History, utility and liberty: John Stuart Mill's critical examination of Auguste Comte

ABSTRACT

This paper shows that Mill's assessment of Comte's work casts light on his own attitude towards the historicity of social phenomena and on the way he connects the notions of utility and liberty. It underlines the relative stability of Mill's views. While the tone of his remarks about Comte varied through time, their content remained basically unchanged. The paper untangles the complex web of the two thinkers’ intellectual relationship by gathering information scattered across many texts, assesses the effects of the Comtian influence on Mill's epistemology and shows how Mill's liberalism was partly built on his opposition to Comte's ideas.

KEYWORDS:

• John Stuart Mill
• Auguste Comte
• history
• liberalism
• Utilitarianism

JEL:

• A12
• B12
• B31

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Stéphanie Denève for improving the English translation. The present text has benefited from discussions during the 16th international conference of the Charles Gide Association for the Study of Economic Thought and from remarks by two anonymous referees of this journal. Any remaining errors are nevertheless my responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ See Littré (1867), Lévy-Bruhl (1899), Hayek (1942,1963), Mueller (1956, 92–133), Lewisohn (1972), Ekelund and Olsen (1973), Weinberg (1982), Kremer-Marietti (1995), Weirich (1998), Robert (1998, 2002), Capaldi (2004, 164–185) and López (2012).

² The subject of Mill's famous essay is “not the so-called Liberty of the Will […] but Civil, or Social Liberty” (1859, 217). In this paper, we will refer to the word “liberty” to express the same meaning, i.e., the political and social freedoms which are considered to be the entitlement of all members of the community.

³ Comte became Saint-Simon's secretary in August 1817 (Gouhier 1933, 239).

⁴ On Mill's changing views on cooperatives, see Capaldi (2004, 211–224) and Gillig and Légé (2017).

⁵ D'Eichthal met Mill in May 1828, when the latter spoke at a meeting of the London Debating Society. See Mineka in (Mill 1963a).

⁶ On Hayek's interpretation of the sources of John Stuart Mill's thought, see Légé (2008) and Peart (2015).

⁷ According to Davis (1985, 348, our italics), “the idea that economics was a provisional science came, primarily, from the St Simonians and most presumably from Comte, and a perusal of Mill's works reveals these new emphases”. Weinberg (1982, 181–182) provides an interesting discussion of the different meanings of the term “provisional” in Mill and Comte.

⁸ This small book, which Comte described as “fundamental”, was initially entitled “Prospectus des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société, par Auguste Comte, ancien élève de l'Ecole polytechnique” when it was completed on 6 May 1822. It was supposed to be added not to the third part of Saint-Simon's Système industriel, but to the “Suite des travaux ayant pour objet de fonder le système industriel, DU CONTRAT SOCIAL par Henri Saint-Simon”(Gouhier 1941, 355–356). Proofs were printed in May 1822 (dated “April 1822”) but Saint-Simon suspended the printers’ work. Additions were made to this text and it was renamed “Plan des travaux scientifiques…” when it was finally published in 1824 as the third cahier (notebook) of Saint-Simon's Catechism of the Industrials, with a supertitle: Système de politique Positive. Saint-Simon prefaced his student's text with a warning. This event occurred as the divergences between the two thinkers grew more numerous after 1820 (Gouhier 1941, 358–384). It caused their falling out, which became permanent in May 1824. In 1851, Comte would publish a different book, also entitled Système de politique Positive.

⁹ Comte mentioned “the time when the new philosophy would become sufficiently widespread to take on a truly organic nature, irrevocably replacing theology in its social function as well as in its mental destination” (Comte 1844, 113). The term “positive” can also be used in this sense, thus designating “one of the most eminent properties of the true modern philosophy, by showing it to be destined first and foremost, by its nature, not to destroy but to organise” (122). As pointed out by Robbins (2011, 68), “Mill seems immediately to have imbibed the Saint-Simonian and Comtean view that there are alternating critical and organic ages in history with corresponding forms of critical and organic thought. He seems to have made a shift away from direct, critical involvement in politics towards organic prescription for future development.”

¹⁰ For Mill, Comte's critique of the theological and metaphysical stages of thinking fits into a battle that has long been waged, by Hobbes in particular, but the law of three stages is “a generalization which belongs to himself and in which he had not, to the best of our knowledge, been at all anticipated” (Mill 1865, 269). Furthermore, “this generalization is the most fundamental of the doctrines which originated with M. Comte” (269).

¹¹ Hayek advised English-language readers to refer to H. D. Huton's 1822 translation of the Plan, included in Early Essays on Social Philosophy, a collection published in1911. He also noted that this collection included “two earlier essays by Comte (that Mill was probably not familiar with) and two later essays that Mill almost certainly saw in Le Producteur” (Hayek 1942, 286, n37). In Hayek's view, Mill would thus have read the Considérations philosophiques sur les sciences et les savants (1825) and the Considérations sur le pouvoir spirituel (1826), because Gustave d'Eichthal had “perhaps sent [him] the issues of Le Producteur” from 1825 and 1826 (Hayek 1942, 280).

¹² On The Spirit of the Age, see Weinberg (1982, 1–36).

¹³ This is what Mill himself stated in his first letter to Comte on 8 November 1841 (Mill 1963b, 489). And this date is confirmed by the fact that Mill's first reference to the Cours appears in a letter dated 21 December 1837. In this letter, Mill describes it as “one of the most profound books ever written on the philosophy of the sciences” (Mill 1963a, 363).

¹⁴ In 1844, John Stuart Mill would ask William Molesworth and George Grote to provide financial support for Auguste Comte. On this topic, see Lévy-Bruhl (1899, VI–IX) and Pickering (2009a, 62–63). Among the radicals, Molesworth was undoubtedly the one with the most substantial financial means. In 1835, he had funded the creation of the London Review before purchasing the Westminster Review and merging both reviews.

¹⁵ For example, in 1841, Mill wrote Alexander Bain a letter two sentences long: “Have you ever looked into Comte's Cours de Philosophic Positive? He makes some mistakes, but on the whole, I think it very nearly the grandest work of this age”(Mill 1963b, 487). See also his letter of 27 March 1843 (579).

¹⁶ Letter from Comte to Valat, 17 July 1843 (Comte 1870, 331–332).

¹⁷ For more details, read the introduction to the seventh volume of the Collected Works (Mill 1843, lxxxii–lxxxiii and xc).

¹⁸ Letter to Valat, 29 October 1816, in Comte (1870, 20–21).

¹⁹ Letter dated 17 April 1818 (Comte 1870, 54–55). Comte had a 1773 edition of David Hume's History of England (in English) (Gouhier 1933, 228, n31).

²⁰ According to by Pierre Arnaud, Comte “would not decidedly take his distance from [the economists] until 1825, after completely removing himself from the influence of Saint-Simon, who had introduced him to them” (in Comte 1822, 125, n1). In fact, as noted by Roger Mauduit (1929, 23), it is “in March 1826, in the Considerations on Spiritual Power, that Comte clearly criticized political economy in a public text for the first time”. But he already had in an 1820 unpublished text (Mauduit 1929, 11–12). From then on, both Comte and Saint-Simon “gradually departed from economic liberalism” (1929, 15).

²¹ See Pierre Arnaud's note in Comte (1822, 175).

²² Mills himself mentions the weakness of English historiography (Mill 1826), and the discipline's belated institutionalisation is frequently cited by commentators as an explanation for Mill's admiration of French historians. However, these two points must be put in context. “England was ahead. There was a chair of ancient history in Oxford as early as 1622, and one of general history in Cambridge in 1627. A chair of modern history was founded in the same year, 1724, at both Oxford and Cambridge […]France was very far behind. At the Collège de France, a chair of history and morals was not created until 1775, and an autonomous chair of history only in the early nineteenth century. At the Sorbonne, the first chair of ancient history appeared in 1808, and the first of modern history in 1812” (Le Goff 2014, 57–58).

²³ As noted by Iris Mueller (1956, 58), “Until he came across this new view of history in the Saint-Simonians, Mill had thought that its study only had some moral importance in that it preserved the deeds of great men from falling into oblivion; but he had declared that the importance of history a source of political knowledge was greatly overrated. Like the Benthamites, he believed that knowledge of human nature was more important than knowledge of history in determining the type of institutions needed by any society.”

²⁴ For an account of the influence of S. T. Coleridge, W. Wordsworth and the Romantic movement on Mill's thought, see Davis (1985) and Capaldi (2004, 86–132).

²⁵ T. B. Macaulay's attack against James Mill (Macaulay 1829) led John to question his father's methodology. “This gave me much to think about. I saw that Macaulay's conception of the logic of politics was erroneous; that he stood up for the empirical mode of treating political phenomena, against the philosophical […] But I could not help feeling, that though the tone was unbecoming […] there was truth in several of his strictures on my father's treatment of the subject: that my father's premises were really too narrow” (Mill 1873, 165). See also Capaldi (2004, 63–64).

²⁶ “By comparison with the account given in the Autobiography, in his letter to d'Eichthal of 8 October 1829, Mill is much more critical of Comte, and these criticisms show a striking anticipation of many of the major faults which Mill was to find in Comte's later work” (Lewisohn 1972, 316).

²⁷ However, in his letter to Herbert Spencer of 13 April 1864, Mill downplays the influence of Comte's book: “I myself owe much more to Comte than you do, though, in my case also, all my principal conclusions had been reached before I saw his [Course]” (Mill 1972b, 935).

²⁸ On the influence of Say on Comte, see Kremer-Marietti (1997).

²⁹ Comte's library held the Essais philosophiques (Prévost's translation of Smith's Philosophical Essays) and Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations (Blavet's translation of Smith's Wealth of Nations), which includes the essay on the “History of Astronomy” (Gouhier 1933, 223, n14). See also Canguilhem (1964, 91–92, n62).

³⁰ “Comte's earliest acknowledgment of his debt to Adam Smith is found in the minor work from 1825, Considérations philosophiques sur les sciences et les savants […] See also Cours, IV, 365, and VI, 168” (Canguilhem 1964, 90, n55).

³¹ “Lastly, I find that there is a real analogy in the Scottish mindset and the French. You have certainly not failed to recognise to what extent the Humes, Fergusons, Adam Smiths, Millars, Browns, Reids, even the Chalmers resemble the French intellectually, whereas our English philosophers, excepting perhaps Hobbes, belong to a different type: for Locke, Berkeley, Hartley, Coleridge, or even Bentham, there is an order of ideas and intellectual tendencies that is profoundly disparate” (Mill 1963b, 638–639).

³² “I shall never forget how much my own evolution was first owed especially to a few luminous inspirations from Hume and Adam Smith.” Letter from Comte, dated 21 October 1844 (quoted by Gouhier [1933, 219]). See also the preface of the Catechism of positive religion: “Hume is my principal precursor in philosophy” (Comte 1852, 7).

³³ James Mill quoted Smith's moral theory in his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), and in his Fragment on Mackintosh (1835). In 1869, John will be the editor of the second edition of his father's Analysis.

³⁴ The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill contains only two brief quotes from Smith's Essays. One, already mentioned, was in the book about Comte (Mill 1865, 288)and the other one was in an 1825 text about freedom of the press (Mill CW21, 25).

³⁵ “So formidable an attack on the Whig party and policy had never before been made; nor had so great a blow been ever struck, in this country, for radicalism” (Mill 1873, 95).

³⁶ “When the fears and animosities accompanying the war with France had been brought to an end, and people had once more a place in their thoughts for home politics, the tide began to set towards reform. The renewed oppression of the Continent by the old reigning families, the countenance apparently given by the English Government to the conspiracy against liberty called the Holy Alliance, and the enormous weight of the national debt and taxation occasioned by so long and costly a war, rendered the government and parliament very unpopular. Radicalism, under the leadership of the Burdens and Cobbetts, had assumed a character and importance which seriously alarmed the Administration” (Mill 1873, 101).

³⁷ The principle is not valid on an individual level. But “the consequences drawn from it will hold equally good if the assertion be limited as follows: Any succession of persons, or the majority of any body of persons, will be governed in the bulk of their conduct by their personal interests” (Mill 1843, 890).

³⁸ “[…] the character and course of their actions is largely influenced (independently of personal calculation) by the habitual sentiments and feelings, the general modes of thinking and acting, which prevail throughout the community of which they are members” (Mill 1843, 891). We must also note that while Mill defines a “state of society” as a given configuration, at a given point in time, of the main social facts, he includes “the common beliefs” on “all the subjects most important to mankind, and the degree of assurance with which those beliefs are held” (912).

³⁹ As Françoise Orazi has so rightly noted (2015, 158), Mill resorted quite often to historical examples in refuting arguments.

⁴⁰ When Mill writes, “it is not so with the Distribution of Wealth” (Mill 1848, 199), Robert writes that in his view, “it is not so with the laws that govern the distribution of wealth” (1998, 188, our italics). The rest of Mill's text, which is quoted, appears to refer to the laws of distribution, and the author can conclude with the idea that, for Mill, human beings have “much more control” over the laws of distribution than the laws of production (188), or still, that the former are distinguishable from the latter “by their malleability” (189). We consider this to be inaccurate, because in this excerpt, Mill is not writing about the laws of distribution.

⁴¹ Note that this warning appeared in the “preliminary remarks” of the treatise: “But though governments or nations have the power of deciding what institutions shall exist, they cannot arbitrarily determine how those institutions shall work. The conditions on which the power they possess over the distribution of wealth is dependent […] are as much a subject for scientific enquiry as any of the physical laws of nature” (Mill 1848, 21). On the famous distinction that Mill makes between production and distribution, see Gillig (2016).

⁴² Is Mill's consequentialism consistent with this idea that human beings cannot control “the consequences of their acts either to themselves or to others?” The answer to this objection is the same as in the case of having no time, previous to action, for calculating the effects of an action on general happiness: in Utilitarianism, Mill (1861, 224) insists on the fact that during “the whole past duration of the human species” mankind “have been learning by experience the tendencies of actions; on which experience all the prudence, as well as all the morality of life, is dependent”. In a nutshell, human beings cannot control the exact consequences of their acts, but they know the consequences their acts tend to produce. On Mill's consequentialism and the principle of expediency, see Gray (1996, 19–42).

⁴³ In his letter of 22 February 1848, Mill wrote to John Austin: “I doubt if there will be a single opinion (on pure political economy) in the book which may not be exhibited as a corollary from his [Ricardo's] doctrines” (Mill 1963b, 731).

⁴⁴ In the Course, Comte (1839, 253) also explains that the strength of the work lies in the “few immortal pages” of its introduction, “in which Condorcet exhibits his general idea, and proposes his philosophical project of studying the connection of the various social states”.

⁴⁵ According to Gouhier (1933, 244), “In 1817, there was not yet positivism […] The worship of liberty would soon be excluded from the system.” In his view, the change occurred early in 1818: “until his twentieth birthday, Comte was a son of the anti-clerical and liberal Revolution […] His enemies were the enemies of Liberty, regardless of the colours of their cockade” (Gouhier 1933, 14–15). Yet Comte's liberalism was still evident in the letter he wrote to Valat on 17 April 1818, in which he explained that political liberty is very valuable and that “civil liberty” is even more so (Comte 1870, 34). He expressed a change of opinion in a letter dated 15 May 1818 (Mauduit 1929, 17), then the reading of Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) around 1820 “contributed to divert him from the system of liberty” (Mauduit 1929, 19). In the Catechism, Comte (1852, 6–7) writes that in political science, de Maistre was “the necessary complement of Condorcet”.

⁴⁶ According to Comte (1852, 12–13), this dictatorship is necessary as a previous condition of “any regeneration” but its “most prominent defect” is that it cannot permit free speech which is “absolutely indispensable to any reorganization of the spiritual power”. Comte, who supported General Cavaignac in the election of December 1848 “was not happy that Louis Napoleon eventually had an overwhelming Victory” (Pickering 2009a, 428). But he declared in late January 1852 “that the new dictator was a better man that he had figured in the beginning” (Pickering 2009b, 20).

⁴⁷ Françoise Orazi asserts that “the second essay of Democracy in America, published in 1840, underscores the same methodological qualities that the author acknowledges in Comte” (Orazi 2015, 167). As we have seen, these are in fact the qualities that he would soon recognise in Comte. At the same time, Mill would also indicate that the manner in which Comte thinks that these growing powers should be organised and used is, unlike for Tocqueville, based “on anything rather than on history” (Mill 1865, 325). See also Robbins (2011, 69).

⁴⁸ This is what Mill calls utility in the largest sense: “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions: but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” (Mill 1859, 224).

⁴⁹ There is considerable literature dedicated to the dispute and to the related topic of moral paternalism. For a long list of references, see (Gray 1996, 160, n17).

⁵⁰ Furthermore, for Mill, “the non-existence of an acknowledged first principle has made ethics not so much a guide as a consecration of men's actual sentiments” (Mill 1861, 207).

⁵¹ Steiner (2015, n22) considers that “Mill paid scant attention” to Comte's “altruistic economics idea”. It is true that Mill does not provide much details about Comte's concept of altruism but he mentions it in his essay on Comte (Mill 1865, 335–340) and, as we have seen, in his essay on utilitarianism.

⁵² In addition to the issue of equality between men and women, in this paper, we have also decided to leave aside the two thinkers’ disagreements on psychology and phrenology.