"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

January 1, 1970