On Liberty and Other Essays [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION On the received and conventional view, John Stuart Mill is an eclectic and transitional thinker, who is never able either to endorse or to abandon the classical utilitarian philosophy he inherited from his father, James Mill, and whose wridngs implement no research programme, exhibit no settled doctrine, but merely reflect his vacillations of mind. In sharp contrast to this convendonal wisdom, recent Mill scholarship presents him as a methodical and programmatic thinker, whose lifelong project was the reconstruction of dassical udlitarianism in a form that could withstand the criticisms of Macaulay and absorb the insights of Coleridge. It is this view of Mill's work that will be expounded in this Introduction to four of his most seminal essays. Here a chronology of Mill's most relevant works may be helpful. Mill had given his account of natural and moral (as we should say, social) science, and of moral reasoning, in his System of Logic, which he published in 1843, and which, for half a century or more, remained the standard work in English on the subject. In the Logic, Mill initiated the project of a Science of Ethology, which would identify the laws of mind and of the formation of character, and from which predictions could be derived, given the facts of history. In 1848, Mill published his Principles of Political Economy, which (like the Logic) at once became a standard text, exercising a dominance over intellectual life in Britain well into the late nineteenth century. The Principles aimed to give substance to the Science of Ethology adumbrated in the Logic, but Mill was no more successful there than in any of his works in coming forward with the laws of mind and society whose existence he had postulated in the earlier work. For Mill, as perhaps for us, this project, a science of mind and society, was always to remain an aspiration, never a reality. It is in the four essays assembled here that we see Mill at his most methodical and systematic, applying the general conceptions advanced in the Logic to his central moral and