Great Ideas of Philosophy

Lecture Forty-TwoThe Liberal Tradition⎯J. S. MillScope: After Hume, who profoundly influenced him, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) is the most influentialphilosopher to write in English. His political treatises were read and revered by ordinary citizens in his owntime, selling, as his friend John Morely would say, for the price of a railway novel. His father, James Mill,had been one of the “radicals” behind the reform movements of the 1830s. His friends included some ofthe most talented essayists, journalists, philosophers, and scientists of Britain.Mill’s philosophy, his science, and his psychology are of a piece. He is an empiricist without hesitation inapproaching the problem of knowledge and an empiricist, as well, in defending a utilitarian theory ofethics. His defense of liberty is based on utilitarian precepts and that resigned fallibilism that is the mark ofthe anti-rationalist.When is the coercive power of the state or of the majority permissibly exercised against the actions of theindividual? The modern liberal tradition was installed by Mill in a manner that gave it nearly unchallengedauthority for more than a century, owing largely to Mill’s positivistic and “scientific” psychology as anapproach to the issue.OutlineI. Along with David Hume, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) might be properly regarded as the most influential ofphilosophical scholars in the English language. He laid the foundations for what we would take to be thescientific psychology of the 20 th century.A. His essay On Liberty is probably one of the most widely assigned in the university curriculum, the locusclassicus for arguments that oppose state and moral paternalism.B. Mill’s System of Logic stands as a “bible” for experimental science.C. His defense of utilitarianism remains perhaps the clearest and most supple.D. He has placed his mark on the widest range of issues in science, politics, and ethics.E. Mill’s autobiography thoroughly outlines his life.1. Mill was home-schooled, with a grounding in Latin and Greek classics, economic philosophies, worldhistory, logic, and mathematics.2. Mill’s father insulated him from other boys and from influences that might infect his thinking withvulgar or mundane habits.3. Thanks to the patronage of the Stuart family, Mill received instruction at Edinburgh.4. Though educated for the clergy, Mill was a strident atheist and proceeded to make do as an occasionalwriter for profit and as an employee of the East India Company. In that post, he composed theauthoritative History of India.II. Early influences on Mill included Bentham, Coleridge and the French writer Auguste Comte (1798–1857), oneof the fathers of a version of what is called positivism. Distinctions are in order, however, when that term isused.A. Comte’s use of the term positivism is perhaps most divergent from the sense now employed byphilosophers. Comte’s thesis is that human thought, as it must address pressing problems, passes throughdistinct stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive.1. The first of these stages he regards as the age of superstition, with belief in occult and personal butsupernatural agents directing the affairs of the cosmos.2. This gives way, in the second stage, to what appears to be a demystified set of beliefs. In fact,however, the mind sees—instead of supernatural beings—entities that may be invoked to “explain”things.3. Inevitably, this all must give way to the third stage, in which the mind applies itself to the study ofnatural laws.14©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership