The Two Mills

...A sentence she marked for deletion, he complained, "is a favorite of mine...

...Bladen admits that Mill's idea of the "science" of political economy was restrictive and artificial, governed by assumptions (pure competition, for example) that Mill knew to be untrue in reality but thought to be necessary in theory...

...Some, like Bladen, have provided logical transitions for judiciously selected quotations so as to minimize the contradictions...

...An entire chapter is devoted to the history and nature of the fungus Phytoph-thora infestans that caused the potato blight, but only several sentences of a 400-page book to the laissez-faire infestation that made the fungus so deadly...

...Simon and Fourier) is praised for involving "no risk" and implying no violation of the "general laws" of human action...

...The fact is that the two Mills are irreconcilable, and that they persisted together through six editions of the Principles, each carefully revised by the author over a period of 20-odd years...

...In the introduction, Professor V. W. Bladen commends the Principles as a "living book which has present value and significance," and this edition as a "working edition for the modern economist," its "main text" easily read by those who "want to ignore changes over successive editions...

...One might discount this, as one discounts Mill's other effusions (such as that only Shelley was her spiritual peer, and even he was "but a child" compared with her intellectually...

...Woodham- Smith's book...

...This is still the fashionable opinion today...

...Woodham-Smith would have been well advised to read Mill's Principles (to say nothing of his editorials at the time in the Morning Chronicle), as Bladen would have done well to read Mrs...

...He wrote to a friend at the height of the famine: "The whole English people are rushing frantically to expend any number of millions upon the present exigency, without much caring how, and taking their revenge on the Irish gentry by the infliction of a lavish poor law which if it passes will as it seems to me render the evils of Ireland incurable except by an universal seizure of the land and expulsion of the proprietors...

...We will suppose this granted...

...One can appreciate the reluctance of most commentators to saddle Mill with so flagrant a contradiction: There is some justice in the ad hominem reasoning that if we are aware of the difficulty, surely Mill could not have been unaware of it...

...If she disapproved of his revised formulation, he assured her, "I certainly will not print it, even if there were no other reason than the certainty I feel that I never should long continue of an opinion different from yours on a subject which you have fully considered...

...Taylor also discovered the virtues of socialism and communism...

...The present edition of Mill's Principles is a superb work of scholarship that could also have been a memorable work of history, had the editors not apparently felt that to put Mill in a historical context was somehow to demean him —a common illusion but a rather extraordinary one, considering the fact that the historical context would have shown how much he shaped as well as reflected his times...

...An enthusiastic admirer of the Revolution, Mrs...

...The English critic Maurice Cranston recently concluded his review of the Principles: "Socialism had spoken to the romantic side of Mill...

...The Principles include a tribute to industrial cooperatives—in effect syndicalism— as "the nearest approach to social justice and the most beneficial ordering of industrial affairs for the universal good...

...For a time, a posthumously published essay, "On Social Freedom", was presumed to confirm the chronological view, but its attribution to Mill has recently been discredited...

...One passage she objected to, he reminded her, had been "inserted on your proposition and very nearly in your own words": "That paragraph which you object to so strongly and totally, is what has always seemed to me the strongest part of the argument . . . and as omitting it after it has once been printed would imply a change of opinion, it is necessary to see whether the opinion has changed or not—yours has, in some respects at least...

...The rewriting of these chapters was occasioned by the French Revolution of 1848, which took place while the first edition was still being printed...

...But no one has a right to bring creatures into life, to be supported by other people...

...Within two days, however, Mill had seen his way to revising or dropping each of these passages, and was anxiously inquiring of "the dear one" (he often addressed her in the third person) whether such objections to communism as remained were sufficiently moderate— "and altogether whether any objection can be maintained to communism...

...Cecil Wood-ham- Smith on the Irish famine recounts in grotesque detail the events leading to the death of 1.5 million people and the forced emigration of another million (out of a total population of eight or nine million) —without explaining how it was that intelligent, well-intentioned, enlightened, liberal men could have not only acquiesced in but contributed to this disaster...

...But in this case Mill seems to have understated her talents...

...And more to the same effect...

...Reviewed by GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB Author, "Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution" Recalling his first sight of Birmingham and the "Black District" of England, Henry Adams remarked that a proper education would have to give more weight to Karl Marx than to "his Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill...

...and the more general part . . . was wholly an exposition of her thoughts, often in words taken from her lips...

...For example, a recent admirable work by Mrs...

...Yet in fact Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy is now as little read as Mill's Principles of Political Economy, the critique and the principles criticized being equally obsolete— and by a familiar irony, for many of the same reasons...

...And this in turn meant that minimum wage-rates or guaranteed employment were impossible without "legal measures for the repression of population": "Every one has a right to live...

...It reflected and informed its age as Marx's did not: One can better understand the Russian Revolution without Marx than the Industrial Revolution without Mill...

...The same work that produces this image of his Satanic free-trade majesty can also be made to produce a Mill who has been described by one historian as an "ancestor of Fabianism and welfare socialism...

...If it was "injudicious" of him to say of the labor theory of value, "Happily there is nothing in the laws of value which remains for the present or any future writer to clear up...

...Today both are the preserves of scholars rather than intellectuals, of historians rather than economists...

...Mill at first demurred at some of her deletions and alterations...

...But "one should not take too seriously what people say about method...

...Little is known," Robson writes, "about the specific role played by Harriet Taylor in the writing and revision of the Principles"—a remark curiously belied by the letters of Mill which are reprinted in the present edition...

...While Lord Rothschild and others were so distracted by the horrors of the famine as to forget momentarily the principles of political economy and undertake projects of relief or call for a relaxation of the Poor Laws, Mill inveighed against the "madness" and "monstrosity" of such proposals...

...It would be possible for the state to guarantee employment at ample wages to all who are born...

...One may be dubious of the present value and significance of the Principles, but of its historical value and significance there is no doubt...

...For the Principles proves so faulty by present standards that even Professor Bladen is obliged, at one point, to quote another economist on the fallacy of "theoretical anthropomorphism" and on the need to read the classical economists in "the context of their own intellectual climate...

...And not only of these milder varieties of socialism...

...she caused it to be rewritten at her dictation and against Mill's judgment— as she also caused the other of the two crucial chapters, "Of Property," to be rewritten...

...and her enthusiasm communicated itself to the proofs of the second edition the following year...

...In his autobiography he said that the chapter on "The Probable Futurity of the Laboring Classes"—one of the two chapters on which the whole of the socialist Mill is based—was "entirely due" to Harriet Taylor (later Mrs...

...Mrs...

...The only good I see likely to arise out of all these things is that I think they are sure to give a great stimulus to colonization...

...Mill himself was less discreet...

...If he did not understand the function of prices, he had "brilliant insights into the probable trend of change...

...If his Malthusianism was not quite the answer "for his day and ours," it was at least "highly relevant to the problem of the modern world...

...But the enterprise is self-defeating...

...what they do is often very different...

...Commentators on Mill have been understandably hard put to reconcile the two Mills...

...The editor himself, Professor Robson, having meticulously annotated the main text (the seventh edition) and collated the changes over successive editions, has heroically refrained from commenting on them...

...And as a historical document, Mill's work may prove a better investment in education...

...And one can admire the generosity that would prefer to ignore an explanation that seems to be both incredible and discreditable...

...By thinking sufficiently I should probably come to think the same—as is almost always the case, I believe always when we think long enough...

...Socialism (a la St...

...He had come to feel the charm of the vision of common ownership...

...The same political economy that condemned the Irish to "colonization," and paupers to work-houses (Mill was an ardent proponent of the Poor Law of 1834 which had abolished all forms of "outdoor" relief—relief in money, kind or employment), also condemned workers to the inexorable order of supply and demand...

...Mill): "She pointed out the need of such a chapter . . . ; she was the cause of my writing it...

...and the famine was one of the "applications" that helps elucidate Mill's theory...

...This is the value and significance of the Principles: an explication of the logic that was as compelling to Mill as it may seem absurd to us...

...But if it does this, it is bound in self-protection, and for the sake of every purpose for which government exists, to provide that no person shall be born without its consent...

...Later he informed her that he had "followed to the letter every recommendation...

...Even the possibility of advocating communism he did not exclude, arguing only that it would be better done "in a separate treatise," in which case it would be advisable to postpone the second edition altogether...

...It testifies to the difficulty of sustaining the historical imagination that so conscientious a historian as Mrs...

...And if still another were altered, "then all the two or three pages of arguments which precede and of which this is but the summary, are false, and there is nothing to be said against communism at all—one would only have to turn round and advocate it...

...Woodham-Smith, with every reason to suspect the liberality of Liberals and the good-will of gentlemen, should have failed to inquire into the theories and counsels of the most eminent and high-minded Liberal of them all...

...Whoever means to stand upon the first of these rights must renounce all pretension to the last...

...The effort to find present value and significance in the Principles reduces much of the introduction to the level of an apologetic...

...the theory of the subject is complete," we are reminded that the marginal utility theory of his successors was not without error...

...and what Mill failed to take account of as science, he took account of in his "applications...

...And communism (by which Mill meant Owenism—there is no mention of Marx), although probably less desirable than an ideal system of private property, was "with all its chances" preferable to "the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices": "The restraints of communism would be freedom in comparison with the present condition of the majority of the human race...

...Yet there was a reverse side to Mill...

...The "laws of value" that he thought so conclusive as to require no further study had as corollaries the Malthusian law of population and the "wages-fund" law, both of which decreed that "it is not the absolute amount of accumulation or of production that is of importance to the laboring class...

...Conversely, where his application is found faulty (as when he belittled the practical importance of increased production), his theory (which put production "in the forefront") is found commendable...

...For Mill's was the ideology that helps make the famine explicable...

...Moreover, communism might be expected to enlarge the scope of the "public spirit" in place of the present "self-regarding interests," and to diminish the effect of Malthusianism, since it was notably inimical to "selfish intemperance...

...One wonders what else one would have learned had more of their correspondence survived, or had they not been so much together that it was generally unnecessary for them to correspond...

...There is more truth in this first sentence than Cranston intended—only it was not the charm of common ownership to which Mill had succumbed...

...If Mill was wrong to exclude from political economy the entire matter of the distribution of wealth, assigning it to the separate province of "human institutions," we are assured that he nevertheless had "much to say about the effect on productivity of human institutions...

...it is not the amount even of the funds destined for distribution among the laborers: it is the proportion between those funds and the numbers among whom they are shared...

...But as a practical political economist he remained a Liberal...

...And the text is internally so inconsistent that one can make sense of it only in terms of the changes in successive editions...

...Others have presented the socialist Mill as a successor to the laissez-fairist...

...For in fact, she not only caused the chapter to be written...