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Unit 13: John Stuart Mill: His Life and Theory of Liberty

their employees. His concern for social justice was reflected in his proposals for redistribution, Notes
mainly by taxation. He ignored Ricardo’s labour theory of value, since price was determined by
forces of demand and supply

13.1 Life Sketch

John Stuart Mill was born in London on May 20, 1806. He had eight younger siblings. His father
James Mill came from Scotland, with the desire to become a writer. Initially, the senior Mill tried
journalism and then concentrated on writing a History of British India, which took him 11 years to
complete. It remained one of the seminal works on Indian history of the eighteenth century, and
is still used as a reference work.

A person may cause evil to others not only by his action but by his inaction, and either
case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

India influenced the life of the young Mill, and subsequently determined his career. All his learning
came from his father, and he read the books his father had been reading for writing the book on
India. Al the age of 11, he began to help his father by reading the proofs of his father’s books.
Immediately after the publication of History of British India in 1818, James Mill was appointed as an
assistant examiner at the East India House. It was an important event in his life, as this solved his
financial problems, enabling him to devote his time and attention to write on areas of his prime
interest: philosophical and political problem.
He could also conceive of a liberal profession for his eldest son, John Stuart. In the beginning, he
thought of a career in law for him, but when another vacancy arose for another assistant examiner
in 1823, John Stuart got the post and served the British government till his retirement.
As James Mill decided to teach his son all by himself at home, the latter was denied the usual
experience of going to a regular school. His education did not include any children’s books or
toys, for he started to learn Greek at the age of 4 and Latin at 8. By the time he was 10, he had read
many of Plato’s dialogues, logic and history. He was familiar with the writings of Euripides,
Homer, Polybius, Sophocles and Thucydides. He could also solve problems in algebra, geometry,
differential calculus and higher mathematics. So dominant was his father’s influence, that John
Stuart could not recollect his mother’s contributions to his formative years as a child. At the age of 13,
he was introduced to serious reading of the English classical economists, and published an
introductory textbook in economics entitled Elements of Political Economy (1820) at the age of 14.
From Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Comte, Goethe, and
Wordsworth, he came to value poetry and art. He reviewed Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1805-1859)
Democracy in America in two parts in 1835 and 1840, a book that left a deep impact on him.
From the training that John Stuart received at home, he was convinced that nurture more than
nature played a crucial role in the formation of character. It also assured him of the importance
education could play in transforming human nature. In his Autobiography, which he wrote in the
1850s, he acknowledged his father’s contribution in shaping his mental abilities and physical
strength, to the extent that he never had a normal boyhood.
By the age of 20, Mill started to write for newspapers and periodicals. He contributed to every
aspect of political theory. His System of Logic (1843), which he began writing in the 1820s, tried to
elucidate a coherent philosophy of politics. The Logic combined the British empiricist tradition of
Locke and Hume of associational pyschology with a conception of social sciences based on the

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