, like his father's, was spent with the East India Company, based in London, in a period when the Company was effectively India's administering authority. From 1865 to 1868 he was a member of parliament. His formal occupations did not greatly interfere with his writing–in the 1820s and 1830s, essays for the Westminster Review; then A System of Logic (1843); and his major works, The Principles of Political Economy (1848) and On Liberty (1859). (Page references to the Principles below are to the 1965 variorum edition from the University of Toronto Press.) He was a longtime companion and eventually husband of Harriet Taylor, whose strong stance on women's rights accorded with his own, set out in his essay The Subjection of Women (1869).

Mill's views on population issues were in many respects Malthusian, but he went further in approving of contraception within marriage, in promoting the emancipation of women, and in calling for curtailment of population increase on environmental grounds. The combination of utilitarianism, feminism, and environmentalism yielded an outlook that is surprisingly modern.

In his Autobiography (1873), Mill describes how the Philosophical Radicals, the group with which he was associated in the 1830s, interpreted T. R. Malthus's principle of population, seeing it not, as most of Malthus's readers did, as an argument against the improvability of human affairs, but "as indicating the sole means of realizing that improvability … [for] the whole labouring population through a voluntary restriction of the increase of their numbers" (Mill 1924, p. 74). The later Malthus, of course, also believed in prudential restraint, but more as an exercise of individual virtue than as an outcome of social policy. The policies Mill advocated to promote escape from a low-level Malthusian equilibrium were popular education (convincing people that producing a large family should be "regarded with the same feelings as drunkenness or any other physical excess"–Principles, 1965, p. 368); land reform, to establish a system of peasant proprietorship; and subsidized emigration, especially of young couples. But a big push was called for: "Unless comfort can be made as habitual to a whole generation as indigence is now, nothing is accomplished; and feeble half-measures do but fritter away resources" (Principles, 1965, p. 378). A further policy measure implied in The Subjection of Women was to prevent women being forced into the role of child-producers by "the press-gang of society." In a letter written shortly before his death, Mill agreed with the opinion that "a necessary condition for over-population is woman's subjugation, and the cure is her enfranchisement" (Mill, 1910, vol. 2, p. 303).

Mill was an early, though circumspect, supporter of artificial birth control, presumably under the influence of the radical reformer Francis Place, an associate of his father. He expressed amazement that, in England at least, the idea of voluntarily limiting the size of family after marriage was never mentioned. "One would imagine that children were rained down upon married people, direct from heaven, without their being art or part in the matter" (Principles, 1965, p. 369). (Mill is not usually known for a lightness of touch, but in a footnote in the Principles [1965, p. 156n] he comments on the relevant proximate determinant: "The most rapid known rate of multiplication is quite compatible with a very sparing use of the multiplying power.")

Most of Mill's views on population and even on women's rights are of interest mainly to historians of ideas. On one issue, however, he is still frequently read and quoted: his vision of the stationary state, set out in Book 4, Chapter 6 of the Principles. Classical economists like Adam Smith, James Mill, and David Ricardo saw economic growth leading eventually to stagnation at subsistence wages as profits fell toward zero and consumer demand flagged. This was their view of the stationary state. Mill's stationary state, in contrast, was arcadian–consistent with the prospect of indefinite human improvement in a world without the "unmeaning bustle of so-called civilized existence":

If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it. (Principles, 1965, p. 756)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECTED WORKS BY JOHN STUART MILL.

Mill, John Stuart. 1871. Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. (1848). 7th edition. London: Parker. A variorum edition appears as volumes 2 and 3(1965) of Mill's Collected Works, published by the University of Toronto Press, 1963–91.

——. 1869. The Subjection of Women. 1869. London: Longmans.

——. [1873] 1924. Autobiography. New York: Columbia University Press.

——. 1910. The Letters of John Stuart Mill. London, Longmans.

SELECTED WORKS ABOUT JOHN STUART MILL.

Himes, Norman E. 1928. "The Place of John Stuart Mill and of Robert Owen in the History of English Neo-Malthusianism." Quarterly Journal of Economics 42(4): 627–640.

Hollander, Samuel. 1985. The Economics of John Stuart Mill. Oxford: Blackwell.

Ryan, Alan. 1975. John Stuart Mill. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.