Maturity and individuality in the later writings of J.S. Mill: a unified account

ABSTRACT

This paper offers an integrated account of maturity and the requisites of individuality in the political thought of John Stuart Mill, bridging his writings on the individual and society. To do so, it focuses on Mill's account of the relationship between civilization, democracy, class, individuality and custom in his later political thought. Mill draws on these concepts to flesh out his account of maturity in both individuals and societies. Mill's conception of custom, in particular, bridges the individual and society. Maturity, simply defined, is the ability to be self-governing. For Mill, only mature individuals and societies are entitled to be self-determining. In offering a unified account of maturity in Mill, this paper is departing from two different views of maturity in Mill that have become popular in recent scholarship. It also offers interpretations of the relationship between civilization and democracy, and class and custom in Mill.

KEYWORDS:

• John Stuart Mill
• maturity
• individuality
• imperialism
• civilization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use the term imperialism and its cognates to refer to Mill's views on Britain's dependent empire (territories ruled by Britain, either directly or through a company, that did not have a substantial settler population). As such, I refer to the groups who were ruled by Britain in this way as ‘dependent peoples’.

2 Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Liberalism and Colonialism: A Critique of Locke and Mill’, in The Decolonization of Imagination : Culture, Knowledge, and Power, eds. Jan P. Nerderveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1995), 81–98; Parekh, ‘Decolonizing Liberalism’, in The End of “Isms”? Reflections on the Fate of Ideological Politics after Communism's Collapse, ed. Alexander Shtromas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 85–103.

3 Inder S. Marwah, Liberalism, Diversity and Domination : Kant, Mill and the Government of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), chaps. 4–5. Marwah's defense of Mill against the proponents of the settled view mostly steers clear of the problems raised by On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government. In these works, he claims that Mill does in fact ‘appeal to the categorical distinction’ between civilized and uncivilized peoples that proponents of the settled view read Mill as making, see Inder S. Marwah, ‘Complicating Barbarism and Civilization: Mill's Complex Sociology of Human Development’, History of Political Thought 32, no. 2 (2011): 350.

4 Marwah, Liberalism, Diversity and Domination, 198.

5 Marwah, 159.

6 Georgios Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad : J.S. Mill on International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 110.

7 Varouxakis, 113.

8 John Stuart Mill, CW XVIII, 223. All quotes from Mill are taken from Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press) 33 vols.

9 Mill, CW XVIII, 223.

10 Mill, CW XVIII, 223–4.

11 Mill, CW XVIII, 224.

12 Mill, CW XVIII, 224.

13 For example, George Kateb, Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011), 99.

14 Joseph Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Martin Hollis, ‘The Social Liberty Game’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures 15, no. 1 (1983): 31–44.

15 This point is well made by Gregory Claeys, Mill and Paternalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 13.

16 Piers Norris Turner, ‘“Harm” and Mill's Harm Principle’, Ethics 124 (2014): 299–326, 321.

17 Claeys, Mill and Paternalism, 12–13.

18 Each of these worries is discussed in Claeys, Mill and Paternalism, 13; 18; 46; passim. I take these to be the major sources of Mill's paternalism, though Claeys offers a more fine-grained discussion of the matter.

19 Mill, CW III, 758–60. For a good discussion of this passage, see Claeys, Mill and Paternalism, 44–5. I think that Claeys underplays the significance of this view in Mill's thought, though he is certainly right to argue that many of Mill's interpreters have wrongly taken this view to represent the totality of Mill's thinking on paternalism, thereby generating an incomplete picture of his views.

20 Not everyone thinks that Mill has an answer to this question. Jennifer Pitts acknowledges that Mill thinks that national character is ‘essentially like’ individual character, but she argues that ‘it would be a mistake to assume that by national character he had in mind anything analogous to the riot of eccentricity and singularity he noted in individuals’ Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 135–6. Although this is true in a general sense, as we shall see, Mill nonetheless outlines a theory of what it means to be mature that takes into account the role of social conditions in fostering the preconditions of individual maturity. In this sense, Mill's account of national character, and of civilization, is in fact analogous to his thinking about individual maturity in important ways.

21 Sharon Stanley, ‘John Stuart Mill, Children's Liberty, and the Unraveling of Autonomy’, The Review of Politics 79 (2017): 50.

22 Mill, CW II, 281.

23 Mill, CW X, 211.

24 Mill, CW X, 211.

25 John Gray, ‘Mill's Conception of Happiness and the Theory of Individuality’, in J.S. Mill on Liberty, eds. John Gray and G.W. Smith (London, 1991), 192.

26 Mill, CW X, 211–14.

27 Mill acknowledges that it is possible to be both mature and unable to appreciate the higher pleasures, but Mill would not accept that a person can be mature and incapable of making choices that might lead them to one day appreciate the higher pleasures.

28 Gray, ‘Mill's Conception of Happiness and the Theory of Individuality’, 190–1.

29 Mill, CW X, 212–13.

30 Gray, 193.

31 Mill, CW XVIII, 260.

32 Mill, CW X, 212.

33 Mill, CW XVIII, 262.

34 Mill, CW XVIII, 262.

35 Mill, CW X, 212.

36 This is not to say that unreflective judgments are always a bad thing for Mill. Impulsive and custom-driven choices are distinct from habits and are caused by different social and psychological forces. Impulse is caused by the inability to control one's internal, spontaneous desires. Habit, for Mill, is the willing of an act simply for its own sake, and not because it is pleasurable. This occurs when behaviours that we undertake because we enjoy them become ingrained through repetition in our minds and are no longer performed with reference to their initial justification. For a lucid discussion of Mill on habit, see Marwah, Liberalism, Diversity and Domination, 154–8. See also Mill, CW VIII, 842.

37 Mill, CW II, 282.

38 Mill, CW XVIII, 262.

39 Mill, CW XVIII, 262.

40 Mill, CW X, 340–1.

41 Mill, CW XVIII, 262; a similar view is reiterated throughout Mill's review of Comte's later works, see esp. CW X, 336–7.

42 Ibid. Emphasis in the original.

43 Mill, CW XVIII, 264.

44 One might wonder how the hold of custom over society can be broken without granting individuals a significant amount of liberty such that they can pursue different ways of life. I address this objection more fully below. For now, it will suffice to mention that Mill thinks that we are taught to develop our individuality by being disciplined. Discipline teaches colonial subjects the usefulness and limits of individuality. The development of individuality is an educative process where the student is not fully free.

45 Mill, CW XVIII, 221–2.

46 ‘The likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful portion of it, are thus the main thing which has practically determined the rules laid down for general observance,’ Mill, CW XVIII, 221–222.

47 Mill, CW XVIII, 273–4.

48 Mill, CW XVIII, 273.

49 Mill, CW XVIII, 273–5.

50 Mill, CW X, 351.

51 Mill, CW X, 337.

52 Mill, CW XVIII, 272.

53 Mill, CW XVIII, 279.

54 Mill, CW XVIII, 273.

55 Mill, CW XVIII, 273; 265.

56 Mill, CW XVIII, 273.

57 Mill, CW VIII, 905.

58 Mill, CW XVIII, 272.

59 The claim that Mill takes civilization to be a characteristic of whole societies, rather than a cognitive characteristic of individuals, follows the argument made in Georgios Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad : J.S. Mill on International Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 110.

60 Mill, CW XVIII, 272.

61 Mill, CW X, 352.

62 Mill, CW XIX, 567.

63 Mill, CW XIX, 415.

64 Mill, CW XIX, 395.

65 Mill, CW VIII, 920.

66 Mill, CW VIII, 892.

67 Mill, CW XIX, 394.

68 Mill, CW II, 211. The reference to St. Simonism as a form of despotic rule appropriate for the imperial context reoccurs in Considerations, though in that work it is mentioned only in passing as a form of rule suited for societies that have already learned the basic lessons of obedience and industry, rather than as a suitable arrangement for teaching these lessons. Mill's inconsistency on this point is some evidence for the view that Mill never really settled on any detailed developmental project for bringing a dependent people from a state of savagery to one of full civilization. See Mill, CW XIX, 395–6.

69 Yvonne Chiu and Robert S. Taylor, ‘The Self-Extinguishing Despot: Millian Democratization’, The Journal of Politics 73, no. 4 (2011): 1241.

70 Chiu & Taylor, ‘The Self-Extinguishing Despot’, 1241.

71 Mill, CW XVIII, 266.

72 Ibid.

73 Mill, CW VIII, 923, quoting CW X, 507.

74 Mill, CW VIII, 926.

75 Mill, CW VIII, 921, quoting CW X, 505. More generally, Gregory Claeys has noted that for Mill, the development of one's individuality served to limit individualism, which was distinct from Mill's ideal of a well developed, self-governing person. See Claeys, Mill and Paternalism, 18.

76 Mill, CW II, 282.

77 Mill, CW VI, 502.

78 Mill, CW VI, 507.

79 For insightful treatments of Mill's thoughts on settler colonies, see Duncan Bell, Reordering the World : Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 211–36; Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad, 125–40.

80 Mill's opposition to the existence of a landlord class is a general feature of his thought. As such, land reform formed an important part of his plan for improving India, and he wanted the British to ensure that no such class of landlords emerged there. For more detailed examinations of debates about land reform and property in India, see Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire : Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad, 108–9; Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Delhi: OUP, 1959 [1982]).

81 Mill, CW XVIII, 262.

82 Mill, CW VI, 530.

83 Mill, CW VI, 516–17.

84 Mill, CW VI, 523.

85 Mill, CW XIX, 415.

86 This conclusion is in agreement with Marwah's account of Mill's developmentalism, though its point of emphasis is different. See Marwah, Liberalism, Diversity and Domination, 199–206.

87 Mill, CW XIX, 567.

88 Ibid.

89 Mill, CW XVIII, 272.

90 Ibid.

91 Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad, 112–13.

92 Varouxakis, 104.

93 Mill, CW VIII, 941.

94 Mill, CW VIII, 940.

95 Mill, CW XIX, 396–7.

96 Marwah and Varouxakis both discuss Mill's assessment of the Jews as an ‘Asiatic’ people that has remained progressive. See Marwah, Liberalism, Diversity and Domination, 193; Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad, 112.

97 Chiu and Taylor, ‘The Self-Extinguishing Despot’, 1249.

98 Mill, CW XIX, 562.

99 Mill, CW XIX, 562; 567.

100 Mill, CW XIX, 567.

101 Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge, 1970), 28–9.

102 Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory, 29.

103 Mill, CW X, 344.

104 Mill, CW X, 351.

105 Mill, CW XXI, 120;122.

106 Mill, CW XXI, 122.

107 Mill, CW XVIII, 274.