This biography attempts to
synthesize a disparate array of interpretative assessments of various aspects
of John Stuart Mill’s thought, in order to arrive at a broadly coherent
assessment and delineation of the relationship between the man and his work. As
a work of biography, it succeeds in forcefully presenting Mill as a theorist
concerned above all with defending liberal culture in general, and highlights
the absolute centrality of individual autonomy to that defense. Thus, Capaldi
suggests that previous interpreters, even those to whom he is sympathetic like Skorupski,
have marginalized aspects of Mill’s work that do not fit into the traditional
categorical boxes into which he is usually placed, particularly that of
modified utilitarian. For Capaldi, Mill was certainly a ‘genetic’ utilitarian,
but his reaction against Bentham and his father, James, was more thoroughgoing
and profound than is typically recognized. However, as he candidly notes at the
outset, the primary worry for any potential biographer of Mill is the existence
of his own, seminal Autobiography, which often works to constrain any
attempt at rethinking the intellectual, thematic and chronological ordering of
material pertaining to both the life and work of Mill. The structure is already
so thoroughly laid down, and so thoroughly well known, that it is something of
a burden for the new biographer, and probably explains the dearth of attempts
to write an overall history of John Stuart Mill.

Capaldi’s prefatory defense of his
enterprise is fivefold. First, simply laying out the connections in Mill’s life
and thought is a worthwhile endeavor for such an intrinsically important
figure. Second, and a corollary of this, new contextualization and
interpretation might allow us to better see the true complexity of his thought.
Third, and a theme that Capaldi implicitly and explicitly utilizes throughout
the study, is the idea that the evolution of Mill’s own thought is itself the
subject matter of his thinking; to this extent, Capaldi’s later focus on the
importance of romanticism, conservatism, and the influence of Harriet Taylor
upon his performative notion of human autonomy in particular, is an attempt to
view Mill’s writings as elaborations of his own identity. He develops here
Eldon Eisenach’s account of Mill’s Autobiography as a work of political
theory in its own right. The classically romantic idea of making one’s life a
work of art is, for Capldi, personified in Mill’s own oeuvre. Fourth, and
correlatively, he hopes that a new biography might help to get around some of
the practical limitations of using Mill’s Autobiography, which
constrains interpretation and presents a rhetorical, partial and necessarily
distorted, or at least distorting picture. The fifth and final defense concerns
the need to reassess Mill in the context of a fuller understanding of the
intellectual life of Victorian Britain based on more recent historical work.

The biography serves a useful
function in its attempt to justify itself along these grounds, and will
certainly be appreciated by those coming to Mill both for the first time, and
more grudgingly, I suspect, by those familiar with his thought. The former are likely
to be impressed by the sheer scope of Mill’s undertakings which, as Capaldi
rightly notes, are in the main often only thought of in terms of the seminal (and
late) texts On Liberty, Utilitarianism, Considerations
on Representative Government, and On the Subjection of Women.
The latter will look to this for a précis and summation of various
aspects of different scholarship, and will find plenty in their own areas of
expertise to rethink, reject or amend. For all this, however, it is certainly
noticeable that Capaldi is, despite his self-consciousness about it, heavily
reliant on Mill’s own self-presentation in the Autobiography, as well as
on contemporaneous biographies like that of Alexander Bain, for the structuring
of his assessment of Mill’s early years. Noting that Mill is here ‘his own best
storyteller’ (p. 35), Capaldi coherently outlines the radical nature of Mill’s
early education, and notes the importance of passing vacations both in France
noting the impact of Jean-Baptiste Say, and with Bentham at Ford Abbey near
Somerset. The hothouse atmosphere of Mill’s studying and relationship to his
patriarchal master is very well accounted for. Mill’s place as a constructed
individual, educated so as to become a leader capable of instantiating the political
and social reform so desired by his father and Jeremy Bentham, his godfather,
seemed to be almost predestined. This only appeared to continue with Mill’s
steady progression along the career path at India House, as a civil servant
employed by the East India Company. Therefore, it is quite a staggering fact
that we would do well to remember, and which Capldi rightfully points out
towards the end of the biography, that Mill would become the leading
philosopher and public intellectual of nineteenth-century Britain without ever
having received a university education€”he would later also decline university
posts, including the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow€”having moved straight
from home into official work after first becoming acquainted with the Austin’s.
The concern with aristocratic cliques and corruption, as well as the religious
requirements of a classical university education in Britain, were enough to
make James Mill forego this aspect at least of his son’s education.

Though initially employed thanks to
his father’s contacts, John soon established a reputation in the company, and
indeed was almost immediately employed on ‘political’ correspondence. This
early and long-lasting (he was employed there thirty-five years) exposure to
issues of colonialism and the rule of imperial colonies from a modern state
thousands of miles away would clearly inform his later practical meditations on
the role of government and intervention, as well as culminating in his official
report on the importance of the East India Company after its decline in the
wake of the 1857 mutiny. Capaldi nods to the complexities here, but doesn’t
really engage with much of the scholarship about Mill and India, beyond noting
the importance of Lynn Zastoupil’s work. The 1820s, covering the period before
his pronounced mental crisis€”on which Capaldi is sensitive, and though he
offers the occasional psychobiographical explanation of sublimated resentment
against his father and others, gives a balanced assessment€”were a decade when
Mill helped to launch the London and Westminster Review. His initial
attempts to promote an open, distinctively liberal periodical were first
presented through this forum, which seemed a logical extension of the
activities he was engaged in as a keen member of the London Debating Society.

Capaldi contextualizes Mill’s
mental state in terms not only of familial resentment, but also of a desire to
assert intellectual independence from both his father’s crude associationism
and also from Macaulay’s famous critique of James Mill’s ‘Essay on Government’.
As a philosophic radical, Mill thought that our ultimate goal is indeed
happiness, but that we can only achieve happiness indirectly, so that the
prerequisite for this end goal is, as Capaldi asserts throughout the work, the
active seeking and maintenance of individual autonomy or flourishing.
Nevertheless, the individual good must also be reconciled with the common good
in Mill’s account, so that the struggle for autonomy can only be
operationalized in conditions where both paternalism and particularism are
absent. Although there is always likely to be an irreconcilable clash of values
between individuals, there can be no meaningful autonomy if it is incapable of
being fully exercised, and this capacity must be made available to everyone. It
is this active role for political education and the cultivation of character
that feeds into both his proposals for parliamentary reform and the question of
female suffrage, as much as it does his idealist philosophy of mind. Capaldi
succeeds, to my mind, in presenting a complete picture of Mill when understood
against the background of this concept of autonomy.

To make his case convincing,
however, the use of the term ‘autonomy’ is perhaps surprising in a work that
claims to be contextually nuanced, and Capaldi suggests that the twin sources
of Mill’s concern with the issue were religious Puritanism and secular
romanticism (p. 252). But, at least as far as I am aware, Mill uses the term
only once, and it is in a late letter of 1871 to Emile Acollas outlining the
central thesis of On Liberty as pertaining to ‘l’autonomie de l’individu’,
and which Capaldi quotes from (p. 268). The general sense of what was important
to Mill might be well understood by us as ‘autonomy’, and Capaldi certainly convinces
in his argument that there is a clear developmental focus to Mill’s thinking
based around such an idea, but was it actually Mill’s term? Indeed, Capaldi is
quick to assert the importance of contextualizing such terms as ‘socialism’ in
order to present a properly historicized account of Mill’s writings and to
defend him from various more recent writers who have tried to claim Mill for a
socialist tradition. It seem to me that the focus on the concept of autonomy
seems to try and do an awful lot with a term Mill didn’t himself use very much;
this is not just semantics, if we are to historically consistent with one term,
we should be so with all. Similarly, the presentation of Mill’s attempt to
reconcile the virtues of a truly or ideally (as opposed to what actually
exists) free market economy with technological and civilizational advance
against the overweening contemporary spirit of commerce (which seeks simply
pecuniary gain) requires some adroit conceptual maneuvering. Mill is presented
as a Hegelian theorist of recognition and reconciliation, a quasi-Kantian
proponent of the categorical imperative of treating individuals as ends, and as
an idealist who had as his favorite philosopher, Berkeley. This broadening out
of Mill’s corpus into a European context is very welcome; it does,
nevertheless, on occasion sound both odd, and given what we know of Mill’s
relationship with much German philosophy, quite forced. Capaldi also requires,
both for his interpretation of Mill’s later more famous writings and for his
interpretation of Mill’s philosophy (especially as outlined in the critique of
Hamilton) a distinction between negative liberty understood traditionally as
restraint, and freedom as an internal condition over which it is a priori
impossible for any other individual to have control. This distinction is not
only also mechanical, but also quite problematic I think both conceptually as
well as practically, especially given Capaldi’s concern to point out the external
requirements for the cultivation of character that can enhance the freedom of
an individual and a community in the first place.

Capaldi is on firmer and better
contextual ground in discussing the relationship with Harriet Taylor and what
this did to Mill’s own self-perception, his place in Victorian polite society,
and in his own family. He successfully shows the remarkable restraint shown by
Harriet and John in maintaining a close relationship whilst she remained
married to John Taylor, and is sensitive to their short but intellectually stimulating
time together after he passed away. The social scandal of Mill and Taylor
brought approbation from Mill’s family and from many friends. The steely side
of his character came to the forefront here, when Mill actively cut himself off
from numerous siblings, after they refused to either meet or congratulate
Harriet upon her engagement to him. Equally, Capaldi is also excellent in
rebutting the crude characterizations of Mill’s position by the likes of Hayek
and Himmelfarb, who suggest that Harriet’s influence was malign, Mill’s praise
of her impact upon his writings forced, and that it was under her pressing that
Mill became far more interested in the condition of the working-classes and of
socialism than was proper to his investigations. Capaldi shows the nonsense of
these claims, by detailing the importance of both romantic and conservative
elements to Mill’s thinking, especially the legacies of Carlyle, and
Coleridge’s notion of intellectual leadership in particular, and by
illustrating the long-standing nature of his concern with the nature of
political freedom. His discussion of the ‘transitional’ essays on the idea of
civilization, on Bentham and Cole ridge, and on ‘The Spirit of the Age’, drawn
from the periodical he was then editing, are very well-done, and the link to
the legacies of the Scottish Enlightenment in the essay on civilization are
well-made, if a little underdeveloped. The importance of Guizot and Tocqueville
to Mill’s formulations are equally well expressed, with Capaldi focusing more on
the latter’s discussion of democracy really than the formers’ account of
civilization. Yet a more detailed focus on Guizot€”who was Gibbon’s editor in
France€”could have made the connection to the Scots even more clear, as well as
outlining Mill’s reliance on French political and social theory.

Mill’s individualism, however, was
drawn from Humboldt in particular. Capaldi is again convincing in suggesting
that On Liberty was essentially a joint production by Harriet and John,
that it was something they saw as illustrating a major public legacy of their
thought, and that it was effectively a reworking of Humboldt with a recognition
of Tocqueville’s arguments about the social and political characteristics of
modern democracy. Capaldi’s book also discusses Mill’s brief stint as MP for Westminster,
noting some of the more interesting details about his candidacy (his chief
opponent was W.H. Smith) and his independency of mind. His embroilment in the
Governor Eyre controversy, in questions of Irish independence and women’s
suffrage are all considered, and flow well out of earlier discussions of his
voluminous writings on political economy and the ‘utopian’ socialism of Comte,
Fourier and Owen especially. Mill’s relationship to socialism in general, and
Christian socialism in particular, is equally capably discussed.

Overall, therefore, this is
simultaneously a satisfying and a frustrating book. Clearly limitations of
space (even in a relatively large volume such as this) must determine the
relationship between intellectual and personal biography. But ultimately it is
difficult to think of this book as in any sense definitive, even if such a term
is resolutely unfashionable, which to be sure is a criticism likely to affect
anyone who attempts to write the life of a polymath like Mill (one thinks of
the great trouble of writing a life of someone like Max Weber too, where again
a posthumous account, though this time written by his wife, has effectively
structured for nearly a century the limits of interpretative latitude). If this
sounds overly harsh, it is not meant to be so, but where Capaldi is judicious
in his criticisms of some (usually older) literature, for example, he neglects
a lot of the more recent work done that would both corroborate and challenge
his presentation. Equally, he seems broadly content in this work to attempt to
contextualize Mill’s own Autobiography by using the bounty that is the Collected
Works of Mill. These are a treasure trove for scholars, and are
indispensable to the writing of any biography of Mill. Yet they cannot be the
end point; to have read them is a necessary, but it is not a sufficient
condition for the writing of a history of Mill and of Mill’s political thought.
There are so many controversies within Mill’s thought that has engendered such
a vast literature, that it is likely to remain impossible for all but the most
dedicated and single-minded scholar to devote their life’s work to untangling
some of the issues. For now, Capaldi’s book is a welcome step along the way
towards that time.

© 2004 Duncan Kelly

Duncan Kelly, Ph.D., Department of
Politics, University of Sheffield, UK

Categories: Philosophical, Memoirs