Economists From England

"It is an uphill race, and a race against time, for if the American form of democracy overtakes us first, the majority will no more relax their despotism than a single despot would. But our only chance is to come forward as Liberals, carrying out the democratic idea, not as Conservatives, resisting it."

"It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak."

"There are but few points in which the English, as a people, are entitled to the moral pre-eminence with which they are accustomed to compliment themselves at the expense of other nations: but, of these points, perhaps the one of greatest importance is, that the higher classes do not lie, and the lower, though mostly habitual liars, are ashamed of lying. To run any risk of weakening this feeling, a difficult one to create, or, when once gone, to restore, would be a permanent evil too great to be incurred for so very temporary a benefit as the ballot would confer, even on the most exaggerated estimate necessity."

"That power should be exercised over any portion of mankind without any obligation of consulting them, is only tolerable while they are in an infantine, or a semi-barbarous state. In any civilized condition, power ought never to be exempt from the necessity of appealing to the reason, and recommending itself by motives which justify it to the conscience and feelings, of the governed."

"The possession and the exercise of political, and among others of electoral, rights, is one of the chief instruments both of moral and of intellectual training for the popular mind; and all governments must be regarded as extremely imperfect, until every one who is required to obey the laws, has a voice, or the prospect of a voice, in their enactment and administration."

"Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And if, exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the slough of selfishness, they do not with one voice answer 'immoral,' let the morality of the principle of utility be for ever condemned."

"A Turk thinks, or used to think (for even Turks are wiser now-a-days), that society would be on a sandbank if women were suffered to walk about the streets with their faces uncovered. Taught by these and many similar examples, I look upon this expression of loosening the foundations of society, unless a person tells in unambiguous terms what he means by it, as a mere bugbear to frighten imbeciles with."

"All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for true, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole."

"We are not so absurd as to propose that the teacher should not set forth his own opinions as the true ones and exert his utmost powers to exhibit their truth in the strongest light. To abstain from this would be to nourish the worst intellectual habit of all, that of not finding, and not looking for, certainty in any teacher. But the teacher himself should not be held to any creed; nor should the question be whether his own opinions are the true ones, but whether he is well instructed in those of other people, and, in enforcing his own, states the arguments for all conflicting opinions fairly."

"The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be rooted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle. ¶ The very corner-stone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth: and this without a particle of regard to the results to which the exercise of that power may lead, even though it should conduct the pupil to opinions diametrically opposite to those of his teachers. We say this, not because we think opinions unimportant, but because of the immense importance which we attach to them; for in proportion to the degree of intellectual power and love of truth which we succeed in creating, is the certainty that (whatever may happen in any one particular instance) in the aggregate of instances true opinions will be the result; and intellectual power and practical love of truth are alike impossible where the reasoner is shown his conclusions, and informed beforehand that he is expected to arrive at them."

"Whatever we may think or affect to think of the present age, we cannot get out of it; we must suffer with its sufferings, and enjoy with its enjoyments; we must share in its lot, and, to be either useful or at ease, we must even partake its character."

"The remedies for all our diseases will be discovered long after we are dead; and the world will be made a fit place to live in, after the death of most of those by whose exertions it will have been made so. It is to be hoped that those who live in those days will look back with sympathy to their known and unknown benefactors."

"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 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."

"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.""

"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."

"[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!""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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'."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"The Saint of Rationalism."

"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"."

"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."

"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."

"Ah! I see; the finishing governess!"

"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."

"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."