Biography
John Stuart Mill was born at 13 Rodney Street in Pentonville, Middlesex, the eldest son of Harriet Barrow and the Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist James Mill. John Stuart was educated by his father, with the direction and help of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was condition an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit intention to name a genius intellect that would conduct the form of utilitarianism and its execution after he and Bentham had died.
Mill was a notably precocious child. He describes his education in his autobiography. At the age of three he was taught Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the whole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Laërtius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato. He had also read a great deal of history in English and had been taught arithmetic, physics and astronomy.
At the age of eight, Mill began studying Latin, the works of Euclid, and algebra, and was appointed schoolmaster to the younger children of the family. His leading reading was still history, but he went through any the commonly taught Latin and Greek authors and by the age of ten could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease. His father also thought that it was important for Mill to explore and compose poetry. One of his earliest poetic compositions was a continuation of the Iliad. In his spare time he also enjoyed reading approximately natural sciences and popular novels, such(a) as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe.
His father's work, The History of British India, was published in 1818; immediately thereafter, at about the age of twelve, Mill began a thorough explore of the scholastic logic, at the same time reading Aristotle's logical treatises in the original language. In the coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. year he was submitted to political economy and studied Adam Smith and David Ricardo with his father, ultimately completing their classical economic view of factors of production. Mill's comptes rendus of his daily economy lessons helped his father in writing Elements of Political Economy in 1821, a textbook to promote the ideas of Ricardian economics; however, the book lacked popular support. Ricardo, who was afriend of his father, used to invite the young Mill to his office for a walk to talk about political economy.
At the age of fourteen, Mill stayed a year in France with the manner of Sir Samuel Bentham, brother of Jeremy Bentham. The mountain scenery he saw led to a lifelong taste for mountain landscapes. The lively and friendly way of life of the French also left a deep notion on him. In Montpellier, he attended the winter courses on chemistry, zoology, logic of the Faculté des Sciences, as well as taking a course in higher mathematics. While coming and going from France, he stayed in Paris for a few days in the house of the renowned economist Jean-Baptiste Say, a friend of Mill's father. There he met numerous leaders of the Liberal party, as well as other notable Parisians, including Henri Saint-Simon.
Mill went through months of sadness and contemplated suicide at twenty years of age. According to the opening paragraphs of Chapter V of his autobiography, he had required himself if the establishment of a just society, his life's objective, would actually make him happy. His heart answered "no", and unsurprisingly he lost the happiness of striving towards this objective. Eventually, the poetry of William Wordsworth showed him that beauty generates compassion for others and stimulates joy. With renewed joy he continued to work towards a just society, but with more relish for the journey. He considered this one of the most pivotal shifts in his thinking. In fact, numerous of the differences between him and his father stemmed from this expanded bit of reference of joy.
Mill met , supplying him with materials in configuration to do so. In March 1835, while the manuscript of the completed number one volume was in Mill's possession, Mill's unwitting housemaid used it as tinder, destroying any "except some three or four bits of leaves". Mortified, Mill gave Carlyle £200 £17,742.16 in 2021 as compensation Carlyle would only accept £100. Ideological differences would increase an end to the friendship during the 1840s, though Carlyle's early influence on Mill would colour his later thought.
Mill had been engaged in a pen-friendship with Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism and sociology, since Mill number one contacted Comte in November 1841. Comte's sociologie was more an early philosophy of science than innovative sociology is. Comte's positivism motivated Mill to eventually reject Bentham's psychological egoism and what he regarded as Bentham's cold, abstract view of human line focused on legislation and politics, instead coming to favour Comte's more sociable view of human nature focused on historical facts and directed more towards human individuals in all their complexities.
As a nonconformist who refused to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, Mill was not eligible to study at the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge. Instead he followed his father to work for the East India Company, and attended University College, London, to hear the lectures of John Austin, the first Professor of Jurisprudence. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1856.
Mill's career as a colonial admin at the East India Company spanned from when he was 17 years old in 1823 until 1858, when the Company's territories in India were directly annexed by the Crown, establishing direct Crown control over India. In 1836, he was promoted to the Company's Political Department, where he was responsible for correspondence pertaining to the Company's relations with the princely states, and in 1856, was finally promoted to the position of Examiner of Indian Correspondence. In On Liberty, A Few Words on Non-Intervention, and other works, he opined that "To characterize any progress whatever towards a barbarous people as a violation of the law of nations, only shows that he who so speaks has never considered the subject". Mill immediately added, however, that "A violation of the great principles of morality it may easily be." Mill viewed places such(a) as India as having one time been progressive in their outlook, but had now become stagnant in their development; he opined that this meant these regions had to be ruled via a form of "benevolent despotism", "provided the end is improvement". When the Crown proposed to take direct control over the territories of the East India Company, he was tasked with defending Company rule, penning Memorandum on the updating in the administration of India during the Last Thirty Years among other petitions. He was offered a seat on the Council of India, the body created to advise the new Secretary of State for India, but declined, citing his disapproval of the new system of supervision in India.
On 21 April 1851, Mill married women's rights. He said that in his stand against domestic violence, and for women's rights he was "chiefly an amanuensis to my wife". He called her mind a "perfect instrument", and said she was "the most eminently qualified of all those call to the author". He cites her influence in hisrevision of On Liberty, which was published shortly after her death. Taylor died in 1858 after coding severe lung congestion, after only seven years of marriage to Mill.
Between the years 1865 and 1868 Mill served as Lord Rector of the University of St Andrews. At his inaugural address, delivered to the University on 1 February 1867, he made the now-famous but often wrongly attributedthat "Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that service men should look on and do nothing". That Mill included that sentence in the source is a matter of historical record, but it by no means follows that it expressed a wholly original insight. During the same period, 1865–68, he was also a Member of Parliament MP for City of Westminster. He was sitting for the Liberal Party. During his time as an MP, Mill advocated easing the burdens on Ireland. In 1866, he became the first adult in the history of Parliament to call for women to be assumption the modification to vote, vigorously defending this position in subsequent debate. He also became a strong advocate of such(a) social reforms as labour unions and farm cooperatives. In Considerations on exemplification Government, he called for various reforms of Parliament and voting, particularly proportional representation, the single transferable vote, and the extension of suffrage. In April 1868, he favoured in a Commons debate the retention of capital punishment for such(a) crimes as aggravated murder; he termed its abolition "an effeminacy in the general mind of the country".
He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1867.
He was godfather to the philosopher Bertrand Russell.
In his views on religion, Mill was an agnostic and a sceptic.
Mill died in 1873, thirteen days ago his 67th birthday, of erysipelas in Avignon, France, where his body was buried alongside his wife's.