A Father of Modern Liberalism:
SCHAPIRO, J. SALWYN
WRITERS and WRITING A Father of Modern Liberalism The Life of John Stuart Mill. By Michael St. John Packe. Macmillan. 567 pp. $6.50. Reviewed by J. Salivyn Schapiro Professor Emeritus of...
...It was tolerance, not as a weakness, but as creative force...
...As a Member of Parliament, he introduced the famous woman-suffrage amendment to the Reform Bill of 1867...
...He was firmly of the opinion that, once these had been gained, everything making for human progress would follow--in time...
...In reality, he formulated a program of social liberalism that anticipated the welfare state of today...
...His childhood was "a weary drudgery...
...According to the author, the principles underlying Mill's important works "were defined, although not actually composed" by Harriet...
...What Mill never questioned was parliamentary government and civil liberty...
...The words "liberalism" and "Mill" have become almost synonymous...
...Harriet was a sensitive, gifted woman, married to John Taylor, a plain businessman...
...at such times, John would discreetly absent himself...
...Mill was no esoteric phenomenon but a legitimate product of his age and of his nation...
...The author devotes considerable space to Mill's upbringing, which was unusual, even unnatural...
...As a result, Mill entered manhood intellectually mature, but emotionally starved and socially isolated...
...Of his liberalism it could be said that it slowly broadened down from advancement to advancement...
...Packe's book gives the reader a comprehensive idea of what sort of man Mill really was...
...In my opinion, Mill's great importance lies in his departure from the creed in which he had been suckled, cradled and nurtured...
...author, "Liberalism and the Challenge of Fascism" SOMETIMES a period in history produces its perfect flower in a great personality who embodies its highest aspirations...
...And the greatest of all the civil liberties was the liberty of opinion...
...Together Harriet and Mill visited friends, spent weekends in the country, and took long trips on the Continent...
...Mill's perfect impartiality, his intellectual honesty, and his constant sympathy with everything that he believed would make for the greatest good of all won for him a position of highest esteem in the English-speaking world of his day and of ours...
...Nor does he analyze the historical background of Victorian England from which his hero emerged...
...Mill ran the whole gamut of liberalism, from its early bourgeois stage to its later democratic stage, and from that to its present social stage...
...He "displayed his power," according to his biographer, "of drawing from opposites a truth greater than either of them could attain alone...
...What made Mill an important thinker in his day...
...Harriet Taylor, and almost at first sight they fell deeply in love...
...At the age of 23, he met Mrs...
...in a sense, she was his collaborator...
...Packe tells this famous love story with deep sympathy and fine understanding...
...She was more than his inspiration...
...As Mill grew older, he became more radical, not more conservative: toward the end of his life, he advocated what he called "socialism...
...But it does not deal adequately with Mill the thinker...
...Reviewed by J. Salivyn Schapiro Professor Emeritus of History, CCNY...
...The "question of a woman's right to vote," writes Mr...
...Mill is a name at which "we still instinctively take off our hats...
...Every line [of his Principles of Political Economy] received her scrutiny...
...Moreover, it contains vivid descriptions of the literary and philosophical entourage of Mill, notably Thomas Carlyle, John Austin, Harriet Martineau, George Grote and Herbert Spencer...
...But not without the grace of woman...
...This English version of a menage a trois lasted for twenty years, and from all accounts the relationship was platonic on the part of all three...
...His pamphlet Subjection of Women became a classic in the struggle for the emancipation of women...
...If the British Labor party can be said to have an intellectual "father," he is not Karl Marx but John Stuart Mill...
...Their love was a romance of a new kind, in which devotion to ideas was as intense as devotion to each other...
...He saw the vital necessity of manhood suffrage, being convinced that the prospects for future progress depended primarily on the workers...
...Read Mill" became a final argument of those who supported his views...
...Without these fundamentals, whatever was gained was never safe and often lost...
...It lacks color, vivacity and wit...
...What saves his best works, notably the Autobiography and On Liberty, for posterity is the cool intellectuality that aerates the intensity of his moral earnestness and the luminous integrity of the author, which shines on every page...
...Whether Harriet was actually endowed with a high mentality or was, as some maintain, a "creation" of Mill really makes no difference...
...The style of the book is lucid and entertaining, with an enlivening wit and penetrating insight...
...He has made use not only of known sources but of letters and papers hitherto not available...
...And the author has painted a portrait of his hero with the brush of a master, both in his broad strokes and in his details...
...The remarkable thing about Mill was that he was able to overcome his "test tube" upbringing...
...He recoiled from the bleak house erected by the classical economists for the habitation of the workers by repudiating their doctrines of laissez-faire, subsistence wage, and wages fund...
...Packe gives only brief summaries of his leading works, and nowhere does he present a synthesis of his ideas...
...What makes him such even today...
...As the blurb on the jacket says, it is "with Mill the human being that he is chiefly concerned...
...They proceeded according to the Utilitarian plan of making him, to quote the author, "not merely a reasoning machine but a machine that reasoned in a radical way...
...This biography tells all there is to tell of Mill the man, and does it very well indeed...
...he was never "converted...
...Politically, Mill was "center" looking toward the "left...
...Packe's book is the first full-length biography of Mill...
...Yet, though not a definitive biography, Mr...
...His On Liberty is to this day considered the best expression of the faith of a liberal in progress through freedom of thought and expression...
...Mill's style is the very man himself, "so clear, and calm, and cold...
...His was not the mechanical rationalism of the Utilitarian, but the sweet reasonableness of the persuasive advocate...
...Hence, the condition of the workers could be permanently improved by the intervention of the state in their behalf and by collective bargaining of trade unions...
...Mill insisted that the market place of ideas must be kept open to all opinions, even wrong ones...
...Though it received only 73 votes, Mill's amendment gave a great impetus to the movement for woman suffrage that achieved such a resounding triumph in the twentieth century...
...It was her sympathy with the demands of the working class that influenced Mill to become an ardent advocate of social reform...
...His was the greatest influence that transformed liberalism from a bourgeois class philosophy into an all-embracing, all-purposeful ideal of democracy...
...Such a personality was John Stuart Mill, the "saint of rationalism," who in his life and thought expressed all that was best in nineteenth-century liberalism...
...The Victorian moral ideal was upheld—by the husband through resignation, by the wife through prudence, and by the lover through rationalization...
...Mill stoutly maintained that the laws governing the distribution of wealth were not natural but man-made, varying in different places and in different periods...
...Two years after the death of John Taylor, Harriet and Mill were married...
...Not only did he favor votes for all men, but also votes for all women...
...His life "had been spent in sharpening his power of analysis, and now analysis had whittled away all his feelings and emotions...
...Packe, "was heard for the first time in modern history in the legislative assembly of a civilized country...
...He transformed the principle of the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number from a system of psychological bookkeeping into an all-embracing ideal of human felicity...
...Mill frequently visited the Taylor home...
...Ore Liberty has even greater relevance today than when it was written, now that freedom of opinion has been stamped out by Communism in one-third of the world and is threatened by reactionary elements even in democratic lands...
...his home, cheerless, godless, silent and afraid...
...His progress was one continuous process of enlightenment...
...Of all despotisms, Mill hated most the "benevolent" kind, which added hypocrisy to tyranny...
...He was not sent to school but was educated by his father, James Mill, who with Jeremy Bentham made him the subject of an educational experiment...
...This is no mean contribution...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 48
