JS Mill was considered to have extraordinary intellectual eminence, and his ability to systematically account for the enlightened view of social and political issues. He took the works of poets such as Coleridge and legal reformists such as Bentham and made the ambitions of continental socialists, discussable with commonplace economics.

Why is Mill interesting?
The tension created by trying to bring all these currents together.
Elements of J.S Mill

• Education given by father, middle class, U
• Social Scientist with a realist approach
• Attempt to build a new personality after his breakdown, lead him to be a romantic

The synthesis of liberal empiricist utilitarian economics (Hume, Smith, etc) with romanticism, especially the English romantic poets. This is an intellectual head on car smash; it contributed to JS Mill’s breakdown. The result though was JS’s Mill version of ethical socialism; a merger or romantic ‘sensibility’ with the supposedly scientific outlook of the empiricists and utilitarians.

Mill’s On Liberty looks like the Romantic, Individualism Idealist Mill (based on people like Goethe) Vs the U reformer that his youth taught.

Mill claimed that he was arguing for liberty based on Utilitarian grounds so it was an instrumental not an absolute argument – but this has been thought to be implausible.

There are two stands of Mill. Who some people think can be unified. Berlin does not think this. He sees Mill as having one side from the Utilitarian and his father – the notion that what human beings want is to be happy, and we discover the true to be happy via scientific investigation (social sciences, anthropology, psychology) we can discover what will make most normal human beings happy – and we must help them to be happy. People should be conditioned in a way, which will make them happy, by rewards, the stick/carrot approach. And Isiah Berlin thinks that Mill as an aspect of this. But Berlin says that here we can identify a contradiction based upon Mill’s huge focus on the individual and simply folding to the majority and custom is bad and detrimental. “Humans are like plants” we don’t want to live like sheep.
Mill didn’t want freedom for it’s own sake – he wanted to ensure freedom of thought, to ensure that society progresses as Berlin says that we cannot have scientific develops etc with out the ability to think freely.

Mill and human nature: we need some freedom of thought in order to produce new theories, but he took the view of Comte that we cannot give people too much freedom.

Once we have all the same knowledge as the scientist we need to work out who the experts are – we need to know which fields of human inquiry are the most useful.
Compte – if we do not allow freedom of thought in the sciences why should we not allow it in ethics and politics.

Why should we not have experts in social aspect of lives?
Is it right to stop heretics? If the views they are promoting are really wrong.
Isiah Berlin: Mill has to defend the idea of Liberty and make it compatible with Utilitarianism – and to do this we will not discover the truth.
With the experiments in living argument, we need to be able to live lives, no matter how shocking as we can never know if the life we are living is indeed the best one out there  - SHOWS LIBERTY TO BE INSTRUMENTLLY VALUABLE.
Berlin – when Mill talks about experiments of living and how the majority is horrible, Mill is not coming across as trying to put square pegs in round holes.

Mill has worked as a civil servant in the east India Company and also as an MP working for votes for women.

And when he was in the house of parliament his speeches did not concern so much the utilitarian concerns like to clean up the sewage, but more often he spoke of concerns about liberty so things protecting minorities from majority bullying.
Based on the grounds that human beings should be allowed to express themselves. And Liberty is part of human beings.

Isiah Berlin: and the Happiness Pill.

He says that if you were to reason with Mill and say that human beings have only ever been happy for a very short amount of time, as we have the sense of remorse, and guilt that we could have done better and that feelings such as grief is one of the biggest prevention to happiness. So Berlin sets up a scenario where if you could give someone a pill which would enable that person to never feel remorse or grief, so in this sense no pain. This may make them less enterprising – but they will be reasonably happy. They will not be able to go beyond the relative contedeness that the pill provides them but based on the one average account of human happiness through history, Berlin, proposes that it is minimal and that perhaps going for the pill makes sense – but Berlin says that it is not likely for Mill to agree to take a pill that will take away conscious, remorse, freedom of action.

Mill does say in On Liberty that he is putting forward the utilitarian case for individual liberty. “Freedom is a means to happiness, not an actual right”. Mill does this by emphasis’s progress. And happiness is best guaranteed by progress.
Berlin: But progress to what? A level of happiness? Berlin asks why can’t we agree on a level of happiness that we want and then when we get to it we can stop.
But Mill is against this, as he wants to continue the idea of experiments in living forever and ever.

Utility for Mill is liberty for the progression of the human being

Mill as an empiricist and not as a utopian does not believe that you can work out what the best way to live is and then model your society around that, Mill does not think that things can be as final as that.

Do we believe Mill that ethics and morality can be looked at via a scientific approach? Or does he think the opposite.

From Mills essays on Bentham and Coleridge we can see the conflict Mill felt between what he inherited and what he taught himself. Mill not only thought that the romantics could teach the rational side of Bentham, Mill saw it as a whole new style of thinking and a whole new style of feeling he found lacking in his father which he says was a factor in his on break down in 1826. A conflict between science and poetry and Mill felt that while his father was alive he could rally against him too much.
Berlin: Mill was a timid man brought up in a way very driven by empiricism. And so Mill found himself very attracted to Germo-romanticism, to the joys of variety and the richness of live. Beyond the rational pleasures of the educated.
He thinks Bentham is right, but Coleridge “opens vistas” and a way of living life, which stimulates human lives forever, the opposite of what Utilitarian think.

It seems to be these too tensions in Mills character, which make him an interesting character still.

On the one hand Mill was a man who thought science would save us, get rid of superstition and the curse of man kind as Berlin says “interested error” and then the longing for variety and richness of life moving in their own directions and the horror of custom and mundanity and the direction of one by another. And these do sit comfortably side by side and “this is what makes mill so fascinating to read” – Berlin

Mills may contribution to philosophy; a system of logic ran through seven editions during his lifetime and formed the bases of the teaching of philosophy – even in the old universities, which Mill came to despise.
Mill’s explanation of the intellectual procedures which scientists use to explain the world.
The center was his account for induction.  The procedure by which we generalize from particular experiences and by which we formulate general laws about the behavior of the natural order.
For Mill the building up of scientific knowledge and the way in which it differed from the less systematic insights offered by poetry or art was explained by the success of the inductive method.
20th century scientists and philopshers don’t always agree that induction is as important as Mill said, and many said that the scientific imagination isn’t even that different from the poetic one.

PETER MEDOWER: Nobel Peace Prize winning scientist
Wrote several essays explaining what the scientist really does and what tradional philopshers accounts tell us he does.
Mill was influential as he appeared to “tie this area of thought up” and Mill seemed to be very good at doing this. Mill’s method was thought to be “the wonderful way it all happened”
Mill really wanted to know why science was successful and prosperous and to apply scientific methods to the problems of society. This emphasis on induction shows the link between Mill and the first inductive philopsher, Francis Bacon.
200 years before Bacon called science “dedicated to the achievement of all things possible”
Bacon was the founder of indutionism and is the root of all Mill’s ideas.
One of the fundamental aspects is: “the world as we survey is facts or can be represented as propositions, matters of facts” and there are matters of mind with which we can compound these matters of facts.

No scientific fact has every been made via induction – Darwin was not the good Baconian as he thought.

It is when you retrospectively analyze and situation where lots of things take place. It is then when you can look over all the causes can you use Mills case for induction exactly. So for example if you have a dinner party and one person gets ill, you can only find out what made them ill by looking over all the possible causes after the event. So if someone gets ill at your dinner party it cant be due to the potted shrimp as everyone ate those, but only one person got ill. And gradually you can work it down by applying the method of difference and Mills four principles of discovery to work it out.
Mill thought this was how scientific information was presented to the mind and that you can sit back and you receive information about the world through your senses and this info is harvested which you can apply through the inductive method and work things out.

Mill Vs Huell?
Huell didn’t think that knowledge was such a passive process.
Huell maintained that scientific development comes from having a notion of what the truth might be – he said scientific theories arise as happy guesses.
Mill did not like the imanative element of the formulation of hypothesis, which might represent the truth.
Mill doesn’t like the idea of things that ‘might” true, and then you go on the journey of attempted verification, but it is only this process of verification which can turn your ‘happy guess’ in to a respectable theory.

Mill represents the division between poetry and science.
Mill’s enormous influence he became the spokesperson of what science could achieve.

Mill looked to Coleridge to give him an account of the meaning of life.
For Mill the poet is not the full man as he lacks the things that make a person unified, namely utilitarian approaches to thinking.
For Mill the poet is someone who is content to express his feelings, but these feelings come at the expense of intellectual occupations.
When a poet is writing poetry reason and emotions are at a perfect balance. For Mill this harmony is never fully capable as you have to compromise reason for emotions. So the Poet can never be a full man. So Mill thinks that the union of these two things is Philosophy.
So to be a balanced person you need to be both, this is illustrated in Mills view of the poet as someone crushed by our emotions.
You need to develop all aspects of your personality in order to become well rounded.

Men at harmony with themselves will it’s self be a harmonious society.

Mill tended to try to link both strands of his personality.
Mill sides with Geothe rather than Coleridge in the detail as Mill thinks that it man is not able to be totally unified.
This could be seen as a misunderstanding that to be totally unified is not possible due to the need to divide the levels of work.

Mills reading of Coleridge influenced his view of social theory. The reading of Coleridge showed Mill that institutions brought about via democracy were not just instruments of greed or folly but they were an expression of a countries national character at a particular stage in its history. This didn’t mean they should not be altered.

Mill thinks democracy should be there to represent the views of the people.

Mill always thought of himself as a radical – even though he loved the conservative Colridge so much.
The difference C. is involved more with the debate of political authority. C. Thinks that democracy is the guardians of our liberty.

Mill is different to C. in regard to economics. Mill was sure economics was a science.

Pedro Swartchs.
Mill was an inventive economist and are relevant today.
Mill wanted to take the Ricardo structure and change the way it was implemented – in the analysis and the appliance of economics to social structure. Mill made important additions.
They saw British society in simple terms and got very black and white conclusions and this effected how Britain was governed – and this is why the traditonals were accused of being hart-less as Mill complained economics was dismal as it made poverty and inequality look inevitable.

Mill made a distinction between laws of production and laws of distribution
LawsofP are like the laws of nature, they have been studied by Ricardo and by James Mill and we know what happens when we increase capitol/population we know what that will do to production. But distribution is a matter for the concerted will of society of how it will be arranged.
The laws of production = scientific account for the best way to generate the most product
Laws of distribution = a political matter, of institutions of private property.
While Ricardo and James Mill thought that distribution was similar to the natural way of the laws of production. Mill says that we can change them, which can then in turn radical change the society.

Mill relied on this distinction as it showed how you could keep the benefits of a competitive market, while still working through the legal system to distribute property to achieve better equality.

Mill wanted to argue that wage law would be compatible with trade union demands.
When Mill at the end of his life said that there is no wage fund, as workers could take all the profits of the business by taking all the wage fund of one year. This changes the Ricardo system that had been in place.

It demonstrates that Mill does not seem to care about growth of business year upon year as the idea of the wage law doesn’t really exist.

Mill and Population:
He wasn’t worried about the population, as he thought a stationary state would arise as population was growing.
The fear of too much population growth was the start of his economics. He as a young U used population growth as a banner to say that real prosperity could never really arrive.
He was against population growth as it meant that women would be trapped in simply raising children, which is why he was big on women’s rights.
Mills response to population

• Affluence not possible with high population
• Preservation of feminine dignity
• Nature would be overrun by man.

These seem to be modern ideas.

Objections come from if you limit population you limit wealth. If we define wealth as material things. But Mill says that although a limit to population growth will limit the amount we can produce it will not limit the extent of non-material wealth we can create.  “Intellectual wealth”

But it wouldn’t be a stationary state by today’s standards, as we will now include non-material wealth as a part of goods.

One of Mills reasons for wanting to make economics less dismal to make the transition to socialism more appealing.

Was Mill a socialist?
We can only do this by comparing him to other socialists.
Mill was not a state socialist – Mill did not want an economy controlled by the state entirely.
Mill was not a pure capitalist in that he didn’t want a free market system due to the inequality.
Mill was mainly a cooperatives and his socialism is similar to what some people think the Yoglaslavias are doing.
But there is the difference between Marx and Mill. Mill didn’t know about Marx. And Marx learnt a lot about Mill from Mill. But Marx had to attack him as Mill represents the bourgeoisie that Marx wanted to attack.
Marx is important but not relevant. But Mill is relevant, but less important to our capitalist system.