John Stuart Mill

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John Stuart Mill : biography

20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873

This intensive study however had injurious effects on Mill’s mental health, and state of mind. At the age of twentyMill, J.S. Autobiography, Part V (1873). he suffered a nervous breakdown. In chapter V of his Autobiography, he claims that this was caused by the great physical and mental arduousness of his studies which had suppressed any feelings he might have developed normally in childhood. Nevertheless, this depression eventually began to dissipate, as he began to find solace in the Mémoires of Jean-François Marmontel and the poetry of William Wordsworth.

Mill had been engaged in a pen-friendship with Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism and sociology, since the two were both young men in the early 1820s. Comte’s sociologie was more an early philosophy of science than we perhaps know it today, and the positive philosophy aided in Mill’s broad rejection of Benthamism.Pickering, Mary (1993) Auguste Comte: an intellectual biography Cambridge University Press, pp. 540

Mill did not study at the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge, because he refused to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.Capaldi, Nicholas. John Stuart Mill: A Biography. p.33, Cambridge, 2004, ISBN 0-521-62024-4. Instead he followed his father to work for the East India Company until 1858, and attended University College, London (UCL) to hear the lectures of John Austin, the first Professor of Jurisprudence. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1856.

In 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor after 21 years of an intimate friendship. Taylor was married when they met, and their relationship was close but generally believed to be chaste during the years before her first husband died. Brilliant in her own right, Taylor was a significant influence on Mill’s work and ideas during both friendship and marriage. His relationship with Harriet Taylor reinforced Mill’s advocacy of women’s rights. He cites her influence in his final revision of On Liberty, which was published shortly after her death. Taylor died in 1858 after developing severe lung congestion, after only seven years of marriage to Mill.

Between the years 1865–1868 Mill served as Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrews. During the same period, 1865-8, he was a Member of Parliament for City and Westminster,Capaldi, Nicholas. John Stuart Mill: A Biography. p.321-322, Cambridge, 2004, ISBN 0-521-62024-4. and was often associated with the Liberal Party. During his time as an MP, Mill advocated easing the burdens on Ireland. In 1866, Mill became the first person in the history of Parliament to call for women to be given the right to vote, vigorously defending this position in subsequent debate. Mill became a strong advocate of such social reforms as labour unions and farm cooperatives. In Considerations on Representative Government, Mill called for various reforms of Parliament and voting, especially proportional representation, the Single Transferable Vote, and the extension of suffrage.

He was godfather to the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

On his religious views, Mill was an atheist.

Mill died in 1873 of erysipelas in Avignon, France, where he was buried alongside his wife.

Major publications

Title Date Source
"Two Letters on the Measure of Value" 1822 "The Traveller"
"Questions of Population" 1823 "Black Dwarf"
"War Expenditure" 1824 Westminster Review
"Quarterly Review – Political Economy" 1825 Westminster Review
"Review of Miss Martineau’s Tales" 1830 Examiner
"The Spirit of the Age" 1831 Examiner
"Use and Abuse of Political Terms" 1832
"What is Poetry" 1833, 1859
"Rationale of Representation" 1835
"De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [i]" 1835
"State of Society In America" 1836
"Civilization" 1836
"Essay on Bentham" 1838
"Essay on Coleridge" 1840
"Essays On Government" 1840
"De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [ii]" 1840
A System of Logic 1843
Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy 1844
"Claims of Labour" 1845 Edinburgh Review
The Principles of Political Economy: with some of their applications to social philosophy
1848
"The Negro Question" 1850 Fraser’s Magazine "Reform of the Civil Service" 1854 Dissertations and Discussions 1859 A Few Words on Non-intervention 1859 On Liberty 1859