John Stuart Mill: A Biography

"This is the closest book on my list to a ‘straight’ intellectual biography, in that it is written by a philosopher and theologian who primarily wants to explore Mill’s ideas. Although he does tell you what what was happening in Mill’s life, it mostlyasks: What did he believe at this point? Where did he get that from? How did that change? It’s a more scholarly book than the others on the list, a bit heavier. But I wanted to represent that kind of intellectual biography, and I don’t think there is a better biography of Mill. I love Mill. I think he the most important thinker of the 19th century. His biographers have done moderately well—but for a man of towering genius, that’s not enough. This book, though it is primarily about ideas really understands Mill the person, and shows you the importance of Mill’s emotional reaction to the world in the formation and distribution of his ideas. It’s very nuanced. “Intellectual biography is a wide and slightly disparate genre. We might think of closely-written books that examine the evolution of a thinker’s ideas” Capaldi really understands that Mill was quite a physical, romantic person. He understands that Mills’ body of work has to be read all together. You see a lot of people online who quote from On Liberty , and be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ it in some way. But that book makes a lot more sense when you have read the essays ‘Bentham’ and ‘Coleridge’ essays, or A System of Logic or The Subjection of Women . You have to integrate it all to see the bigger picture. Capaldi does that. He’s also very good on the relationship with Harriet Taylor, Mill’s wife, who was absolutely crucial to how Mill finessed some of his ideas, fundamental. She was part of the driving energy of how John Stuart Mill—the economist and logician who wrote two major textbooks of the 19th century—became the great polemicist who said to Victorian society: We’re too conformist, too conventional, not intellectual enough. We don’t care enough about civilisation. We should be feminists. We should take religion seriously without being religious fanatics… all these things that now sound like common sense, but were in fact radical ideas that got him classed as either an eccentric or asa true genius, depending on the partisan divide.. Mill is seen now as a liberal hero. But he was also one of the great poetry critics of the 19th century. He wrote some of the best essays about theism. He was a very, very broad, deep, synthetic thinker. Capaldi really gets this. He takes him seriously. And you will understand Mill so much better through this book than through the other biographies. Yes, this comes out very well in the debate about Mills and his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill. Mill said Harriet was fundamental to his work, an equal partner, but this claim has been disputed ever since their deaths. (And while they were alive by some of their gossipy acquaintances.) John and Harriet spent a lot of time apart, often for health reasons, and wrote to each other. So even though most of her letters were lost we do have a sense of their intellectual interdependence. They don’t always write in great detail about their work, but they refer to their conversations and their discussions. Clearly, it was a marriage of minds. We can see her edits on the Autobiography . They are not always detailed, intellectual edits, but she made some big decisions. You get the sense that she is going to go and sit next to him and talk about these edits. Like Mill said, their conversations were fundamental to the work. So even though Harriet Taylor’s own writing isn’t as important as Mill’s, we get the sense that there was a close working relationship between them that significantly informed how Mill produced much of his work. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Mill says again and again and again that this work would not exist without her. Without Harriet Taylor, Mill might not have written The Subjection of Women , which is a towering achievement; it’s polemical, it’s logical, it’s intuitive. There were young women in the last quarter of the 19th century who slept with that book under their pillow. It became the inciting philosophical text of the global women’s votes movement. What good is it to say, oh, well, Mill was already a feminist when he met Harriet? Okay, but it’s not the same thing as writing that book! It’s easy for intellectuals to collapse that distinction, but I think the ordinary person has a much better understanding that how you live and what you talk about is very important to your work. We get a sense of what Harriet was like intellectually from her daughter (also a Harriet). There’s a letter from Harriet’s daughter to one of her friends, where she says: Don’t praise my work. I need you to tell me what is wrong with my work. She says: Mr Mill is too nice. He tells me that I am good. But I am very hard on Mr Mill and I tell him he must be very hard on me. She learned that from her mother, Mill’s wife. Her childhood seems to have been a lot of close attention: What are you thinking? Why are you thinking that? Are you really being good? Are you really doing your best? These are the attitudes that Harriet brought to her marriage of minds with John. How would that not be fundamental to his work? It’s crazy to think that. That’s why Mill is so interesting. He’s a synthetic thinker. In the ‘Coleridge’ essay , from 1840, he talks about how the ‘history of opinion’ is of people agreeing and disagreeing, but rather than being a clash of ideas, the opposing sides gradually oscillate into the centre; each reaction and counter-reaction gets us closer to a central point of truth. This was how Mill always tried to think, to be many-sided in order to see the truth. That’s why intellectual biographies of Mill are so interesting. You’re in this oscillation of thought and counter-thought, reaction and counter-reaction. Mill said that both sides were telling the truth, but what is interesting is that they are not telling the whole truth. There’s a letter to Carlyle where he says, everything you’ve said is true, but it’s just part of the truth. I think about this every time I read an op-ed. It’s like: what I’m being told is the truth, it’s just missing lots of other important nuance. It’s an aspect of the truth. Mill is the great philosopher of the oscillation, the great philosopher of both sides So much of our culture would benefit from having more of a “philosophy of oscillating to the centre.” And this Mill biography is a classic intellectual biography."