Arguably, looking at the life of John Stuart Mill
is at least as important for understanding classical economics
as reading his economic writings themselves.
Mill's life spans 1806 to 1873.
He's quite a wide-ranging thinker, much more than just an economist
and, arguably, he was the most important British philosopher and thinker
of the entire 19th century.
To understand John Stuart Mill,
one needs to know that he was the son of James Mill,
who was himself one of the leading British economists
of the early 19th century.
James Mill was himself a Ricardian, a free-market economist,
and very much a Benthamite utilitarian.
It was James Mill's dream to raise a son in the same lineage
to carry on the tradition after he and Jeremy Bentham were gone,
and thus John Stuart Mill became the educational project of James Mill.
And, indeed, from the very beginning,
John Stuart Mill was reared as a child prodigy.
It was assumed he'd be a brilliant thinker and economist.
He was educated as such,
and of course, he turned out to be, though in a way very different
from what his father had expected or hoped for.
John Stuart Mill started learning Greek at the age of 3.
This program of education was really quite intense.
By the age of 8, he is already studying algebra,
science, logic, poetry, and, yes, some political economy.
And what teachers he had!
Some of the leading minds in Britain were instructing the young Mill.
That included his father, who was a very sharp economist,
albeit quite a rigid one,
Jeremy Bentham and also, David Ricardo.
Arguably, by the age of 18,
John Stuart Mill was the best economist in the world,
or at the very least, the best economist in Great Britain.
Yet, there is quite a dark side to this entire history,
and at the age of 20, John Stuart Mill suffers a nervous breakdown.
According to Mill, this was a reaction against the rigidity of his education,
and that his life reached a period of crisis,
where he wondered what kind of pleasures were possible,
or what was it that he could possibly care about,
and wondered how he could get out of this deep despair.
We moderns might call this a form of depression.
Yet, John Stuart Mill emerges from this period of depression.
By his own account, he repairs himself with poetry,
in particular, the poetry of William Wordsworth.
Mill starts to repair his intellectual career,
but he starts to take it in other directions.
In part, these other directions are driven by, or, at least,
reflected in his friendships with some other thinkers.
Mill was no longer just talking with the free market Ricardians,
but he struck up an extensive correspondence
with Auguste Comte, and also a number of socialists,
and, also, St. Simonians,
and, overall, the common strand which tied these individuals together
was a rejection of the reasoning of classical economics
and a move toward a much greater belief in the efficacy,
and, indeed, necessity of government intervention.
I think of Mill as, really, the first classical economist,
who started to integrate a lot of key insights
of the socialists of his time,
although I would add that, in my view, this was by no means always for the better.
Mills' most important friendship was with Harriet Taylor.
He indeed eventually married her in 1851, after 21 years of an intimate friendship.
Of course, biographers are fond of debating
just how romantic this friendship was or wasn't before they married.
Taylor's main influence on Mill was:
a) to get him much more interested in issues of women's rights and feminism
and b) also to turn Mill's interests much more toward questions of distribution
and also socialism,
again, rather than just the free or market Ricardian economics
he learned when he was young.
In addition to his writings, which I'll discuss shortly,
Mills had a number of other jobs in his life.
For instance, he spent a good deal of time working for the East India Company,
that was until 1858.
Mill was also closely involved with the periodical called "Westminister Review".
He was rector at St. Andrew's University in the 1860s,
and he also was, for several years, in the 1860s, a Member of Parliament,
typically close to Liberal party positions.
I consider Mills' best works to be mostly from his later period,
and I would list four of them here:
"On Liberty", "The Subjection of Women",
"Utilitarianism", and "On Representative Government".
I think of these as formative documents of modern liberalism.
They're still profound works, they still repay careful reading.
None of them are economic per se,
but they show a strong ability to integrate economic insights
with philosophy, politics, social concerns and other areas.
It's interesting that Mill thought, in addition to "On Liberty",
his most important work was his "Essay on Logic",
but hardly anyone reads this book today.
It's quite long.
It's mostly read by historians of the philosophy of science,
and you can think of it as Mill's attempt
to set scientific and, indeed, inductive knowledge
on a sound philosophical footing.
What are Mill's best economics works?
Well, I very much preferred his
"Essays Upon some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy".
Some of these essays he wrote when he was really quite young,
and, analytically, they are extremely sharp and insightful.
See our videos on some of these essays.
What about Mill's "Principles of Political Economy",
which came out in 1848?
This is a very long book, and it had a longstanding influence as a text,
but, overall, I find it somewhat disappointing.
Mill wrote this work in somewhat of a hurry
and, actually, for a long time,
he had stopped seriously thinking about a lot of economic issues
and somehow it shows up in the work.
It never quite hits the right level.
It's a mix of too general and a lot of points
which maybe are not sufficiently thought through.
It's still an important and influential book,
but, overall, I don't think it represents Mill at his best or most profound.
So, where to go next?
I very much suggest reading John Stuart Mill's "Autobiography",
which is also one of his greatest works
and it's one of my favorite books of all time.
Like Mill's other major works, it's available online and free.
It's also beautifully written.
There are two other good biographies of Mill listed here,
and, also, see our other videos on the Irish and India questions,
for these other sides of Mill's life.
And see our video on Mill on Bentham,
and, if you wish, read Mill's essays on Bentham and Coleridge,
in conjunction with his autobiography.