Mill and Paternalism by Gregory Claeys, and: Mill on Justice ed. by Leonard Kahn, and: Mill by Frederick Rosen (review)

A little less than sixty years ago, a teenage enthusiasm for John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell nearly put an end to my secondary education; skepticism about the existence of God and therefore about the value of compulsory chapel was not well received. I concluded that anything that unnerved my teachers as much as Mill’s essay On Liberty (1859) must have much to be said for it. Mill is still capable of provoking something like anger in his readers; Gertrude Himmelfarb blamed his ideas—and more especially those of Harriet Taylor—for the cultural unraveling of the 1960s, and free-market liberals blame him for betraying the sanctity of property rights. In the past half-century, interest in Mill has grown, as has the sophistication of the discussion, but without much of a consensus being reached on what is of most value in his work, nor on how most productively to approach it. Historians of ideas, historians of social movements, literary historians, and analytically-minded philosophers tackle him very differently.

The three books under review here are a case in point. The authors are broadly sympathetic to Mill; each book is interesting, scholarly, and well-argued; and each makes novel points about already well-explored topics. Nonetheless, they cater to different tastes and rest on very different presuppositions. Frederick Rosen thinks that the recent attention to philosophical puzzles—such as the relation between justice and utility with the attendant difficulties of act and rule utilitarianism—distract us from Mill’s actual project. Mill on Justice, edited by Leonard Kahn in Palgrave Macmillan’s series on “Philosophers in Depth,” risks dismissal as a collection of essays that, while interesting, are not really about Mill. Gregory Claeys, on the other hand, has spent a long and productive career securing a sympathetic hearing for the nineteenth-century social reformers whom Karl Marx dismissed as utopian socialists, and his Mill and Paternalism is a useful contribution to that project; it is less about paternalism narrowly construed than about the very many exceptions that Mill admitted to his espousal of laissez-faire economics. Claeys makes fewer methodological claims than Rosen, but his narrative clarity and careful attention to the details of Mill’s changing views on property, equality, and acceptable forms of socialism yield many rewards.

Rosen covers the broadest terrain, from Mill’s conception of social science as spelled out in A System of Logic (1843) through his Principles of Political Economy (1848), and on to On Liberty and The Subjection of Women (1869). Kahn and his contributors might be thought to cover the narrowest, since they avowedly focus on Mill’s views on justice, beginning with the famous discussion in chapter 5 of Utilitarianism (1861); but appearances are deceptive. Two of the nine essays discuss the similarities and differences between Mill’s liberalism and that of John Rawls, and C. L. Ten’s engaging contribution considers Mill’s claim in On Liberty that despotism is a legitimate mode of governing so-called barbarians, and defends Mill against ill-considered charges of racism.

It is inevitable that any discussion of Mill’s understanding of justice will broaden out to consider his ideas about rights and liberty, as well as his account of the “art of life” in A System of Logic and his defense of Jeremy Bentham against William Whewell in “Whewell on Moral Philosophy” (1852) (Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. VIII, edited by John M. Robson [University of Toronto Press, 1974], 949). Claeys, as I have suggested, concentrates a good deal of attention on Mill’s account of the various exceptions to the laissez...