J.S. Mill Revisited: Biographical and Political Explorations (review)

Bruce Kinzer's J.S. Mill Revisited is aptly subtitled "Biographical and Political Explorations." Whereas the first four chapters reexamine J. S. Mill's exceptional education at the hands of James Mill and the impact on his thinking of his friendship with Thomas Carlyle and his formative relationship with Harriet Taylor, the concluding three chapters, versions of which have previously appeared, consider Mill's mature political thinking. The first part, then, follows the first thirty years of Mill's life while the second part focuses mostly on his final fifteen years.

Although both parts contextualize the development of aspects of Mill's thinking, they differ in their methodological approaches and motivations, as Kinzer states explicity at the outset. Kinzer acknowledges his considerable debts to generations of secondary scholarship on Mill, but he says that he has tried to ignore or forget the taint of this influence in the first four essays. He wants to revisit Mill without prejudice, hoping to see what he "could learn about the young Mill through a largely unmediated encounter with the relevant primary materials" (2). Kinzer also tries hard "to resist using what [he] thought [he] knew about the mature J. S. Mill to understand and explain the young John Mill" (2). That is, he not only wants to suspend the influence of what other scholars have said about Mill, but also what he himself has said of the later Mill. For Kinzer, one's own previous views about a thinker can distort and derail new interpretations just as much as can the views of others. All interpretations of a text, including one's own, can eventually become sources of prejudice.

The more conventional strategy of the last three chapters is in keeping with Kinzer's "belief that a heavy dose of contextualization can enhance our understanding of Mill's political thinking" (7). Kinzer's goal here is to explore the intertwining vicissitudes of Mill's later political philosophy and political activism with Victorian politics.

The first four chapters are insightfully rich. For instance, Kinzer carefully describes how Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1829 criticisms of his father's Essay on Government (1825) helped Mill escape the confining shadow of his own father's intellectual influence. But where Macaulay exposed his father's crude deductive method, Macaulay erred in the opposite extreme by trading simple-minded deduction for equally crude induction. Whereas his father deduced too much from too few scientific generalizations about human nature, Macaulay overreacted, opting for purportedly unadulterated empiricism. All this is familiar enough, though Kinzer narrates this episode succinctly and clearly, reminding this reviewer just how much Mill's rejection of Herbert Spencer's "rational" utilitarianism was surely rooted in his earlier encounter with Macaulay.

Mill's relationship with Taylor and her influence on his thinking is even more familiar. Kinzer's discussion of Mill and Taylor nevertheless manages to say (sometimes inadvertently) something new. Kinzer cites Mill's statement to Taylor about The Subjection of Women (1869) where Mill says that the moral rules to which his essay appeals would not apply to someone as morally refined as her:

If all resembled you, my lovely friend, it would be idle to prescribe rules for them. By following their own impulses under the guidance of their own judgment, they would find more happiness, and would confer more, than by obeying any moral principles or maxims whatever; since these cannot possibly be adapted beforehand to every particularity of circumstance which can be taken into account by a sound and vigorous intellect worked by a strong will, and guided by what Carlyle calls "an open loving heart."

(Mill qtd. in Kinzer 93–94)

Notwithstanding the flattery, such remarks bear on the unending controversy about whether Mill exemplified what we now call "rule utilitarianism." Here, at least, Mill implies that rule utilitarian practical reasoning suits normal mortals well enough but would be redundant at best for morally exceptional individuals. Whereas the former need...