Book Review, 31 January 2008
Reviewed by John Cottingham

Austere man of action and intellect

John Stuart Mill: Victorian firebrand
Richard Reeves
Atlantic books, £30
Tablet bookshop price £27 Tel 01420 592974

Unquestionably one of the most important thinkers of the nineteenth century, J.S. Mill achieved huge eminence in his own lifetime, and now has an assured place in the "canon" of great authors whom every philosophy student is expected to have read. It was his mammoth System of Logic which secured his reputation on its appearance in 1843, though the volume ("so very dry a book", as his partner Harriet Taylor called it) is now not widely read except by specialists in the theory of meaning or the philosophy of science. But two of his shorter works, Utilitarianism (1861) and On Liberty (1859), remain indispensable items on the reading list for those studying moral philosophy and political theory, while The Subjection of Women (1869) has become a foundational text of modern feminism.

The prevailing image of Mill is that of an austere Victorian intellectual. In a letter written from the south of France in 1861, he observed that the life he was then living was "in truth too self-indulgent for any one to allow himself whose duties lie among his fellow-

beings, unless, as is fortunately the case with me, they are mostly such as can better be fulfilled at a distance from society than in the midst of it." Both the tone, ponderous and slightly prissy, and the implied self-image, of a thinker working at a distance from the "midst of society", hardly bespeak the activist. Richard Reeves, in this substantial biography, aims to show, however, that Mill was in truth a "passionate man of action".

In our own contemporary culture, the word "passionate" is frequently over-used: one can hardly buy a sandwich or a cup of coffee without being assured that the manufacturer cares "passionately" about the product - as if this somehow added to the quality. There seems to be something vaguely patronising about assuming that readers of a biography of a famous intellectual need to be wooed by the assurance that its subject was no mere fuddy-duddy purveyor of ideas. Although Mill was involved in championing several public causes, most notably the equality of women, it is his philosophical ideas that surely represent his claim to fame; he himself declared that the "inculcation and diffusion" of those ideas was the "principal outward purpose" of his life.

The ideas in question had been significantly shaped, from Mill's early years, by the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, based on the creed of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Benthamite utilitarianism is described by Reeves as the "best-known moral theory of all time". If that means that Bentham's theories are better known than those of Aristotle or Kant, that is surely doubtful; and if it means that the notion of happiness as the foundation of morality has gained wider currency than ideas of duty, obligation or virtue, then that too seems questionable.

What is true is that utilitarianism, in its modern guise, known as "consequentialism", has become extremely, not to say alarmingly, influential. If all that matters is the balance of good produced by an action, then fundamental prohibitions, for example against lying, or killing the innocent, lose their entrenched status: all is in principle permitted, provided there is some counterbalancing advantage for enough people. Mill was aware of the sinister features of the Benthamite calculus, but devoted his utmost ingenuity to attempting to mitigate them. He tried, for example, to show that moral rules like those of veracity or justice could serve as useful "direction posts", indicating classes of action likely in general to secure happiness. But the whole point, of course, is that morality consists in respecting fundamental human values even when they do not promote a balance of welfare. Our contemporary British political culture, with its steady pressure, in the name of "security", against fundamental rights like trial by jury and habeas corpus, shows the dire implications of a moral framework in which the only ultimate standard is the balance of benefit for society as a whole. Utilitarian approaches to the allocation of medical resources provide another example of the risk of individuals being "sacrificed to the aggregate". Mill himself may have been concerned about the protection of individuals, but in so far as his advocacy of utilitarianism paved the way for such consequentialist developments, its influence can plausibly be seen as malign. Reeves seems blithely unaware of any of these complications when he resoundingly declares that "the world Mill left" was, and still is, "unquestionably better for his efforts".

Reeves' rosy view of Mill is better supported when he comes to discuss On Liberty, in which Mill enunciated his famous "harm principle''- that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised society against his will is to prevent harm to others". The "muscular simplicity" of Mill's concept, Reeves argues, has "given it an unequalled position and permanence in intellectual and political life". Certainly Mill's principle, one of the most widely quoted dicta of any philosopher, has become one of the bulwarks of the liberal outlook; though its very "simplicity" means that it is far too schematic an instrument for deciding how far we should go in restricting those who, for example, try to harm themselves or those who, while not actually harming others, deeply offend them by insulting their beliefs or way of life.

Some of the more interesting parts of Reeves' book concern Mill's attitudes to religion. Known in his time as the "Saint of Rationalism", Mill is often seen as an apostle of secularism; but Reeves argues that he was more sceptic or agnostic than atheist. Never quite happy with the radically anti-religious views he had imbibed in early life from his father and from Jeremy Bentham, Mill connected the religious impulse with the poetic impulse, regarding both as supplying "ideal conceptions grander and more beautiful than we see realised in the prose of human life". Sometimes this appears to be a merely utilitarian or instrumental conception of religion, namely that it can be "a source of personal satisfaction and elevated feelings", and hence, as Mill put it, "morally useful without being intellectually sustainable". Towards the end of his life, though, he reflected that the evidence from "adaptations in Nature" might support the idea of creation by intelligence.

Verging at times on hagiography (Mill's life was "the finest example of thought in action of the last two centuries"), this fluently written biography presents a well-researched picture of Mill's achievements. Mill may or may not have been a passionate "firebrand", but he remains one of Britain's most influential intellectuals.

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