James Mill Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Scottish philosopher James Mill (1773–1836) occupies a major place in nineteenth-century British political thought. His writings covered not only the fundamentals of government, but also education, political economy, law, history, and prison reform. However, two of his contemporaries eclipsed Mill’s standing as a political theorist: his friend and founder of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, and Mill’s eldest son, moral philosopher John Stuart Mill.

James Mill was born on April 6, 1773, in Scotland. His mother, Isabel Fenton Milne, changed the family name to the more English-sounding “Mill” to give her first-born son greater social opportunities. It was she who supervised his daily studies in composition, arithmetic, Greek, and Latin (a regime he later imposed on John Stuart.) With support from a wealthy Scottish patron, James Mill attended the University of Edinburgh in 1790. It was intended that he become a minister, but he soon became disillusioned with his religious instruction and left Scotland to pursue a “career of authorship” in London, England.

In 1805 Mill married Harriet Burrow. To support his growing family, he worked as a journalist and editor, writing some 1,400 editorials and hundreds of essays. It was shortly after the birth of John Stuart in 1806 that he began work on the book that eventually established his literary reputation. Published in 1818, Mill’s three-volume History of British India was highly successful and won him a post with the East India Company. However, the intervening years prior to the book’s publication were no less important to Mill’s development as a political thinker.

In 1808 Mill met Jeremy Bentham, with whom he formed a long intellectual partnership. Mill, Bentham, and their followers maintained that basic “scientific principles” of human nature, namely, the desire to maximize pleasure and to minimize pain, should be applied to economic and political affairs. Their philosophical creed came to be known as utilitarianism, but as they also believed that the aim of all government legislation should be to seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, the Benthamites were considered “philosophical radicals.”

Although he was an enthusiastic propagandist of Bentham’s utilitarian principles, Mill altered some of his mentor’s views on political reform. He persuaded Bentham to shift his focus away from the British aristocracy as a force for social change and embrace instead a more radical democratic position. In Mill’s Essay on Government (1820), originally written for the fifth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, his arguments were mainly directed against “virtual representation,” which, for Mill, resulted in a few aristocrats with “sinister interests” ruling at the expense of the majority’s happiness. He maintained that only a representative democracy with frequent elections and an enlarged franchise provided a unity of interest between public officials and the community. That said, Mill limited political participation to the wise and virtuous members of society—educated adult males over the age of forty.

James Mill died on June 23, 1836. His Essay on Government had its critics, such as Whig historian Thomas Babington Macauley, who attacked Mill for using what he saw as bogus scientific claims to support radical political reforms, and the feminists who complained that Mill’s advocacy of representative democracy excluded half the human race. However, the work remains a classic statement of utilitarian political theory.

Bibliography:

Halevy, Elie. The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism. Translated by Mary Morris. London: Faber and Faber, 1928.
Mill, James. An Essay on Government. Edited by Currin V. Shields. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955.
Political Writings. Edited by Terence Ball. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Thomas,William. The Philosophic Radicals. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

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