Liberty Abroad: J. S. Mill on International Relations by Georgios Varouxakis (review)

John Stuart Mill once replied to an editor that he could not supply an article on a political topic because “the principles concerned are so mixed up with the specialities of the cases” and he was “not a master of the details, and … the details are all-important” (qtd. in Varouxakis 184). In turning his attention to Mill’s views on international relations—international law, just and unjust wars, treaty obligations, non-intervention, empire, standing armies, and militia—the historian of political thought and Mill expert Georgios Varouxakis gives due attention to the specialities of the cases and all-important details. Varouxakis is concerned that scholars who have relied only on Mill’s canonical works—Principles of Political Economy (1848), A System of Logic (1843), On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1861–63), and The Subjection of Women (1869)—have misunderstood Mill on these key issues, most egregiously when conscripting him in their contemporary causes.

In carefully reading Mill within the periodical hive of Victorian Britain, in an age of Continental exiles and international political and military action, state formation and deformation, Varouxakis focuses on the issues that concerned Mill, his unfaltering courage in speaking up, and his provisionality while assessing evidence, whether on the war with Russia in 1870, for which he was accused of being a home-hater, or on formulating a policy of counter-intervention in order to enforce non-intervention in relation to Italy. On a more global scale, Mill’s views on the Empire and war are analyzed in detail in chapters 5 and 6.

On Empire, Varouxakis demonstrates that Mill had a coherent and deeply held position on what makes a society progressive, why India needed British intervention in order to progress, and why Britain’s own prejudice would result in failure. He was as critical of Britain as of India and diverged from both Thomas Babington Macaulay’s notorious Minute on Indian Education (1835) and his father James Mill’s armchair The History of British India (1817). Mill’s pessimism regarding British rule in India due to the low moral conditions of the British upper classes—he explicitly excepted the working classes in his condemnation—was first alerted “by the atrocities perpetrated in the Indian Mutiny and the feelings which supported them at home,” although he had disagreed with Britain’s anglicizing policies in India as early as the 1830s (qtd. in Varouxakis 106). On the settler colonies, Mill was consistently in favor of self-government with regard to all affairs except foreign policy and defense and equally consistently against independence or separation unless the colonies desired it.

Mill’s views on the American Civil War are carefully analyzed by Varouxakis in a fine sixth chapter on war and peace. In Britain, they had a leading role in galvanizing opinion in favor of the North. Mill was persuaded that the war, to him the just war par excellence, came down to the South’s desire to extend slavery, and from 1862 he argued for a war of abolition, not separation, and then—taking an extreme position, for the times—for compensation to former slaves through the vote, land, education, and, if desired, free immigration to the North. Varouxakis is intent to show that Mill was not an over-optimistic believer in the inevitable disappearance of war; rather, he was committed to the idea that war could be an ethical intervention against injustice. In his proposed defense of Belgium in the Franco-Prussian War, he argued that strong nations should defend the weak when the latter were threatened by domination. He was against standing armies, but for school-trained militia and citizen-soldiers. In Britain’s case, he also supported a strong trident, on behalf of others as well as itself, as he considered naval power “as essentially defensive as military is aggressive” (qtd. in Varouxakis 173). One may certainly disagree with Mill on the nature of progress or responsibilities of...