John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873


The particulars of Mill's life are too well known - as laid out in his famous Autobiography (1873) for instance - to be worth repeating here, so we will just rattle them out: son of the Ricardian economist James Mill, trained from an early age to be a genius, "lent" by his father to utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, became a utilitarian himself, followed his father into the British East India Company, broke with Bentham, had an existentialist crisis, turned to the doctrines of Saint-Simon and Comte, met Harriet Taylor and waited twenty years for her husband to die, became a Whig politician, etc., etc.

J.S. Mill was an economist, a Classical economist whose magnificent 1848 restatement of Ricardo's theory was thought to be so conclusive that, in the beginning of a discussion on price theory, he confidently notes that:

"Happily, there is nothing in the laws of Value which remains for the present or any future writer to clear up; the theory of the subject is complete: the only difficulty to be overcome is that of so stating it as to solve by anticipation the chief perplexities which occur in applying it."

(J.S. Mill, Principles, 1848: Book III, Ch. 1).

Major Works of John Stuart Mill

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