James Mill

(1773-1836)

Some thinkers have had the misfortune of being overshadowed by both their predecessors and their successors. This is true e.g. of Karl Reinhold, a philosopher known often just as the link from Kant to Fichte. A similar fate has been experienced by James Mill, who is often regarded just as the person to transfer Bentham’s utilitarianism to his more famed son, John Stuart Mill.

Even so, James Mill was an interesting philosopher, with a wide range of interests. Indeed, this variety calls for some selection. I will not look at his role as a historian of India, although this was a work close to his professional interests as an administrator in East India Company. I will also ignore his economic writings, mainly because Mill's main achievement was to inspire David Ricardo to complete his book on economy. Instead, I shall focus on Mill’s political essays, the most famous of which is undoubtedly his essay on government.

Mill begins his look on the best form of government with a conundrum. Clearly, pure democracy is impossible, he says, because every time a governmental decision is required, we cannot go around asking everyone what to do. Then again, aristocracies and monarchies can - and even more strongly, Mill appears to say - tend to devolve into dictatorships where rulers follow their own interests. Sometimes solution was seen to be in mixing democracy with monarchy and/or aristocracy. Mill noted that this would mean merely that the government would not be unified, but a battlefield of the different interests of the nobles and the commons.

Mill’s simple answer is representation - the decision must be made by people representing the real owners of the political power. Evidently, representation is pointless in case of monarchies and aristocracies and does not remove the threat of tyranny. One might naturally ask whether the representational democracies don’t also face the threat of tyranny, in case representatives gain too much power. Mill’s answer is that if the representatives are regularly changed then they will have an incentive to rule for the best of the whole community - after all, they will soon be just regular citizens.

Mill’s account of representation has some notable gaps. First of all, it is a bit unclear whether Mill really suggests that all the representatives will be changed at appointed time, without any chance of same representatives being re-elected. A more important problem is Mill’s somewhat naive assumption that the interests of an individual representative will in every case coincide with the supposed interest of the whole community. Indeed, Mill seems to leave quite out of consideration the possibility that representatives might make decisions benefiting just some factions within the people. Mill does try to prevent this possibility by rejecting all systems where representatives are voted to represent certain professions or class. Yet, even if one would not officially be a representative of certain class, she might still feel the interests of this particular class as aligning with one’s own and make decisions based on it.

Despite his rather republican conclusions, Mill at once takes back his statement that mixed governments could not work and notes that a king and a House of Lords could still be maintained, if the representative government would find some use for them in administration. Mill’s suggestion might have been just a political move, meant to allay concerns that he would be deposing British royalty. Even so, he makes the further conservative move that voting could have an income limit. He doesn’t want the limit to be too great, which would make the system practically aristocratic, but allows a small limit, because, he says, people with little money can take care of the interests of those with no money. Furthermore, although Mill does not want rich people to buy votes for themselves and therefore endorses a secret ballot, he casually notes that representatives will most likely be rich and aristocratic in the good sense of the term, that is, capable men.

My use of the word “men” is quite deliberate. Mill states in clear terms that women are to be treated like children: they do not take part in voting, neither as voters not as candidates, because, Mill says, their interests are taken care of by adult men. Nowadays, Mill’s reasoning seems just preposterous. Even if one would believe that fathers and husbands always have the interests of their children and wives in their mind, the case of orphaned, unmarried women would still need some further solution.

Mill’s system of government has, then, an elitist streak. Indeed, he notes that while even a nation of mere uneducated people would benefit from representational democracy, its true worth is shown in nations with a large, educated middle class. Then again, Mill’s middle class is not a closed club, but people can become part of it by educating themselves. Indeed, Mill endorsed the idea that all people could and should receive education, with the exception of those that have some clear syndrome making learning difficult. This is the part where Mill’s philosophy most closely touches what was classically meant by philosophy, as Mill notes that finding best means of education requires first determining what human mind is like and what makes it happy. We’ll see in a later post what to make of this side of Mill’s philosophy.

In addition to representative government, Mill also spoke for freedom of press. According to him, there are only two cases where it should be restricted. Firstly, press should refrain from publishing slanderous lies told of individual persons. They could still make headlines about true scandals, except in cases where scandals are not true scandals, although irrationally held to be so because of outdated morals. Secondly, press should not hinder the proper activities of government. This does not mean that government could not be criticized, and in fact, Mill takes it to be the duty of free press, because people need to no when a time for a revolution is at hand.