James Mill - Career

Philosopher, historian, and economist, the father of John Stuart Mill, born in Northwater Bridge, Angus, E Scotland, UK. He studied for the ministry at Edinburgh, and became a teacher, then a journalist. A disciple and friend of Jeremy Bentham, he was an enthusiastic proponent of utilitarianism, and took a leading part in the founding of University College London (1825). His first major publication was the History of British India (1817–18), which secured him a permanent position with the East India Co, where he rose to become head of the Examiner's Office in 1830. He continued writing utilitarian essays for such publications as the Westminster Review and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and wrote Analysis of the Phenomenon of the Human Mind (1829), his main philosophical work, which provides a psychological basis for utilitarianism. A member of the circle of ‘Philosophical Radicals’, his Elements of Political Economy was an important influence on Marx.

James Mill (April 6, 1773 – June 23, 1836), Scottish historian, economist, political theorist, and philosopher, was born at Northwater Bridge, in the parish of Logie-Pert, Angus, Scotland, the son of James Mill, a shoemaker.

Career

In October 1798 he was licensed as a preacher, but met with little success. Finding little prospect of a career in Scotland, in 1802 he went to London, in company with Sir John Stuart, then member of parliament for Kincardineshire, and devoted himself to literary work. In 1805 he published a translation (with notes and quotations) of CF Villers's work on the Reformation, an unsparing exposure of the alleged vices of the papal system. He then took a house in Pentonville, where his eldest son, John Stuart Mill, was born in 1806. About the end of this year he began his History of India, which he took twelve years to complete, instead of three or four, as had been expected.

In 1808 he became acquainted with Jeremy Bentham, and was for many years his chief companion and ally. Between 1806 and 1818 he wrote for the Anti-Jacobin Review, the British Review and the Electric Review; In 1808 he began to write for the Edinburgh Review, to which he contributed steadily till 1813, his first known article being "Money and Exchange." In the Annual Review for 1808 two articles of his are traced--a "Review of Fox's History," and an article on "Bentham's Law Reforms," probably his first published notice of Bentham. He made powerful onslaughts on the Church in connexion with the Bell and Lancaster controversy, and took a prominent part in the discussions that led to the foundation of the University of London in 1825. In 1814 he wrote a number of articles, containing an exposition of utilitarianism, for the supplement to the fifth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, the most important being those on "Jurisprudence," "Prisons" and "Government."

In 1818 the History of India was published, and obtained a great and immediate success. The year following he was appointed an official in the India House, in the important department of the examiner of Indian correspondence. His great work, the Elements of Political Economy, appeared in 1821 (3rd and revised ed.

From 1824 to 1826 Mill contributed to the Westminster Review, started as the organ of his party, a number of articles in which he attacked the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews and ecclesiastical establishments. From 1831 to 1833 Mill was largely occupied in the defence of the East India Company, during the controversy attending the renewal of its charter, he being in virtue of his office the spokesman of the court of directors. For the London Review, founded by Sir William Molesworth in 1834, he wrote a notable article entitled "The Church and its Reform," which was much too sceptical for the time, and injured the Review.

Mill had a thorough acquaintance with Greek and Latin literature, general history, political, mental and moral philosophy. All his work is marked by original constructive thought, except in a few subjects, in which he confessedly expounded Bentham's views. At a time when social subjects were as a rule treated empirically, he brought first principles to bear at every point. The work itself, and the author's official connexion with India for the last seventeen years of his life, effected a complete change in the whole system of governing that country. It is noteworthy that Mill never visited the Indian colony, relying solely on documentary material and archival records in compiling his work. This fact has led to severe criticism of Mill's History of India by notable economist Amartya Sen..

Mill played a great part also in British politics, and was, more than any other man, the founder of what was called "philosophic radicalism." His writings on government and his personal influence among the Liberal politicians of his time determined the change of view from the French Revolution theories of the rights of man and the absolute equality of men to the claiming of securities for good government through a wide extension of the franchise. It followed up the views of Ricardo, with whom Mill was always on terms of intimacy. Among the more important of its theses are:

that the chief problem of practical reformers is to limit the increase of population, on the assumption that capital does not naturally increase at the same rate as population (ii.

The work as a whole is a striking example of the weakness of treating economic problems from a purely a priori standpoint by the deductive method.

By his Analysis of the Mind and his Fragment on Mackintosh Mill acquired a position in the history of psychology and ethics. He took up the problems of mind very much after the fashion of the Scottish Enlightenment, as then represented by Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown, but made a new start, due in part to David Hartley, and still more to his own independent thinking. The Fragment on Mackintosh is a severe exposure of the flimsiness and misrepresentations of Sir James Mackintosh's famous Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy (1830), and discusses the foundations of ethics from the author's utilitarian point of view. Mill, Autobiography (1873) Theodule Ribot, La Psychologie anglaise (1870;

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.