John Stuart Mill

The father's educational program

John Stuart Mill was born May 20, 1806, in Pentonville, London, the eldest of nine children of James Mill (a Scottish philosopher and historian) and Harriet Burrow. His father had developed strong views on the malleability of mind under Utilitarian influence - particularly the work of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill's mentor and close collaborator - and decided to raise John Stuart as a deliberate experiment in the production of a perfectly-trained Utilitarian thinker.

The program began essentially from infancy. John Stuart learned Greek at age 3 and Latin at age 8. He was reading Plato in the original by 12 and had completed a substantial classical canon (Herodotus, Xenophon, Diogenes Laertius, Lucian, Isocrates, Demosthenes, and others) before any English child of his social class would normally have begun classical languages. He learned arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and calculus from his father in parallel.

The educational program is documented to a degree no other figure in Cox's sample approached. James Mill kept detailed records, and J.S. Mill himself later wrote an Autobiography (published posthumously in 1873) covering his early intellectual development in extensive detail. This documentation is what placed Mill at the top of Cox's 1926 ranking - it is also the reason that ranking is now considered an artifact of methodology rather than a measurement.

The East India Company years (1823-1858)

In 1823 J.S. Mill took a position at the British East India Company, where his father had worked since 1819 as Chief Examiner. The position involved drafting correspondence between the Company and the British government concerning the administration of India. Mill remained in this role for 35 years, rising to Chief Examiner himself after his father's death in 1836.

The East India Company position was Mill's primary livelihood throughout his most productive philosophical years. He wrote his major works in the early mornings and evenings, with the days spent on Company business. He has been generally quiet about the colonial-administration content of his Company work; his published political philosophy on the rights of subject peoples is in significant tension with the administrative work he did.

In 1858 the East India Company was dissolved following the 1857 Indian Rebellion; its administrative functions were absorbed by the British Crown. Mill retired with a substantial pension and from this point forward devoted himself entirely to writing and to political activity.

The mental crisis and emotional development

In 1826, at age 20, Mill underwent what he later called a "mental crisis" - a period of severe depression during which he found himself unable to take pleasure in the Utilitarian projects his father had trained him to pursue. The crisis is documented in detail in the Autobiography and has become one of the most-studied case histories in 19th-century psychology and philosophy.

Mill emerged from the crisis through encounter with the Romantic poets, particularly William Wordsworth. He came to believe that his father's educational program had over-developed his analytical capacities at the expense of his emotional and aesthetic life. This insight became central to his mature philosophical positions - particularly his expansion of Bentham's Utilitarianism to include qualitative as well as quantitative differences in pleasures.

The crisis is also significant for what it suggests about high-childhood-precocity programs generally. Mill's account is one of the earliest detailed first-person discussions of the psychological costs of structured intellectual acceleration - a topic now studied in modern gifted-education research with substantially better methodology.

The major works and the relationship with Harriet Taylor

Mill's major published work includes A System of Logic (1843), Principles of Political Economy (1848), On Liberty (1859), Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Utilitarianism (1861), The Subjection of Women (1869), and the posthumous Autobiography (1873). The works cover political philosophy, economics, ethics, philosophy of science, and feminist theory in unusual breadth.

A central intellectual relationship of Mill's adult life was with Harriet Taylor, whom he met in 1830 (when she was married to John Taylor) and married in 1851 after John Taylor's death. Mill credited Harriet as substantially co-author of On Liberty and other works. The exact extent of her contribution has been debated since their lifetimes; recent scholarship has generally come to credit her contributions more substantially than 19th-century writers did.

The Subjection of Women (1869) was decades ahead of the actual British franchise extension to women (1918 partial, 1928 equal). The book argued that "the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement." Mill's 1866 petition to Parliament for women's suffrage was the first formal petition on the subject; it was rejected.

Parliamentary years and legacy

Mill served as Member of Parliament for City of Westminster from 1865 to 1868. His parliamentary record included substantial work on the Reform Act 1867 (which expanded the British franchise), advocacy for women's suffrage, and unsuccessful attempts to introduce proportional representation. He lost his Westminster seat in the 1868 general election; he did not run for office again.

After leaving Parliament he returned to writing full-time. He lived primarily in Avignon, France, in his final years, in the house Harriet had owned before her 1858 death. He died there on May 7, 1873, at age 66.

His position in the history of philosophy is unusually broad: he is a foundational figure in Utilitarian ethics, liberal political theory, modern feminist thought, and 19th-century political economy. The Mill Library at the London School of Economics holds the major archive of his papers. The Autobiography continues to be studied as both a primary source for 19th-century intellectual life and as a case study in the psychological dynamics of high-childhood-precocity programs.

Timeline

• 1806Born in Pentonville, London.
• 1809Begins learning Greek at age 3.
• 1814Begins learning Latin at age 8.
• 1818Reading Plato in the original Greek at age 12.
• 1823Begins work at the British East India Company.
• 1826Mental crisis at age 20.
• 1843A System of Logic published.
• 1848Principles of Political Economy published.
• 1851Marries Harriet Taylor.
• 1858East India Company dissolved; Mill retires from Company work. Harriet dies.
• 1859On Liberty published.
• 1861Utilitarianism and Considerations on Representative Government published.
• 1865Elected Member of Parliament for City of Westminster.
• 1866Petitions Parliament for women's suffrage.
• 1868Loses MP seat in the general election.
• 1869The Subjection of Women published.
• 1873Dies in Avignon, France, at age 66. Autobiography published posthumously.
• 1926Cox ranks Mill as the highest-IQ subject in her 300-figure sample.

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