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James Mill As Economist: Theory Dominated by Deductive Metho D School of Management & Languages Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, EH14 4AS Tel: +44(0)131 451 3542 Fax: +44 (0)131 451 3079 Mail: [email protected] Web: www.sml.hw.ac.uk School of Management and Languages James Mill as Economist: Theory Dominated by Deductive Metho d Thomas Torrance Discussion Paper Series in Economics ISSN 1741-8240 DP2004-E06 Aug-05 JAMES MILL AS ECONOMIST: THEORY DOMINATED BY DEDUCTIVE METHOD1 Thomas S Torrance, Economics Department, School of Management and Languages, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS June 2005 Introduction James Mill1 was born on the 6th April 1773 in North Water Bridge, a village on what is now the A94 trunk road and which is situated half way between the Angus town of Brechin to the south and the Kincardine town of Laurencekirk five miles to the north (the Royal Mail treats the latter as the postal town address of the village). North Water Bridge is also approximately six miles northwest of the Angus coastal town of Montrose. His father, also James, though born with the family name of Milne, was a shoemaker and small businessman. Both James senior and his wife Isabel Fenton believed in education as an effective means of self improvement and strongly supported the young James in his early studies, first at the local village school and then at Montrose Academy. In 1790, with the support of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart, who were friends of the Mill family, Mill was encouraged to continue his education at the University of Edinburgh. Sir John was a Baron of the Exchequer in Scotland and owned an estate at the nearby village of Fettercairn, and from this period onwards he saw himself as 1 Early versions of this paper have been presented at the Scottish Economic Society Conference in Perth, March 2005, and at the European Society for the History of Economic Thought Conference, Stirling, June 2005. This completed version will form a chapter in Alistair and Sheila Dow (eds), Scottish Economic Thought, forthcoming. Mill’s sponsor and mentor. And indeed, while a student, Mill lived in the Stuarts’ town house in Edinburgh. Mill spent eight years at the University of Edinburgh. His original career plan was the Church of Scotland ministry. To this end, after taking traditional Arts courses in Greek, Latin and Moral Philosophy (this last subject was studied under Dugald Stewart, 1753-1828, a dominant figure of the Common Sense school of philosophy), Mill devoted himself to studying Divinity from 1794. In 1798 he was formally licensed as a preacher by the then Presbytery of Brechin (today both Brechin and North Water Bridge are within the Kirk’s Presbytery of Angus). Mill’s interest, however, in theology and in the Church of Scotland waned, and in 1802 he decided to break decisively with his past and to leave Scotland. In the company of Sir John Stuart, who was travelling south for a Parliamentary session, Mill departed for London to start a new career as a journalist. Following his departure, Mill was never to set foot in Scotland again. Initially in London he was employed by the Anti-Jacobin Review, and then, a year later, was appointed editor of the Literary Journal. Mill married Harriet Burrow in 1805 and in the following year his first child was born, a son he named John Stuart in honour of his old patron from Scotland. In the year of John Stuart’s birth Mill started a task that was to continue until 1818, namely writing the volumes of his History of British India. On the success of this work he came to be employed in 1819 at India House by the East India Company (which at that time and until its legal dissolution in 1858 governed India under authority of its 2 parliamentary charter) as an examiner of its correspondence and despatches. This well-paid employment, which finally ended Mill’s earlier financial worries, continued until the year of his death in 1836. In 1808 Mill’s friendships began with the utilitarian philosopher and legal reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and the stockbroker economist David Ricardo (1772- 1823), and both associations, in their different ways, profoundly shaped Mill’s intellectual development. His friendship with Bentham was particularly influential, and Mill even moved his residence in London in order to be situated closer to him. Largely owing to his contact with Bentham, Mill came to abandon the ‘Scottish’ ethical intuitionism of Dugald Stewart and his school, and to embrace wholeheartedly the ‘English’ utilitarian outlook, which rooted ethics in the teleological ‘greatest happiness principle’. The close personal friendship with Bentham led Mill to join with him in public criticism of traditional legal conventions in the name of social improvement. Mill’s many contributions in the 1810s on social and legal issues to the Edinburgh Review and to the reformist political magazine the Philanthropist are testimony to his growing political radicalism. Mill’s friendship with David Ricardo was largely responsible for the growth of his interest in political economy as a distinct ‘science’. Mill gave encouragement to Ricardo to publish a compilation and expansion of his many previous economic writings, which duly appeared as his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817. In return Mill was urged by Ricardo to publish his own views on political economy. Mill’s work originated as notes used to instruct his son John Stuart in the subject, but emerged as a published book in 1821 under the title Elements of Political 3 Economy2. We shall examine in greater detail two of the important topics of this book later on in this chapter. Between 1816 and 1823 Mill wrote a total of ten articles for the Supplement to the 5th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. These articles embraced various topics in the fields of government, jurisprudence and education, the most influential being the one on Government of 1820. These articles were separately reprinted in 1828 and, in light of the reliance by them on utilitarianism as the underlying philosophical basis of analysis, were applauded as essential reading by political and philosophical radicals well into the middle of the century. And largely on account of these articles, Mill in his later life came to be publicly perceived as the best known expounder and disciple of the Benthamite ‘religion’. It should be noted, however, that, taking a longer view, the best known statement of this outlook is held not to be anything written by James Mill, but by his eldest son John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). J.S. Mill’s essay ‘Utilitarianism’ of 1863 is today held to be the prime exposition of this type of moral philosophy, and indeed it must be one of the most intensively-studied and enduring philosophical works of all time. From 1820 onwards until the year of his death, Mill, in the pages of the Westminster Review and other mediums such as the issued public statements of the Political Economy Club which he co-founded in 1823, devoted himself more or less continuously to social reform, including reform in the area of education (in which he considered himself an expert, having been involved in the home-education of all his nine children, most notably that of John Stuart). The climax to the reformists’ efforts occurred in June 1832 with the passing into law of the great Reform Act. With its 4 abolition of the ‘rotten boroughs’ and extension of the franchise, the Act started a democratic constitutional process that made it eventually possible for serious consideration of the utilitarian agenda to become practical politics. Mill’s interests also extended to psychology and the nature of the human mind, and his mature views in this area are represented by his book, Analysis of the Human Mind, published in 1829. A chief thesis here is that there are ‘no innate principles in the mind’ (Locke 1690: 67ff), to use the phrase of John Locke (1632-1704), not even of an organisational or conceptualising kind: all knowledge comes from what is empirically experienced. From this starting point, Mill established his views on education and his recommendations for educational reform. It’s interesting to note that Locke’s ‘empirical’ theory of knowledge, to which Mill adhered in the years after his youth, differed greatly from the ‘intuitionist’ claims of the Common Sense (i.e. common judgement) school of philosophy which Mill had encountered while an undergraduate at Edinburgh University. In contrast, this school, founded by the Church of Scotland minister and philosopher, Thomas Reid (1710- 1792), argued that ‘all knowledge, and all science, must be built upon principles that are self-evident’ and that ‘the same degree of understanding which makes a man capable of acting with common prudence in the conduct of life, makes him capable of discovering what is true and what is false in matters that are self-evident, and which he distinctly apprehends’ (Reid 1795: 559). James Mill died at his London home on the 23rd June 1836. As one of the figures whose thought was responsible for shaping the pattern of British social culture in the 5 later part of the nineteenth century, albeit in many ways indirectly via the philosophical and political writings of his much better know eldest son, his influence stretched beyond the grave. Mill’s Deductivist Methodology As we have already observed, in 1821 with the encouragement of David Ricardo, Mill published his Elements of Political Economy, a closely-argued work of admirably modest length at just over 300 pages. The second edition, which appeared in 1823, and the third of 1826 only contain minor alterations, most of which are merely verbal.
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