Classical Economists

"After dinner Mr. Mill read us Shelley's Ode to Liberty & he got quite excited & moved over it rocking backwards & forwards & nearly choking with emotion; he said himself: “it is almost too much for one.”"

"I went to Cambridge in the middle [eighteen] sixties... Mill possessed at that time an authority in the English Universities...comparable to that wielded forty years earlier by Hegel in Germany and in the Middle Ages by Aristotle."

"John Stuart Mill, By a mighty effort of will, Overcame his natural bonhomie And wrote ‘Principles of Political Economy’."

"In his On Liberty (1858) and in his Representative Government (1861) Mill produces formal arguments which are designed to show that liberty, in particular liberty of thought and expression, is necessary for the development of human society. Progress, he argues, depends upon the freedom of individuals to innovate and experiment; conformity inevitably produces stagnation. This is the utilitarian basis of his argument against fully fledged democracy, that it is likely to produce a tyranny of the majority which will stifle those individual forces in society which give it life and meaning. For James Mill democracy had been a weapon to destroy the power of the 'sinister interest'; for his son it was a potential threat to liberty and social diversity, the mainsprings of human progress."

"The heart of Mill's argument for the cause of Liberty transcends the utilitarian. In pages which are the classical expression of English Liberal thought he argues the case for liberty and for representative institutions on the grounds that these are essential to that full and rich development of human individuality which he obviously values as an end in itself."

"“At night John Mill came in, and sat talking with me till near eleven: a fine, clear enthusiast, who will one day come to something; yet to nothing Poetical, I think : his fancy is not rich ; furthermore he cannot laugh with any compass. You will like Mill.”"

"I never knew a finer, tenderer, more sensitive or modest soul among the sons of men. There never was a more generous creature than he, nor a more modest."

"In any case the soul of Bentham (if he had one) went marching on, like John Brown; and in the central Victorian movement it was certainly he who won. John Stuart Mill was the final flower of that growth. He was himself fresh and delicate and pure; but that is the business of a flower. Though he had to preach a hard rationalism in religion, a hard competition in economics, a hard egoism in ethics, his own soul had all that silvery sensitiveness that can be seen in his fine portrait by Watts. He boasted none of that brutal optimism with which his friends and followers of the Manchester School expounded their cheery negations. There was about Mill even a sort of embarrassment; he exhibited all the wheels of his iron universe rather reluctantly, like a gentleman in trade showing ladies over his factory. There shone in him a beautiful reverence for women, which is all the more touching because, in his department, as it were, he could only offer them so dry a gift as the Victorian Parliamentary Franchise."

"His systematic account of the nature and methods of 'science', in the broadest sense, attained an authority in England that was positively papal."

"Mill—it is one of the few things about him one can assert with reasonable security against contradiction—was not Nietzsche. He was not, that is, attempting fundamentally to subvert or reverse his society's moral sensibilities, but rather to refine them and call them more effectively into play on public issues (examples will be noted below). In these circumstances, the moralist runs the risk of priggishness, as he contrasts the consistency of his own position and the purity of his own motives with the logical confusions and self-interested prejudices that he must impute to those who, sharing the same premises, fail to draw the same conclusions."

"Even when J. S. Mill contended that some pleasures are better than others, he continued to assume the axiom, for to Mill as to Bentham the relative value of an object or activity depended on its contribution to the pleasure or happiness of the recipient, not on the intrinsic and peculiar worth of the recipient."

"As every reader of Representative Government soon discovers, it was Mill himself who undermined his own argument for universal inclusion by posing a counterargument based on consideration of competence. In the course of his discussion, he explicitly asserted that the criterion of competence must take priority over any principle, whether categorical or utilitarian, that makes inclusion in the demos a matter of general right among all adults subject to the laws... Mill brought into the open a problem that had been glossed over by some of his most illustrious predecessors. Yet in justifying an exclusionary demos Mill did no more than make implicit what had generally been implicit in all previous democratic theory and practice."

"Mr. J. S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, Utilitarianism, (1864, pp. 45, 46), of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality." Again he says, "Like the other acquired capacities above referred to, the moral faculty, if not a part of our nature, is a natural out-growth from it; capable, like them, in a certain small degree of springing up spontaneously." But in opposition to all this, he also remarks, "if, as in my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ at all from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? Mr. Bain (see, for instance, The Emotions and the Will, 1865, p. 481) and others believe that the moral sense is acquired by each individual during his lifetime. On the general theory of evolution this is at least extremely improbable. The ignoring of all transmitted mental qualities will, as it seems to me, be hereafter judged as a most serious blemish in the works of Mr. Mill."

"Ah! I see; the finishing governess!"

"Neither Hayek nor Mill accurately or consistently stated the libertarian standard for appropriate coercive involvement in the lives of others. This standard is exclusively to prevent harm to others."

"At first glance, On Liberty stands the principle of utility on its head. Mill was less concerned to promote the welfare of the majority, it seems, than to protect an eccentric minority from mass mediocrity. On closer inspection, however, his arguments reveal something other than a snobbish obsession with talented individuals. Only through the public influence of an enlightened minority, he believed, might common people aspire to self-improvement. This belief also shaped his attitude to representative government. Although acknowledging that universal suffrage provided an essential safeguard of individual interests, he rejected the Benthamite proposition that everyone should exert an equal influence upon politics. Democracy, he feared, was potentially an elective dictatorship which failed to restrain the inclination of the majority to enact ignorant and capricious measures. It would thereby reinforce the tendency of the modern age to stifle individuality in mass conformity."

"You must be aware of the fact, but I think can hardly appreciate the reality, that in all parts of this country (and wherever our tongue is spoken) there are thousands of earnest men and women to whom your name is as familiar as a household word, and who do not merely admire your ability and appreciate your work, but regard you with all the feeling due to that highest of all characters,—the "great, good man"."

"The Saint of Rationalism."

"No one has ever been so right about so many things so much of the time as John Stuart Mill."

"The founding utilitarians, Bentham and Mill, were not just armchair philosophers. They were daring social reformers, intensely engaged with the social and political issues of their day. Indeed, many familiar social issues became social issues because Bentham and Mill made them so. Their views were considered radical at the time, but today we take for granted most of the social reforms for which they fought. They were among the earliest opponents of slavery and advocates of free speech, free markets, widely available education, environmental protection, prison reform, women's rights, animal rights, gay rights, workers' rights, the right to divorce, and the separation of church and state."

"John Stuart Mill was the saint of rationalism for a good reason. Mill's ideas are the roots of the self-destructive character of a rationalist or constructivistic view of how civilization could be organized. Since Mill, this muddle about facts has guided policy and most of the strivings of people of good will, who were inspired by a false picture, based on a worldwide division of labor, of how a society worked. It was from Mill's muddle (and the similar deceptions of Marx) and from the confusion of those pretended defenders of liberty who proclaimed a new moral postulate which required a complete suppression of individual freedom that the whole muddle of the middle derived. The ideal of freedom was increasingly relegated to second place by the idea of social justice. However, the two are incompatible. If one accepts the principle of social justice, one cannot preserve the market economy which provides that which social justice would like to distribute. The two principles are antagonistic and irreconcilable. There can be no halfway house between them. As the promise of social justice cannot be generally satisfied and also cannot be refused to all others once it has been conceded to some, there can be no question about where one's choice must be if one really wants to help the poor."

"Such demands stem chiefly from the tradition of rationalistic liberalism that we have already discussed (so different from the political liberalism deriving from the English Old Whigs), which implies that freedom is incompatible with any general restriction on individual action. This tradition voices itself in the passages cited earlier from Voltaire, Bentham, and Russell. Unfortunately it also pervades even the work of the English 'saint of rationalism', John Stuart Mill. Under the influence of these writers, and perhaps especially Mill, the fact that we must purchase the freedom enabling us to form an extended order at the cost of submitting to certain rules of conduct has been used as a justification for the demand to return to the state of 'liberty' enjoyed by the savage who - as eighteenth-century thinkers defined him - 'did not yet know property'. Yet the savage state - which includes the obligation or duty to share in pursuit of the concrete goals of one's fellows, and to obey the commands of a headman - can hardly be described as one of freedom (although it might involve liberation from some particular burdens) or even as one of morals. Only those general and abstract rules that one must take into account in individual decisions in accordance with individual aims deserve the name of morals."

"It was only the 'marginal revolution' of the 1870s that produced a satisfactory explanation of the market processes that Adam Smith had long before described with his metaphor of the 'invisible hand', an account which, despite its still metaphorical and incomplete character, was the first scientific description of such self-ordering processes. James and John Stuart Mill, by contrast, were unable to conceive of the determination of market values in any manner other than causal determination by a few preceding events, and this inability barred them, as it does many modern 'physicalists', from understanding selfsteering market processes. [...] John Stuart Mill perhaps played the most important role in this connection. He had early put himself under socialist influence, and through this bias acquired a great appeal to 'progressive' intellectuals, establishing a reputation as the leading liberal and the 'Saint of Rationalism'. Yet he probably led more intellectuals into socialism than any other single person: fabianism was in its beginnings essentially formed by a group of his followers."

"When the term “Western civilization” is equated with racism, cultural superiority and pervasive oppression, and students in my political philosophy class refuse to study the works of John Stuart Mill or John Locke (or any other white thinker) because they consider them white supremacists, there is no lower level of educational hell."

"[T]he greatest and best man of this century – I allude of course to John Stuart Mill."

"In regard to what I have said of Mill... I should not have expressed so strong an opinion had I been thinking only of his political economy. There is much that is erroneous in his Principles, and he never had an idea what capital was, but the book is not the maze of self-contradictions which his logic undoubtedly is. If you have not examined his logical theories very critically, you will hardly be aware that upon the principal points he usually holds from three to six inconsistent views all at the same time."

"I believe that he was literally the only person who was in the least impressed by her. Mrs. Grote said briefly that she was a stupid woman; Bain said she had a knack of repeating prettily what J.S.M. said and that he told her it was wonderful.... If she was he thought, someone else at least should have given us indications."

"Although his nineteenth-century reputation depended only slightly upon his fame as an economist, his Principles of Political Economy... was one of the most influential texts of any time. As late as 1919 it was still being used at Oxford...Mill's single point of originality was the distinction between the laws of production and the laws of distribution...In contrast to Ricardo, Mill had read widely. In his... discussion of Russian, Prussian, English, and Austrian systems of , he cited Richard Jones... who has come to be regarded as a precursor to historical economics. On peasant proprietorship in Switzerland, North America, and elsewhere, his authority was Sismondi, a pioneer student of industrial fluctuations. He quoted... Tooke on the perils of inflation. He refuted Attwood, a leading member of the inflationist Birmingham currency school. Mill relied upon Babbage on division of labor, and Wakefield on colonization and the relative advantages of large and small landholdings. On , he employed John Rae's New Principles of Political Economy. Although the major influences remained Malthus, Smith, and Ricardo, the book gave abundant evidence of Mill's endeavor to keep up with the times. The effort extended to a sympathetic, though ultimately disapproving, association with socialism."

"John Stuart Mill is an epigone of classical liberalism and, especially in his later years, under the influence of his wife, full of feeble compromises. He slips slowly into socialism and is the originator of the thoughtless confounding of liberal and socialist ideas that led to the decline of English liberalism and to the undermining of the living standards of the English people. Nevertheless—or perhaps precisely because of this— one must become acquainted with Mill's principal writings:Principles of Political Economy (1848) On Liberty (1859) Utilitarianism (1862)Without a thorough study of Mill it is impossible to understand the events of the last two generations, for Mill is the great advocate of socialism. All the arguments that could be advanced in favor of socialism are elaborated by him with loving care. In comparison with Mill all other socialist writers—even Marx, Engels, and Lassalle—are scarcely of any importance."

"Reformers like Mill saw women's oppression as a 'relic of the past...discordant with the future and which must necessarily disappear.'"

"liberals such as Mill, and later socialists and feminists of different political sympathies, likened women's situation within marriage and their deprivation of civil rights to the state of slavery. As Mill expressed it in The Subjection of Women, a text that was first published in 1861, the year of the outbreak of the American Civil War, 'no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is'."

"The most virtuous and truth-loving man that I at least have ever known."

"He was a friend of my parents, and I didn't know him through that because my parents died when I was quite tiny; but nevertheless it made me know he existed, and so I read his books. And, well, they were the sort of books that would appeal to me. They were empiricist and liberal and humane. And I liked him very much."

"Mill's discussion of justice is like and unlike Hume's. Like Hume, Mill was an ethical naturalist, looking to the function of the rules of justice in social life. Unlike Hume, Mill went beyond an analysis of the emotions expressed in judgements of justice."

"We are far too apt to think of Mill as a technically philosophical writer, because we cannot help thinking of him as the author of the Logic, and to forget that he, no less than Bentham and the other utilitarians, is primarily dominated by the practical interest of the social reformer. He is really far more interested in the question of how, “once the general happiness is recognized as the ethical standard,” this ideal is to be practically realized, than in the question of the ethical criterion and its proof."

"The growing feeling that private life should be distanced from public life, and was in some sense opposed to it, wrecked the philosophic attempt to reconcile the two. Specifically it destroyed John Stuart Mill's attempt to combine social and moral philosophy under the unifying principle of utility. In one sense, Mill was successful. Setting out to provide a 'unifying social doctrine' by incorporating the 'major positive views' of his Intuitionist critics, he succeeded in giving Utilitarian justifications for many current social practices. Where Mill was much less successful was in linking his social doctrine with his morals. Mill's Autobiography is a brilliant dissection of Victorianism's mid-life crisis. It raised two problems which are vital for understanding the Cambridge civilisation of Keynes's day. First, how is one to reconcile the claims of personal happiness and social duty when the two diverge? And is happiness or pleasure an adequate aim for human conduct? Are there not some things worth doing some dispositions worth cultivating, which are valuable in themselves, irrespective of any Utilitarian justifications they might have? Is it not better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied? What Mill succeeded in doing was to make Cambridge Benthamite in that aspect of its thought which related to social policy. Mill's Utilitarianism, Cambridge mathematics and Cambridge's Nonconformist conscience were the chief constituents in what became the Cambridge School of Economics, whose founder was Alfred Marshall. What Mill failed to do was to make Cambridge moral philosophy Benthamite."

"John Stuart Mill's position as the unchallenged leader in economics and in other fields in his time was due not only to the quality of his own work but also to the happenstance that people of comparable stature did not come along at that time to contest his methods and conclusions. He was like a track star running against the clock instead of against another track star. He was never pushed — either by the criticism or the competing theories of comparably able contemporaries — to reach his utmost potential. In the long run, his reputation suffered accordingly, because in the long run there are always people of comparable stature."

"[T]he last and greatest of liberal thinkers."

"Of all my reviewers you are, perhaps, the only one who has thoroughly understood me; who has taken a general bird's-eye view of my ideas; who sees their ulterior aim, and yet has preserved a clear perception of the details."

"As increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less labor, the energies of the industrious members of the community are bent to the compassing of a higher result in conspicuous expenditure, rather than slackened to a more comfortable pace. ...this want ...is indefinitely expansible, after the manner commonly imputed in economic theory to higher or spiritual wants. It is owing chiefly to the presence of this element in the standard of living that J. S. Mill was able to say that "hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.""

"Kant and Mill disagree about many things – even basic things – not only about the substantive foundations of ethics but also about moral psychology and about how such basic moral notions as duty and conscience are to be conceived. But these differences seem to me only to make all the clearer the close parallels in their conception of the structure and aims of ethical theory."

"The dominant model is not a good one for understanding the ultimate basis of moral value, for grounding our present moral beliefs or for pointing the way to radical revisions in them. For these tasks, the older, more philosophical model found in Kant and Mill is far better."

"In bodily presence, though not commanding, at sixty he was attractive, spare in build, his voice low but harmonious, his eye sympathetic and responsive. His perfect simplicity and candour, friendly gravity with no accent of the don, his readiness of interest and curiosity, the evident love of truth and justice and improvement as the standing habit of mind—all this diffused a high, enlightening ethos that, aided by the magic halo of accepted fame, made him extraordinarily impressive."

"In his collective influence he made innumerable pulses of knowledge and thought vibrate in his generation. Respect for him became an element of men's own self-respect. How of wit or humour, you ask? He was perfectly patient of a playful sally levelled at bad reasoning, or perverse feeling, or questionable act; but for himself, we were content with his swift detection of a sophism or trenchant exposure of a fallacy, performed with a neatness, finish, and celerity that was a very passable substitute for wit."

"[H]e could be both severe and plain-spoken as anybody in Parliament or out, and knew how to run an adversary clean through with a sword that was no spinster's arm. Fitzjames Stephen, who led the first effective attack on Mill's pontifical authority, said he was cold as ice, a walking book. On the contrary, he was a man of extreme sensibility and vital heat in things worth waxing hot about. In truth he sometimes let sensibility carry him too far. One notable afternoon in European history, I saw him in an instant blaze into uncontrollable anger. It was July 14, 1870. He was sitting in his garden, and I brought him the news that France had declared war upon Prussia. He violently struck his chair and broke out in a passionate exclamation, "What a pity the bombs of Orsini missed their mark, and left the crime-stained usurper alive!""

"Ideas are not everything in a teacher, vital though they may be. Mill's merit was the extension of them in spirit and letter to social and political issues and marked events... Boundless patience went with a social hope for mankind that could never be shaken. All the grand sources of human suffering, he was convinced, are conquerable more or less by human effort."

"His sense of the miseries and wrongs of "the greatest number" was the mainspring of the resolute beneficence of thought and purpose that really made his very life and daily being... Mill would take endless trouble to procure the reversal of an inhuman sentence in a police court; he abhorred insensibility to the sufferings of our fellows in the lower order of creation. He was warm in congratulation on Freeman's attack on field sports published in the Fortnightly (1869). "I honour him," Mill wrote, "for having broken ground—a thing I have been often tempted to do myself, but having so many unpopular causes already on my hands, thought it wiser not to provoke fresh hostility.""

"I do not know whether then or at any other time so short a book ever instantly produced so wide and so important an effect on contemporary thought as did Mill's On Liberty in that day of intellectual and social fermentation (1859)... Mill believed that no symmetry, no uniformity of custom and convention, but bold, free expansion in every field, was demanded by all the needs of human life, and the best instincts of the modern mind... The little volume belongs to the rare books that after hostile criticism has done its best are still found to have somehow added a cubit to man's stature... [It] is a restatement and new reinforcement of Tolerance, discussion without restriction, the free life of the individual, so long as he does not injure other people, fair play for social experiment. On all this nothing could be more bracing than Mill's handling of his lofty case, and the idealism of it, the enthusiasm, sustained as it was for page after page, very nearly approached the electrifying region of the poetic, in the eyes of ardent men and women in our age."

"We cannot say, at any rate, that Liberty was the work of the Demagogue, either of Rationalism or anything else, because it was evidently a potent war-cry against the infallibility of Public Opinion, and the usurpation of Majorities, whether by Act of Parliament or social boycott."

"I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing — the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others."