MILL, JAMES

MILL, JAMES (1773–1836), Scottish philosopher.

Famous as the father of John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), James Mill was an important thinker in his own right. Trained during the Scottish Enlightenment at the University of Edinburgh, he studied Greek and philosophy, taking a degree in theology in 1798. Instead of becoming a preacher, he went to London in 1802 to become a journalist. An agnostic by 1808, as a writer he analyzed problems confronting the Anglican Church, education, economics, and government. His articles frequently appeared in the Anti-Jacobin Review, the British Review, the Eclectic Review, and the Edinburgh Review, and in 1811 he became one of the editors of the Philanthropist. He was also a regular contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Despite numerous journalistic pursuits, Mill could not provide a comfortable living for his large family until he was appointed an Assistant Examiner in the India House in 1819, a result of his most important work, History of British India, begun in 1806 and published in 1817. He later became Chief Examiner of the India House in 1830.

Significantly, in 1808 Mill became a disciple, friend, and assistant to Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), helping to popularize the ideas of utilitarianism (also known as Benthamism or radical philosophy). Mill is known for being the organizer of Bentham's followers, who included David Ricardo (1772–1823) and Joseph Hume (1777–1855). In 1821 Mill, an advocate of the Banking School theory, helped establish the Political Economy Club in London, a precursor to the establishment of economics as a profession and university discipline. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), Ricardo, and others frequented these meetings. Mill's utilitarian tome on economics, Elements of Political Economy, was published in 1821.

As a utilitarian, Mill believed in seeking "the greatest happiness of the greatest number"; assumed that human beings are only motivated by self-interest and that they will always seek pleasure and avoid pain; sought to educate citizens to understand what was truly in their self-interest; and focused on training individuals to choose behavior that would result in the greatest happiness for the whole society. For Mill, utilitarianism was not a self-indulgent philosophy but one that required individuals to be self-disciplined and ethically exacting. In fact, he once noted that "under a bad government there is no common interest. Every man is governed by his private interest" (cited in Burston, p. 15). Mill explains the ethical foundations of utilitarianism in his Fragment on Mackintosh (1835). Indeed, like the prolific Bentham, Mill systematically articulated utilitarian ideas that are important in the history of thought about education, psychology, economics, ethics, and government.

ideas on government

Mill's 1820 article "Essay on Government," which appeared in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, laid out the utilitarian notion that good governments are representative in form. His rationale was that the more people have political power, the more their government is obliged to seek what is in the people's self-interest. Utilitarians distrusted the aristocracy and monarchy, assuming that aristocrats and monarchs wanted to aggregate all power and benefits to themselves. In this influential article, Mill concluded that a large portion of the citizenry would need to have the vote and that the House of Commons was the best locus of governmental power because it represented a majority of the people and could provide adequate checks to the monarch and aristocracy. This article also asserts that in order to ensure the greatest happiness to the greatest number, men must be guaranteed the highest compensation for their work and that a representative system could best fulfill this need.

Writer and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) famously lambasted Mill's article on government, saying it was hardly the scientific document Mill claimed it was. Contemporary critics note numerous problems with the utilitarian philosophy. Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that his "Essay on Government" helped to create a climate in which the first Reform Bill of 1832 was passed, enlarging the voter rolls to include some of the middle and lower classes. The second (1867) and third (1884) Reform Acts would gradually add more unrepresented citizens to the voter rolls.

Even though Mill never went to India, he spent more than a decade writing his masterwork, TheHistory of India. As an examiner in the India House, the headquarters of the East India Company in London, reviewing incoming dispatches and preparing preliminary dispatches in return for almost two decades, he was able to put into practice some of his ideas about governing India, otherwise known as "the jewel in the crown" of England's colonies. Using a utilitarian rationale, he suggested that it was actually a positive that he had never been to India because he could be more objective about the people and the culture rather than sentimentalizing them as he thought other writers had done.

In the nineteenth century, Ricardo critiqued Mill's India politics, noting that one universal form of government might not be good for all cultures. He added that it was, at the very least, inconsistent to support representative government in general while also insisting that India be governed by England.

Modern critics differ on The History. Many have pointed out that it is in keeping with the work of postcolonial theorist Edward Said and others who argue that those who colonized the East in the nineteenth century viewed it and its peoples as inferior and as in need of the civilizing influence of the British. Javeed Majeed, however, suggests that The History is ambivalent about maintaining an imperial presence in India (it was not economical, for one thing), and that it is important to note that Mill wrote the work in order to critique British governmental practices at home and abroad so as to call for reform through establishment of utilitarian principles. Others find that in The History Mill attacks an Orientalist approach to India typical of his time—that is, an approach that stereotypes India as an exotic, romantic site of vast economic and aesthetic riches for the use of Britain.

ideas on education

In keeping with the utilitarian optimism about the potential to change human behavior so as to create a society in which the greatest happiness was to be had by the greatest number, Mill asserted that differences between human beings could be explained by their difference in education. Reflecting the influence of John Locke (1632–1704), he added that people could be educated through "association of ideas" to learn the behaviors that would be in their own and society's self-interest. That is, he assumed, with David Hartley (1705–1757), that human beings are like a blank slate (tabula rasa), and their knowledge of the world occurs only through sense experiences. Thus Mill reasoned that through a utilitarian education of systematic rewards and punishments people could be trained to truly know and act upon what was best for themselves and their society. For example, Mill writes, "Under the guidance and stimulus of desire to obtain Pleasure and to avoid Pain, we can associate beneficent means of attaining these ends, and become morally good people, or we can find such ends associated with causing pain to others, with corruption and so forth, and be morally bad" (cited in Burston, p. 231). Laying out "associationist" ideas and strongly critiquing the imagination, Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) is seen as important to the history of psychology.

Though Mill and his utilitarian friends abandoned efforts to establish such a system for the lower classes in London, Mill did train his own nine children according to the associationist method, combining it with the monitorial method used in Scotland. To Mill this seemed an efficient, cheap, and scientific educational model: the teacher directly educated the best students, who were then required to teach the younger children, thus reinforcing their own education while easing the strain of teachers having to work with large groups of students.

Though Mill's pedagogy produced his brilliant son John Stuart Mill, it was at a high emotional cost. As John Stuart later wrote, his father was overly strict, providing his children more punishments than rewards and little emotional support. For example, Mill made his son start learning Greek in demanding doses when John was just three years old. Dedicated to logic, the elder Mill also derided the imagination, fiction, and literary writing. As an adult, John Stuart Mill realized that this lack of the poetic had all but destroyed his ability to feel.

In Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens (1812–1870) fiercely lampooned the teaching paradigm that had so badly affected John Stuart Mill by featuring utilitarian educators named Grad-grind and McChoakumchild who only focus on "Facts." Likewise, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Romantic writers, including William Blake (1757–1827) and William Wordsworth (1770–1850), attacked Hartley's associationist ideas. They argued that the human mind is not just a passive receptor of sensations from the outside world but also actively engages with and changes reality.

Dedicated to putting into practice utilitarian ideas about schools, Mill actively helped to establish the University of London in 1825 as a means of democratizing education. At the time, Oxford and Cambridge only admitted upper-class men who were members of the Anglican Church. Mill ensured that the University of London would serve children of the middle and lower classes who were of all denominations as well as those who were nonbelievers.

See alsoBentham, Jeremy; Economists, Classical; Malthus, Thomas Robert; Mill, John Stuart; Utilitarianism.

bibliography

Burston, W. H. James Mill on Philosophy and Education. London, 1973.

Leung, Man To. "James Mill's Utilitarianism and the British Imperialism in India." Political Studies Association Conference (1998), 1–15. Available from http://www.psa.ac.uk/cps/1998.htm.

Majeed, Javed. Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's The History of British India and Orientalism. Oxford, U.K., 1992.

Milgate, Murray, and Shannon C. Stimson. Ricardian Politics. Princeton, N.J., 1991.

Stokes, Eric. The English Utilitarians and India. Oxford, U.K., 1959.

Thomas, William. Mill. Oxford, U.K., 1985.

Zastoupil, Lynn. John Stuart Mill and India. Stanford, Calif., 1994.

Gail Turley Houston