JAMES AND JOHN STUART MILL

JAMES AND JOHN STUART MILL

Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century

Bruce Mazlish

Routledge Taylor & Francis Croup LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 1988 by Transaction Publishers

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Library of Congress Catalog Number 88-4801

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Mazlish, Bruce, 1923- James and John Stuart Mill: father and son in the nineteenth century.

Reprint. Originally published: New York: Basic Books, 1975. Includes bibliographies and index. 1. Mill, John Stuart, 1806-1873. 2. Mill, James, 1773-1836. 3. PhUosophers- England-Biography. I. Tide. B1606.M39 1988 192 [B] 88-4801 ISBN 0-88738-727-6

ISBN 13: 978-0-88738-727-2 (pbk) T O M Y PARENTS

AND

MY CHILDREN

“[T]he women, of all I have known, who possessed the highest measure of what are considered feminine qualities, have combined with them more of the highest masculine qualities than I have ever seen in any but one or two men, & those one or two men were also in many respects almost women. I suspect it is the second- rate people of the two sexes that are unlike—the first-rate are alike in both—except —no, I do not think I can except anything—but then, in this respect, my position has been and is, what you say every human being’s is in many respects ‘a peculiar one.’ ” J. S. Mill to Thomas Carlyle, 5 October 1833

“It would be a mistake to suppose that a science consists entirely of strictly proved theses, and it would be unjust to require this. Only a disposition with a passion for authority will raise such a demand, someone with a craving to replace his religious catechism by another, though it is a scientific one. Science has only a few apo- deictic propositions in its catechism: the rest are assertions promoted by it to some particular degree of probability. It is actually a sign of a scientific mode of thought to find satisfaction in these approximations to certainty and to be able to pursue constructive work further in spite of the absence of final confirmation.” Sigmund Freud, Third Lecture, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS x i

INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION XÜ i

IL LUSTRATIONS FOLLOWING I 52

I FATHER AND SON

1 Introduction 3 2 Fathers and Sons: The Nineteenth Century and the Oedipus Complex 15

II JAMES MILL

3 The Person 47 4 Government and Leadership 77 5 The Economic World 97 6 India and Colonial Attitudes 116

III JOHN STUART MILL

1 The Family 149 8 Childhood 166 Co ntents

9 Adolescence 176 10 The “Mental Crisis” 2°5 11 Intellectual Development 23r 12 Harriet: Love Unto Death 280 13 Sex and Sensibility 328 14 Economics 35 1 15 On Government 377 16 Social Science 403 17 Conclusion: The Mills in History 428

NOTES 435 PERMISSIONS 465 PICTURE CREDITS 467 NAM E INDEX 469 SUBJECT INDEX 477

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I L IK E T O T H IN K that with this book I have made a contribution to psychohistory, a new field where history and psychology meet. I have tried to broaden its concerns and means of approach, to re-examine some classical psychoanalytic concepts per se, and to revitalize the figures of James and John Stuart Mill, breathing fresh life especially into the latter and his works. Whatever the actual success of this effort, it has rested on the assistance of innumerable persons and institutions, and I would like to make here a general acknowledgment of my thanks and appreciation. The initial research work, done mainly in Great Britain in 1967- 1968, was made possible by a faculty fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. A year as a Visiting Member at the Institute for Ad­ vanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (1972-1973) then gave me the essential time and setting for the actual writing of this book. I am deeply grateful to Carl Kaysen, Director, and to Clifford Geertz, head of the Social Science Program, not only for their invitation to me but for pro­ viding an ideal combination of catered isolation and intellectual stimula­ tion. Part of my support at the Institute was provided by the National Science Foundation under Grant GS-31730X1, and I would like grate­ fully to acknowledge it. Anna Marie Holt, who headed the secretarial staff of the Social Science Program, was somehow always able to produce chapters or assistance when neeeded, and I tend her and her staff my admiration. The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute was kind enough to invite me to deliver a version of what is now Chapter 2 of this book at one of its scientific meetings, and I gained a good deal from that ses- xi Acknowledgments

sion, especially from the commentaries of Professors Abraham Zaleznik and John Demos. To my friend, Abe Zaleznik, I owe additional debts with which he will be familiar. T o my colleagues at the Group for Ap­ plied Psychoanalysis (Boston) I also extend thanks for their general in­ spiration and criticisms. Others who have helped by readings, specific suggestions, or assis­ tance are Professors J. H. Burns, Joseph Frank, Albert Hirschman, Norman Holland, Dr. O. Mannoni, Arnaldo Momigliano, Robert C. Tucker, Fred Weinstein, Perez Zagorin, and, of course, my wife Anne. In my efforts to make some of the translations from the French correct and literate I have called upon Professors Richard M. Douglas and George Kelly. Professors Michael Laine, and John Robson have kindly re­ sponded to factual inquiries, but, more than that, everyone working on Mill is indebted to Professors Priestley and Robson for their magnifi­ cent editing of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Unfortunately, much of my writing was done before key volumes were published and my references, therefore, are often to earlier editions or to the original collections in the British Museum and the London School of Economics. M y publisher, Basic Books, Inc., has been a source of great support throughout. I should like to express my appreciation to Erwin Glikes, President, and Julie DeWitt, Project Editor. As for Martin Kessler, Vice President and Editorial Director, and my personal editorial mentor, he has once again put me under obligation to him by his patient assistance and wise counseling.

xii Introduction to the Transaction Edition

The reissue of James and John Stuart Mill is a kind of rebirth, which offers me a splendid opportunity to reread and to review my book, now that more than a decade has passed by. It is an occasion for reflections and perhaps even reorientations. The immediate temptation is great, of course, to set the record straight and to reply to one’s misguided critics. In spite of Benjamin Franklin’s advice always to give way to temptations, this is one to be resisted. Instead, I shall recall fondly the favorable reviews, and, if I may be forgiven a flowery, un-Mill-like, phrase, consign to the depths of Lethe all the benighted reviewers. What I should like to do in this regard, however, is to indulge in a kind of fanciful imitation of Marx and Engels, who wrote reviews (and quite good, objectives ones) of Capital , which they felt had been unduly overlooked. In their case, they hid their authorship of the reviews; in mine, I confess it, as I suggest the ways in which I would have liked, and obviously would like now, this book to be regarded. There are two other tasks I want to undertake in this new introduction. The first is to say something more about psychohistory and what has happened to it in the course of the last decade or so, as well as where my own thoughts on the discipline now stand. The second is to reflect further on some of Mill’s intellectual concerns, and especially on liberalism, a subject that occupied so central a place in his speculations and whose parlous conditions is so important to our own time. 1

In suggesting that I would write a review of my own book, I was not entirely serious. What I would like to do, however, is to highlight some features of the book of which sight might be lost. The fact is that my attention to the Mills was not only for their own sake, interesting and important as their story is, but also in the service of several larger themes. Yet to be faithful to the materials of my case study meant an immersion in the materials of Mill scholarship that, as I now realize, could cause the themes that interested me to be largely overlooked. Here I wish to rectify that possible holding of the telescope by the wrong end.

xiii Transaction Int roduction

One of my intentions, clearly, was to contribute to, or, in fact, to start, a debate on the problems of integrating psychology with intellectual history. This was, after all, the problem which led me to the book. What I quickly discovered is that Mill scholars generally don’t know, or if they claim to know, don’t sympathize with, psychoanalysis. And few psychoanalysts, if any, would claim to be Mill scholars. Thus, the problem of judging the work fairly and acutely posed a difficult task of informed criticism.i Put simply, my largest intention was to reach a clearer and greater understanding of the nature and meaning of the social sciences. It was Nietzsche who said that "Philosophy is the confession of the philosopher." I would add to this that "Social science is also the confession of the social scientist" - and it is worth noting how many sociologists, such as Tönnies, Simmel, and Durkheim, started out as philosophers. Many students of social science, especially after Karl Mannheim’s work on the sociology of knowledge, are keenly aware of the way political, social, economic, and other values or interests shape our conception of social science. Alvin Gouldner, for example, has been especially vocal about the problems in sociology in hisThe Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1970). What they seem to ignore is the role of personality, as if somehow or other that was too personal, too subjective, to be allowed entrance into the attempt at social science. It is after all a person, an individual, who shapes social science. Such a person, while shaped by the existing social structure, culture, and especially intellectual heritage of the times, is also defined by family, education, and personal experiences, as these combine with genetic endowment. It is this rich mixture, this full-bodied as well as full-minded, person who thinks, and feels, about social science. He or she brings values, as well as ways of judging and interpreting, that are personal as well as cultural or cognitive to the enterprise. If this be conceded, then the study of this dimension of social science itself becomes a part of the effort at social science (which, to repeat, is of course only one of many dimensions worth studying). It is the endeavor to make that clear, and then to indicate how one might go about such a study, that stands at the heart of this book, as I originally conceived it. It is not by accident that the penultimate chapter in the book is on John Stuart Mill’s attempt at a social science; there I tried to show how the whole story of his life enters into his work, and contributes to its "failure" in his own eyes. Thus, I have sought to work at the same task in which he was engaged, standing, however, on the shoulders of his self-acknowledged misconceived and tentative effort in order to gain from his experiences a clearer view of how to move forward. John Stuart Mill’s case is especially interesting because he was, so to speak, the representative man of the period at the moment when the specialized social sciences stood on the edge of emergence from general philosophy. Mill never made it to the other side, though he had the stepping stone of economics to help (or hinder?) him. He was the last great "Renaissance" man; for Max Weber a

xiv Transaction Introduction few generations later, such a man in the age of developed, specialized capitalism had become a "dilettante,” a mere "literati." Mill was a man of enormous ambivalence and inconsistency, thus mirroring the hesitations of his time as it stood between two worlds 2 My study of John Stuart Mill, therefore, was intended not only as a study of one person wrestling with the ambiguities of himself, but as a study of an ambivalent social scientist attempting to make sense of his world. Part of the problem was that Mill was a moral reformer as much as, or even more than, he was a social scientist. Thus, in one way he was more aware of his values than the average social scientist (and certainly economist) today. And the fact that he was a Utilitarian moral reformer, struggling mightily and personally as I have tried to show, with his inherited intellectual tradition, meant that he carried with him the baggage ofits claim to be a science: or at least to offer scientific treatments of legislation, economics, and psychology. At the heart of my book is the theme of the nature and meaning of the social sciences and the particular importance of understanding the role of personality therein, as exemplified in the Mills, father and son. I think that this theme was overladen with too many particulars. In this new introduction, then, I have a chance to peel away some of the covering layers.3 Anot her major theme is more clearly stated in the book. It is the theme of generations and their importance. John Stuart Mill himself linked his belief in progress with the change of generations. He thought of such change as occurring in intervals of one generation (see p. 420). One might quarrel with such precision; his insight, however, was correct. Generational change allows for both intellectual and social inheritance and for changes in that inheritance. It takes its place in importance along side of economic as well as technological and scientific change. What I tried to do in my book was to build on James Stuart Mill’s insight on generations. I sought to add flesh and substance to his comment, and to show, in his own case, the lived experience behind the general statement. I tried to add a psychological dimension to the intellectual, and to speculate on how Mill’s experience might or might not be typical for his generation. I asked for others to make similar case studies, and thus to allow for comparisons. I confess to disappointment: neither discussion about generational change, in the terms I have suggested, nor comparable case studies has been forthcoming. Intimately connected to the theme of generational change is the father-son theme. It forms the subtitle of my book. Here at least, I thought, reviewers would deal with the substance of my more-than-Mill theme. After all, I tried to specify my claim about generational change by tying it to actual fathers and sons, and, going even further, to the idea or theory of the Oedipus complex. Again, with few exceptions, to quote David Hume about the initial reception of his Treatise on Human Nature, the theme fell still-born from the press. Historians were mute about generational change, and psychoanalysts no less so about my exhortation to re­ examine the oedipal conflict in an historical context. "Fathers and Sons: The Nineteenth Century and the Oedipus Complex," Chapter II, was repr ted in The

xv Transaction Introdu ction

Columbia Forum (as "The Changing Face of Oedipus: Fathers and Sons in Modem Times," IV, no. 1, (Winter 1975), and I received all sorts of nice letters and personal comments about it; but again no public confrontation in print. The only real follow-up on the subject itself was Harold Isaac’s article in the magazine, Dae dal us.* For me, the themes of social science, generations, and the Oedipus complex are all tied together. Perhaps the soup was, to use a phrase of Clifford Geertz, too "thick," in the sense not of description but of conceptualization. To add to the problem, I mixed in other themes. Without going into as much detail as with those already mentioned, I would like to note a few additional ones. There is the theme of the psychology and rights of women with the interest this might have for women’s studies. There is the theme of modernization and economic development, strong in both practice and theory in James Mill and then carried on, conceptually, in his son’s Principles of Political Economy and other writings; here the link to those interested in development theory is clear. Lastly, there is the theme of the coherence of character and creed. James Mill, especially, is the prototype of the Utilitarian character, almost to the point of caricature: self-made, manly, independent, rationally controlled (especially in the areas of sex and work), not giving way to feelings of any kind (especially of love) and so on. John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism was a somewhat different creed. He had been created by his father and wrestled all his life to form himself; he was proud of his feminine qualities; he was prepared to be dependent on others, such as Harriet Taylor, while asserting his intellectual independence; and he was desirous of fusing feelings and rationality in the service of humanity. The question that arose in my mind was in regard to the relation of ideology and character. We know that masses of people can share a belief system without having homogeneous personalities.5 Yet this study of the Mills suggests the coherence of character, when studied in the fine grain of one case, with creed. How do we reconcile the macroscopic and the microscopic in this area? Is it that the creation of a creed must necessarily proceed from a character that is in special alignment with it? That once a creed exists, however, different individuals project different meanings upon it, as with a Rorschach Test? Alas, here, too, my hope to stimulate dialogue on this issue found no response. The reissue of this book gives me a second chance. Now that I have more clearly signposted some of the themes that I thought important in the case of the Mills, and which transcend them, perhaps readers can travel along these roads with a better idea of ultimate destinations.

2

As psychohistory, narrowly conceived, my book certainly got attention. One reviewer was kind enough to call it "a remarkable book,” and another described it as "the best psychohistory this side of Erikson.” Some other reviewers,

xvi Transaction Introduction however, condemned the whole attempt, root and branch, and decried the desecration supposedly involved in approaching a figure in this way: said one, "How dare Mazlish speculate on the great man possibly masturbating as a child?" By now, psychohistory has achieved an uneasy acceptance in many circles. The battle seems largely over. I am not sure, however, that the peace treaty may not have lost what was gained in battle, a real sense of what psychohistory is about (something more than spicy biographical details), as well as the problems that remain. I would like to review a few of the important issues involved. I should like to do so via two methods, the first autobiographical, the second philosophical. The first is somewhat self-indulgent, but (inspired by John Stuart Mill and persuaded that an account of why one entered a field may shed light on its raison d’etre, as well as be a contribution to the history of the field itself) I shall allow myself to reminisce. My own professional training was in modem European history, majoring in intellectual and minoring in medieval history. My initial teaching involved the usual commitment to surveys of Western Civilization, but gradually I came to teach courses in the Great Books and in intellectual history.My first book was solidly in the latter area: The Western Intellectual Tradition: from Leonardo to Hegel (1960; in collaboration with Jacob Bronowski, and still available). There was not a breath of "psycho" anything in that book, but much on the two cultures, i.e., the attempt to integrate technology and science with intellectual concerns. By my next book,The Riddle of History: The Great Speculators from Vico to Freud (1966), I had focussed more sharply on the philosophy of history, including a concern with the nature of history and the social sciences. My concern with historical methodology and the philosophy of the social sciences was further expanded by a decade-long involvement as associate editor of the journal, History and Theory. This involvement led me in what might have seemed an odd direction, but was, in fact, on the immediate path I was pursuing: it led to the gathering and overseeing of a group of scholars who worked on a project whose outcome wasThe Railroad and the Space Program: An Exploration in Historical Analogy (1966), to which I contributed a long introduction. The subtitle is the hint that I was still pursuing the subject of historical methodology. Where, then, does psychohistory enter? One of the cardinal tenets of psychoanalysis is that much that we do is overdetermined, i.e., motivated from numerous, reinforcing sources. 1958 was a seminal date. In that year, William Langer gave his Presidential Address to the American Historical Society, "The Next Assignment", and Erik Erikson, the analyst, published his book, Young Man Luther. Both played a strong, though delayed, role in leading me to psychohistory. Langer was an historian’s historian. He was a diplomatic historian, whose long volumes on specialized subjects (the Congress of Berlin, etc.) testified to hours and hours in the archives, and to the possession of the tenacity so valuable to the patient toiling of the historian over the dry leaves of the past. Eventually his expertise helped lead him to be chosen as head of Research and Analysis during

XVII Transaction Introduction

WWII in the OSS. Now, suddenly, he announced that if he were a young historian starting over, he would work at the frontiers where psychology and history meet. I was at that 1958 meeting and can attest that many eminent scholars went out muttering that "old Bill Langer has gone off his rocker.” (No one knew, incidentally, that his brother was the eminent psychoanalyst, Walter Langer, who, recruited to the OSS, headed the team that did the classic study of Hitler, later published as The Mind of Adolf Hitler [New York: Basic Books, 1972]). When I innocently asked "why?" - I was answered by a sarcastic, "If it’s viable, name the books that carry out this 'assignment'." I had to confess I knew of none. On my return to Cambridge and my home university, M.I.T., I plunged into the library in my off moments to explore the literature, out of curiosity. I must confess that, though Erikson had been a visiting lecturer at M.I.T. a year or so earlier, and my colleague Lucien Pye had mentioned his name to me, I had had little more interest than to drop in once and to think no more of it. Now I read Erikson’s Young Man Luther with great excitement, as well as discovering other less path-breaking articles and books by psychoanalysts and a few historians. Erikson’s impact on me, and the Held, was immense because he not only developed psychoanalysis itself further in the direction of ego psychology, making it more useful therefore for ordinary historians (while we might not be able to secure material on a subject at age four, we could have better luck with the identity crisis later on), but he also immersed himself in the historical data and then personally integrated the two parts in his own composition. When he cordially invited me a few times to sit in on his graduate seminar, which he was giving at Harvard - "I’m not sure of my student’s history," he said in his characteristically diffident way, "and need some help" - I became exposed to his extraordinary clinical sense, which allowed him unerringly to point a student in the right direction. This was the context in which an "accident” occurred (as is well known, psychoanalysis is dubious about accidents). A book representative, for they still flourished in those days, came by my office and asked what I was doing. I mentioned the work in philosophy of history, but explained that the projected book was already under contract Then I said I was indulging my curiosity about the "next assignment" His eyes lit up. "Write a book for us about it" he said. I patiently explained that I didn’t know much about the subject, that no one would read it if I did write it that no courses existed for text use, etc. Pushing all my objections aside, he persuaded me to do an anthology, which would show the state of the art You could help create the field, he said confidently. My agreement was predicated on the fact that half the anthology, as I insisted, would be on the philosophy of history - at least here I knew something, for, after all, I was writing about Freud as the last of the great speculative philosophers of history in myRiddle of History-while the other half would be on the actual application of psychoanalysis to historical materials.

XVlll Transaction Introduction

With the publication of that book, Psychoanalysis and History, in 1963 [revised edition, 1971], at one bound I became a pioneer in the new field. (I have left out in my account of overdetermination my own therapeutic analysis, started around 1958, undertaken in order to learn why I had come to a divorce.) Pioneers have to keep ahead of the wagons in back of them. The next year, 1964-65,1 began to give a course in "History and Psychoanalysis," to my knowledge the first by an historian (Erikson was a lay analyst) in an American university (and thus probably the world), a seminar which I still offer. At about that same time, I joined with Joseph Michaels (a President of the American Psychiatric Society), and my colleague in English literature, Norman Holland, in setting up the Group for Applied Psychoanalysis (GAP), whose monthly meetings brought together analysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, humanists, and social scientists to discuss a work in progress. The Cambridge-Boston GAP was the first of its kind, soon however to be followed by others scattered around the country. When the American Academy of Arts and Sciences funded a small research project to inquire into the possibilities of psychohistory, the Wellfleet project (named after Wellfleet, Cape Cod, where we met during each of three consecutive summers for one week), starting in 1966,1 was the historian among the founding members, who included, besides Erikson (primus inter pares), the two psychiatrists, Robert Lifton and Frederick Wyatt, and Philip Rieff, the sociologist. Here I pursued my learning of the trade and its principles. The account above, hopefully, may be of service to some future student of historiography, and specifically psychohistory. "But how," the reader may now breathlessly ask, "did you come to the Mill book?" The answer is that I had been teaching Mill "straight" for a number of years in my classes in intellectual history: On Liberty, Autobiography, Utilitarianism. Increasingly, I found myself coming across problems of interpretation that did not seem to yield to the usual logical or philosophical analysis. In those same classes, incidentally, I was teaching Freud as a standard figure in intellectual history. At one moment of revelation, obviously prepared by my experiences as described above, while dealing with John Stuart Mill’s account of his formation at the beginning of his Autobiography I noticed that he, the philosopher of the women’s movement, never once mentioned his mother. Further research showed that, in an early draft, he had devoted four or five pages to her, highly critical, and then discarded them. "Why?", I asked. And what did all this signify, if anything, for his views on women? I was off and running. From that moment, I became a real psychohistorian; or, rather, I began to do psychohistory as part of my more overall practice of history and my interest in the question of the social sciences.6 About a decade later, I published this book. Once fully aware of psychohistory, I cannot imagine looking at or listening to texts and arguments in intellectual history without its insights. It would be like going back to mono after hearing mush on stereo.

xix Transaction Introduction

Here in brief, then, is one experiential argument for psychohistory. A more philosophical, and thus public, argument is needed, however, to show why an historian, or anyone, should come to the field. I think that that argument can be made more persuasively today than twenty years ago because of the work that has gone forward under the heading variously of discourse analysis or hermeneutics. In our post-positivist epoch, it has been becoming clear»* and clearer that classical social science labors under severe limitations. It has bath water but no baby, so to speak, i.e., it has thrown out the active, creative human being. Marx certainly saw this, in his better moments, as he sought to combine theory and praxis. Max Weber’s Verstehen philosophy is a major step forward, placing intentionality in combination with unintended consequences at the center of the sociologist’s quest. Recent work in discourse analysis both furthers these insights and threatens to overwhelm them. In one breath, it asks us to pay greater attention to the meaning of actors, as expressed in texts (which, as with Foucault, can be institutional arrangements as well as written documents); however, as in Derrida and deconstructionism, any claim to real knowledge as inhering in these texts is poohpoohed. On this latter account, there can be no social science (or even natural science) with any claim to much validity. Hermenuetics, in this context, is not a more sophisticated and correct move to a deeper, more comprehensive science of Man, but simply a reducto ad absurdum. This is hardly the place for an extended discussion of discourse analysis. I will simply take the position that it asks us, rightly, to look more closely at texts, both fictional and non-fictional, in order to better determine their author’s true meanings - all this in the service of seeking to get closer to "reality" (and here I distance myself vigorously from deconstructionism). In its request, in my view, it is simply extending the methods and means of literary criticism, and especially new criticism. Psychoanalysis is merely, in this context, another form of discourse analysis, with the difference that it claims to bring a kind of psychological science, i.e., a systematic set of theories and evidences, to its task. In hi s Idea of History, R. G. Collingwood spoke of how the historian "puts his authorities in the witness box."7 Psychohistory, of course, "puts them on the couch." It does so because it believes thatintentions have an unconscious as well as conscious basis. Would anyone seriously deny this? If not, then how can one continue to ignore the possibilities of psychohistory? The zeal, sometimes unbecoming, of the psychohistorian is rooted in his belief - or at least it is for me - that thepsychoanalytic adds to the cognitive understanding. Psychohistory does something more. If actions are taken partly or largely out of unconscious motives and intentions, it is extremely difficult to determine responsibility and, even more important, to encourage truly responsible actions. At a time when fateful decisions are being taken which affect the whole human species, such as those concerning arms control and nuclear weapons, there is a sense of urgency in trying to make the unconscious, conscious. At a time when we

xx Transaction Introduction need the best as well as most human social science that we can get, psychohistory, as I have tried to argue earlier, may be able to make a most important contribution. I shall try to clarify what I mean here. In an article, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility," Thomas L. Haskell makes a subtle and difficult argument to the effect that humanitarian sensibility depends, in part, on the development of both a feeling of increased links to others and a sense that one has the actual means - techniques, or as Haskell calls them, recipes - with which to help others.8 He sees both these elements emerging in great strength from the capitalist market experience. I find his argument persuasive and can only refer the reader to it here. Let me now try to put it in my terms. In order to deal with humanitarian problems effectively, one must have not only conscience but calculation. By calculation I mean the social sciences, traditionally understood, as they try to link cause and effect and to relate unintended consequences to our cognitive intentions. Burke attacked "sophisists, economists, and calculators,"; the Enlightenment understood better that, with all its narrowness and often aridity, the sciences of Man offered us the possibility of greater insight and control over our destinies. But if calculation helps with unintended consequences, psychoanalysis, or better still, psychohistory, helps with our "unintended intentions." It contributes to the hermeneutic side of the social sciences and is absolutely vital to that effort.? If there is any validity to what I have been saying, then one can turn back to psychohistory itself, and look at its actual workings more closely. For example, I deliberately tried to test the applicability of orthodox, classical Freudian theories and concepts in my book on the two Mills. I wished to exhaust the possibilities in one way of proceeding, to see its powers and limitations. I saw the book as merely one stepping stone to the nether shore of psychohistory. In saying that I remained within the orthodox Freudian scheme, I have not been quite accurate. Erikson’s influence, and that of his development of ego psychology, building on the work both of Freud and his daughter Anna Freud as well as others, is plainly visible. I was also becoming increasingly aware of developments in psychoanalytic theory, occurring under the head of "object relations theory," and drawing its ideas from the work of Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and others, Even further removed was the controversial self-psychology, exemplified in the work of Heinz Kohut. As the reader will see (p. 215), I allude in this book to the possible interpretations that might be forthcoming from use of these latter theories. But my intention, heuristic in intent, was mainly to test one set of possibilities, not eclectically to explore others. My intention may have been misguided; but it was certainly conscious. Obviously, if I were to write a second book on the Mills, I would be tempted to do it from a fresh perspective, seeing what the newer theories added or subtracted, and trying to test their usefulness and validity. In such an effort, Kohut’s self-psychology would be a major inspiration. Starting as an orthodox Freudian, Kohut worked his way gradually to an

xxi Transaction Introduction indepen dent, though complementary, position. His emphasis was on the nurturing experiences of the first one or two years, and the mirroring and idealizing transferences that develop at that time. He stressed that at that time a crucial sense of self and of self-esteem developed, or did not (and a comparison with Erikson’s stage of basic trust is in order here), with fateful and continuing results for the future. All of this, and much more, is of great interest to psychoanalysts. Of even greater interest to us is Kohut’s extension of his theories to history. In essays such as "Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage" (1972) and "Creativeness, Charisma, Group Psychology" (1976), he sought to suggest how psychohistory could go beyond individual analysis to groups. His book,Self Psychology and the Humanities, published posthumously in 1985 (which includes the two essays cited) potentially can influence historians as much as Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950), if combined with Kohut’s The Analysis of the Self (1971) and The Restoration of the Self (1977).10 Inasmuch as Kohut puts completely to one side the Oedipus complex, although without rejecting it, his self psychology would have been antithetical in conception to my Mill book as written. In a second Mill book, with the fearful oedipal conflict satisfactorily explored and braved, I would be very tempted to proceed in a Kohutian manner. In fact, I have done with my Mill book. My own interests in psychohistory have moved, as Kohut’s did, toward a greater understanding of groups. However, in contrast to Kohut, I am desirous of using a more extended approach than the clinical psychoanalytical. Again, in a hermeneutic fashion, I have begun to use myths, legends, folk lore, and literary constructions, as well as rituals, monuments, iconography, etc., in an effort to construct a picture of a grouppsyche (specifically, I have been giving a course for the last few years on "The American Psyche," asking in a new fashion the question "What is an American?" and tracing out the consequences for history of an answer). In analyzing what I call a "psychic repository” held by groups, I am wandering on a path that parallels Kohut’s but goes by different twists and turns. 11 What started in the Mill book continues then, but in different modes. Even as I make other forays, often quite removed from explicit psychohistory, the inspirations and aspirations of the Mill book remain with me .12 It would be nice to think that it might serve some of its readers in the same fashion.

3

Between the two Mills, James and John, a revolution in moral sensibilities occurred. Its implications for liberalism, as an ideology, are consequential, and still hold significance for us today. Both character and creed changed, as I have tried to show. James Mill had also held liberal beliefs, but held them on narrow Utilitarian lines, pseudo­ scientific, overly rational, and constrictive as to theory. John Stuart Mill, in seeking to emancipate himself from his father’s "mechanical" making of him, also sought

XXII Transaction Introduction to emancipate liberalism. He envisioned it more as representing an ongoing "organic" process, responsive to emotional as well as rational needs, and aiming at the fullest individual self-development Yet, as I have also tried to show in the book, Mill the son’s "liberalism was really an extension, not a true transcendence" of Mill the father’s Utilitarianism (see pp. 433-434). And in the quiet manner of liberalism, that is as it should be. What basis in social science joined, or separated, the two men? James Mill's social science was Utilitarian, in its Benthamite mode. In political science, it was the science of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. In economics, it was the rational system of David Ricardo, rigidly capitalistic in conception. In all areas, it was rigorously deductive (or at least such was its claim; see the footnotes in Chapters 3 and 4 of the text for references to further discussion). In the case of John Stuart Mill, his social science basis was much less certain. He stood on the edge of the initial development of sociology and anthropology as specialized sciences: his friend Auguste Comte was giving public definition and meaning to the concept of "sociology," using the word in the forty- seventh lecture of his Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830-1842). In economics, this second Mill was even ready to consider the claims of socialism. And, in the end, he hoped for a crowning science of ethology, by which he meant not the study of animal behavior but "the theory of the influence of various external circumstances, whether individual or social, on the formation of moral and intellectual character" (See p. 404). Yet, when John Stuart Mill came to On Liberty , his social science had little overt effect on him, and he spoke with the voice of the moral reform er. 13 As I have tried to show, he also spoke with the impassioned tones of his own life experience, and its aspirations for self-development. One result was that, as Isaiah Berlin has so well argued, Mill’s Liberty is only anegative one, preventing undue interference with the individual, and ignoring positive involvement of the larger state or society. As such, it stands removed from the dialogue begun by sociologists such as Comte, and continued by the classical sociologists, such as Durkheim and Weber, who foliov/ed after him, with their emphasis on community and the bonds that tie humans together.14 To return to John Stuart Mill, however, his liberalism embodied one major change from that of his father’s, and thereby both shaped and reflected the liberalism of his own generation. It assumed that economic development, i.e., prosperity, would lead to greater emotional ties between members of society, i.e., to greater sympathy and altruism. Comtean Humanity was to be served, by both social science and sensibility. As Stefan Collini argues, in an important unpublished paper, the view of nineteenth century liberalism as essentially egoistic and rationalistic must be qualified. The moral thinking of the most prominent Victorian intellectuals was "marked at least as much by a positive concern for the value of altruism and the role of feelings as it was by any commitment to the

XXlll Transaction In troduction

premises of self-interest and rational calculation.” ^ John Stuart Mill, of course, was central to this attempted synthesis. By discovering in himself feelings, the stuff, along with thought, of psychohistory, Mill could find place for them in his version of Utilitarianism. This marked a major separation from his father and his father’s past. Thus, my study of the Mills was also a study of two stages in the development of liberalism. What about a third stage, liberalism in the future? I want to look briefly at the vicissitudes of liberalism in this regard, starting during John Stuart Mill’s time and continuing to ours. There were two problems with the new stress mi feeling. The first was that the demands of altruism could and did become oppressive for many Victorians. Duty, in fact, began to overwhelm love. The thought that one might possess selfish motives drove many to despair and melancholy.16 The price of altruistic progress could become too heavy. When added to repression in the area of sex, we have the makings of the famous Victorian ethos. Victims of it became fit subjects to enter the consulting chambers of a Viennese doctor, Sigmund Freud. But even before Freud, a German philosopher had pointed out the other danger to liberalism from re-awakened feelings. The discovery of Nietzschean instinctual desires was deeply disturbing to the belief in reasoned feelings underpinning the liberal ideology. It was not that middle-class elite thinkers had not previously been aware of the irrationality and primitive urges of the masses. But, like both Mills, they thought the lower classes could be uplifted and guided to reason, once emancipated from tyrannical authority. Now, that faith was shaken. Worse, as first Nietszche and then Freud pointed out, reason was not even the master in one’s own, middle-class, house. In our time, we have seen how liberty has become confused with liberation, Mill’s On Liberty replaced with Marcuse’s On Liberation. Even in Mill’s cherished women’s movement, one part of women’s liberation, with its frequently inchoate longings and group spirit, has threatened to replace what Mill would have regarded as proper liberty. Where altruism once prevailed, with all its problems, now narcissism, with all its indulgences, pretends to become the public philosophy. Liberalism seems lost today, groping for some solid footing either in a social science that can offer even a tentative certainty in the face of post-positivistic discourse analysis, or a reformer’s faith in the moral educability of Man, now seen as a more instinctual rather than rational creature. No solutions can be forthcoming to these dilemmas of liberal belief until all parts of the problem are addressed: the nature of humans, the nature of the social sciences, and the morality involved in social existence. James Mill, in his restricted and dogmatic way, and John Stuart Mill, in his more ecumenical and ambiguous way, tried to cope with the elements of the problem. Psychohistory, as I have tried to suggest, points to some of the crucial, even if debatable, answers, and is an essential part of the effort at social science. In

xxiv Transaction Introduction

saying this, of course, I am also saying that the answers will not be "positive science," most strictly understood, but tentative, uncertain, human responses. In regard to all of these matters, the two Mills, struggling together and with one another in their time, have much to tell our present time.

Notes

1. An exception to this statement is Richard W. Noland, "Psychohistory, Theory and Practice," The Massachusetts Review XVHI, no. 2: 295-322, who, in his long and thoughtful article, did indeed understand what I was trying to do in regard to psychohistory. I thank him for his careful and informed reading. 2. Some scholars, such as John Robson, editor of The Collected Works o f John Stuart Mill as well as of The Mill News Letter, are very uncomfortable with such a description of Mill. Dennis A. Rohatyn, for example, defending two books dealing with Mill from Mr. Robson’s ire, noted Mr. Robson’s intolerance for the accusation of inconsistency flung at Mill, argued that his "indignation is uncalled for," and concluded, "There is room for other trends than the ones advocated by Mr. Robson. There had better be, if scholarship is to avoid plunging itself in aridity, with Mill the unfortunate victim." ("On Behalf of Ebel and Berlin," The Mill News Letter V, no. 1, (Fall 1969): 6-9.) (To Mr. Robson’s credit, however, it should be noted that he did publish Rohatyn's comment in the News Letter, a nice Mill-like gesture.) 3 . Cf. Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation o f Max Weber (New Brunswick, N J.: Transaction, 1985 [orig. 1970]). Mitzman has written one of the few other works that tries to integrate psychology and intellectual history and to do so with an eye on the themes of social science and of generations. See further my review-essay in History and Theory, X, no. 1, (1971): 90- 107. 4. Harold R. Isaacs, "Bringing Up the Father?" Daedalus (Fall 1978). This is an important and original article. (Although my friend and then colleague Harold Isaacs seems inexplicably to have suffered amnesia about our conversations, in which, before he wrote his article, we discussed my thoughts on the subject, on the basis of a copy of my chapter, thus any effort at a cumulative handling of the topic was foregone). 5. See, for example, the discussion in Fred Weinstein and Gerald M. Platt, Psychoanalytic Sociology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 6. I should add that much of my subsequent work in this area was also in what is called "personality and politics" or leadership studies. In 1966, the year before I went to England to finish my archival studies in the Mill materials, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences had invited me to a conference on "Philosophers and Kings" (published as an issue of Daedalus [Summer 1968]). The conference was mainly devoted to psychohistorical studies of political leaders, though one or two of the papers were on intellectual leaders; and I was asked to give a paper on James Mill as both a political and intellectual leader. While in England, the Presidential campaign of 1968 had started; and my English and Continental friends were asking, 'What are Nixon and Humphrey like? After all, their finger will be on the button; they are more important to us than our own prime ministers." Under the influence of the Academy conference, I took an interest in the matter. The immediate result, a divertissment from my epical Mill work, was a short book, In Search o f Nixon. Published as it was in 1972, it "found him" before Watergate. His subsequent confession in public seemed to many to make me a prophet, and the book achieved a certain amount of notoriety. It had been written solely from the available documentation; to explore the methodology of such work I proceeded to add the use of interview

XXV Transaction Introd uction

techniques in writing another book in this genre, Kissinger: The European Mind in American Politics (1976). (Incidentally, Kissinger, though he had not actually attended the Academy conference, did contribute an article on Bismarck to the issue of "Philosophers and Kings." It is an excellent psychological study.) These political books of mine can be considered as further explorations in social science inasmuch as leadership studies form a part of such effort 7. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: 1946), 237. 8. Thomas L. Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of Sensibility," The American Historical Review, in two parts, 90, nos. 2 and 3 (April and June 1985). 9. I have tried to explore this matter further in my book,The Meaning of Karl Marx (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984 [paperback ed., 1987]). Especially in the chapter, "The Importance of Being Karl Marx," I have tried to inquire into the question of whether personality intrudes more into social science and philosophy than into either natural science or the arts, and why this might be so. 10. The original title of Self Psychology and the Humanities was to be something like History and the Self which would have been more likely to realize its true intent and to attract the attention of historians and other social scientists. Unfortunately, the title was changed at the last moment 11. My article, "Leader and Led, Individual and Group," The Psychohistory Review (Spring 1981), explores the methodological underpinnings of my idea of the "psychic repository" and thus the basis of "The American Psyche." 12. For example, my most recent ms., The Unchaining of Modern Man: Self, Society, and the Cash Nexus (forthcoming), concerns the omnipresent sense of breakdown in connections experienced by Western Man at the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions. In what is basically a form of intellectual history, but again aimed at an understanding of the nature of social science, I am trying to see how the original literary lamentation over this putative breakdown came to serve as a prime foundation for the development of sociology. Eschewing any explicit psychohistorical approach, the work assumes its insights. The proposed book, of course, also bears in it the inspiration of John Stuart Mill's concern with connections, generational or involving other social groups, and their possible fraying or breakdown. 13 . Gertrude Himmelfarb would have it that John Stuart Mill did not even speak with his own voice, but that of Harriet Taylor. See her "The Other John Stuart Mill," inVictorian Minds, N. Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968, 113-154, and On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case o f John Stuart Mill (N.Y.: Seeker and Warberg, 1974). Alan Ryan, in The American Historical Review LXXXI (1976): 139, described her view of Mill as "wrong-headed and mean-spirited"; and I see no reason to controvert his judgment Keith Thomas puts the matter in milder terms: "For the abiding impression left on the reader by her essays (apart from admiration for their wit and literary skill [a judgment in which I share]) is that of the rigidity of her own moral and political values." (The New York Review of Books XXXIV, no. 9 (May 28,1987): 28.) A poorer fit between writer, Himmelfarb - otherwise a gifted historian - and subject - the tolerant, flexible, liberal-minded John Stuart Mill - is hard to imagine. 14 . See again footnote 12. While John Stuart Mill was concerned with breakdown of connections, he was not particularly interested in the positive construction of community, to bind people together. 15. Stefan Collini, "’Enduring Motives to Noble Action': Altruism and Feeling in Victorian Liberalism." Paper prepared for a meeting of the Boston Conference on Social and Political Thought held at Harvard University on 14th May 1987: 4. 16. See further my article on the economist W. S. Jevons' travails in this regard: "Jevons' Science and his 'Second Nature,"’ The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (April 1986).

XXVI FATHER AND SON

1

Intr oduction

Book and Boy

“I W AS BORN in London on the 20th of May, 1806,” John Stuart Mill begins his Autobiography, “ and was the eldest son of James Mill, the author of the History of British India.” Most readers, and this in­ cludes most scholars, have not noticed what an extraordinary state­ ment this is. It invokes a new version of an immaculate conception, in which the mother is entirely missing; indeed, John Stuart Mill never mentions her throughout the published version of his work. Instead, we have “book and boy” both produced by James Mill, seemingly acting alone. The rest of the Autobiography appears to bear out this conception. It is as much about James Mill, the father, as it is about the son. Taken together, the relations of the two make up one of the great father and son stories of the nineteenth century. It is in these terms that we shall deal with the case of James and John Stuart Mill; for us, however, the unnamed mother, epitomizing all women of the period, will also figure largely in the matter, haunting us, so to speak, throughout this book. The other extraordinary thing about John Stuart Mill that catches one’s immediate attention is the episode of his mental crisis. A t the age of twenty, a faithful disciple of his father’s belief in strict rationality, John Stuart Mill underwent an experience that saw him teetering on the edge of seeming irrationality. For months, and even years, he hovered on the brink of the darkest despair, sometimes falling victim to his feel­ ings of profound melancholy, and then painfully pulling himself back to healthier emotions. Out of this descent into self-awareness, Mill

3 I / Father and Son emerged with a personal, as well as intellectual, need to reconcile thought and feeling, the “rational” and the seeming “irrational.” In the synthesis that he now painstakingly constructed, he forged a new and much broader definition of liberalism than was envisioned in his father’s con­ stricted Utilitarianism. Thus, his mental crisis, itself related to his deepest feelings about both his father and his mother, resulted in a kind of “new birth,” of John Stuart Mill the person and of liberalism the doctrine.

A Short Story

A P A R T FRO M B E IN G the author of The History of British India, who exactly was James Mill, the father? What sort of son was John Stuart Mill, and what sort of mother did he have? What was the character of the time and society in which they all lived and which shaped their lives and the lives of those around them, and which they in turn shaped? W e shall devote our entire book to answering these and related questions. Here, however, let us start with a brief glimpse, a review and overview of the entire personal story. The external facts are fairly simple. James Mill was born in Scotland in 1773 of humble parentage. Spurred on by his ambitious mother, the bright young boy devoted himself to study. Fortunate enough to attract the patronage of Sir John Stuart and his wife, Mill was sent to the University of Edinburgh to prepare for the ministry. B y 1802, unable to find a parish and disillu­ sioned with a religious career, he “ emigrated” to London. There he quickly obtained a position as editor and writer, married, and began to raise a family. T o secure his position, he started to write a great work, The History of British India, in 1806, the same year as his first-born, John Stuart, arrived on the scene. The writing of the book and the education of the boy— four or five hours each day devoted to this latter enterprise— went on together, at the same time as James Mill slaved over his articles and periodicals in order to earn a necessary living. The education seems an act of unusual parental devotion. Devoted as he was to the education of the boy, James Mill, after a year of marital bliss, began to disparage and scorn his wife, Harriet. This did not prevent him, however, from fathering on her eight more children, in spite of his being perhaps the earliest public advocate of birth control. Meanwhile, James finally finished The History of British India, and on the basis of it secured the post of an examiner at the East India Company, rising to the top in a few years. B y about 1818 he had

4 i / Introduction become a successful and comfortable civil servant, a friend of the rich and mighty. He was also a Utilitarian reformer. Enrolling himself in 1808 as a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, the famous Utilitarian philosopher, James Mill rapidly became a power on his own, writing tracts and books on all aspects of knowledge as well as lending a practical political basis to the doctrine and organizing support for its aims inside and outside of Parliament. A man of forceful character, he played a significant role in British intellectual, political, and economic life, until his death in 183Ó. As a Utilitarian, James Mill made sure that John Stuart Mill’s education conformed to the tenets and aims of that school. Starting with Greek (at age three) and Latin, the child prodigy— for so John Stuart Mill seems to have been— was made to work through arithmetic and much of history and literature by twelve. At that time he was also given a rigorous training by his father in logic and political economy. The boy had no peers or playmates aside from his siblings. All feelings were disparaged, and the sole emphasis was on hard work and cold rationality. A trip to France when he was fourteen seemed a mere hiatus in this education, for on his return John Stuart Mill went, not to Cambridge University as contemplated at one time, but back to his books and the teaching of his siblings. All seemed placid enough; John Stuart Mill accepted his father’s Utilitarian views as his own, and at seventeen dutifully accepted a post next to his father in the East India Company. The only sign of his autonomous growing up was the gath­ ering of a peer group around him that was independent of the father. Then, suddenly, in 1826 at age twenty, John Stuart Mill underwent a severe mental crisis, characterized by profound melancholia and de­ pression. He now felt a loss of faith in his chosen career as a Utilitarian moral reformer, and an awareness of how joyless and devoid of feelings was his own life. Silently he suffered through this “crisis,” finally re­ constituting his balance around 1830, though with constant relapses throughout the rest of his life. Intellectually he then began to explore new avenues of thought, and to make friends with men like Carlyle, of whom his father would disapprove. Outwardly still subservient and devoted to his father, John Stuart Mill had inwardly moved a great distance away, though he never entirely broke the ties that bound him. A t about the same time that he had worked his w ay through his crisis, the young and handsome John Stuart Mill met the beautiful and vivacious Harriet Taylor, and the two fell deeply in love. The only problem was that Harriet Taylor was married and the mother of two

5 I / Father and Son children (with a third to follow almost immediately). What occurred now is an amazing love story. For nineteen years John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor, and her husband lived in a kind of ménage à trois, to the scandal of all their “ Victorian” friends. Yet, if we can trust the evidence, the two lovers never consummated their love sexually. Then, on the death of John Taylor, John Stuart Mill and Harriet were at last free to marry each other, which they did in 1851. A t this point John Stuart Mill broke with his mother and remaining siblings, accusing them in raucous fashion of not accepting his new wife. When Harriet died in 1859, Mill mourned extravagantly, and de­ voted the rest of his life to her memory. In this devotion he was joined by Harriet’s daughter, Helen, who came to live with and take care of her stepfather. John Stuart Mill lived for almost fifteen more years, working at his writings and causes, and even entering Parliament for a few years. When he died in 1873 he left behind a rich legacy of works and a reputation as the foremost liberal thinker of his times. At this point his father’s life and work lay in shadow, obscured by the greater fame of the son. Such, in scandalous brevity, is the bare outline of the story of James and John Stuart Mill. What are we to make of it? W hy do we bother with it? After all, James Mill is a half-forgotten figure, unknown any longer in his native Scotland, and remembered elsewhere only by fusty scholars.1 One could paraphrase a statement about Herbert Spencer, and ask “ Who now reads James. Mill’s History of British India, or his Essay on Government?” True, the son is more important. While one could raise the Spencerian question about John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic or Principles of Political Economy, it would not hold for the classic On Liberty , a staple reading today as it was in 1859, or The Subjection of Women, which, with the advent of Woman’s Liber­ ation, is also rapidly becoming a popular classic. With this said, however, one might still wonder what importance the two men together might have, aside from their works, read or unread. To further whet the reader’s curiosity, let me pose a series of questions: H ow do we explain the fact that James Mill, perhaps the earliest exponent of birth control by artificial means, nevertheless pro­ duced nine children with a woman whom he had ceased to love? What sort of character did this “self-made man” have, and how did it affect the way he treated his family? What kind c f education did he give his first-born son, whom he “ made” as he did his books, and to what effect? What really happened during John Stuart Mill’s mental crisis? How can we explain satisfactorily the fact that the highly restrained and virtuous John Stuart Mill entered into a shocking relationship with a

6 i / Introduction married woman? What actual shape did his intellectual development take, as he broke with his father, and yet remained tied to him? W hy the cankered and unnecessary break with his surviving family after his marriage to Harriet Taylor? And how do we account for his over- extravagant mourning at her death? These are some of the seemingly titillating questions, and there are many more like them.

Fathers and Sons

OUR PRIMARY AIM in dealing with James and John Stuart Mill, however, is not to describe the story alone, dealing with specific bio­ graphical questions as they arise, but to seek to understand its whole meaning and significance in terms of generational relations, specifi­ cally the father-son conflict encased in the concept of the Oedipus complex. W e are starting from the view that man, though an animal with “instincts,” has few that are invariant. The direction and satisfac­ tion of these instincts is extremely plastic, and largely controlled by culture. The cultural cues are something that must be learned by each individual. They are learned through “symbolic” rather than genetic inheritance. Moreover, they change over time. This change is facili­ tated by the fact that, with few exceptions, men are born and then die within less than a century. The new “generation” is less ossified than its parents, and is open to fresh cultural innovations. Thus, genera­ tional change becomes, potentially, a prime mechanism of social change. If men lived forever, they would undoubtedly become quite fixed in their ways. “ Learned behavior” would take on the rigid quality of a “ programmed instinct.” Death of the individual, and new birth, offer the possibility of regeneration. Society, of course, must retain a large degree of constancy in order to remain a “society,” that is, a constella­ tion of relatively permanent relations. Hence, in most cases, genera­ tions greatly resemble one another— that is what the socialization process is about— and cultural change can often be minute. One thinks of so-called “ traditional” or “ primitive” societies. A t critical moments, however, for whatever reasons, the pace of change accelerates dra­ matically. A t this point generational change often becomes the prime vehicle for social change. It is my thesis that in the nineteenth-century Western world (and perhaps elsewhere, too), generational change as the means of social change suddenly became pivotal. Industrial and scientific revolutions, along with political ones, posed a problem of cultural transmission that

7 I / Father and Son was new in its intensity and placed an enormous strain on parent-child relations. In the nineteenth century the most dramatic form this took was in a heightened sense of father-son, i.e., generational, conflict.2 Much attention has been given, and rightly so, to class conflict at this time as a mechanism of social change. I am suggesting that genera­ tional conflict is at least of equal importance. Here, in actual human beings, external experience of the new social and cultural develop­ ments met with internal, psychological experience. The result, a total experience of the person, had enormous social consequences. It is the interplay of the personal and the social, of the individual psychic de­ velopment and the general political and economic evolution—with each “causing” and influencing the other in what I call “corresponding processes”— that makes for the powerful social change that we call history. If this be granted, how can we approach effectively this subject of generational change? One good way, I believe, is to start with detailed case studies, and work out from them. Such a case study is the present one: the father-son relations of James and John Stuart Mill. It has the great advantage of dealing with two famous men, at least in their own time, whose intellectual works are available to us, and about whose lives we have relatively abundant documentary evidence.3 Moreover, one of the participants in the conflict has left us an autobiographical account of his “ mental crisis,” which stands at the heart of his genera­ tion’s experience. As key figures in the political and intellectual changes of their time, both father and son become prototypic protag­ onists in what Freud was later to call the Oedipal conflict. They allow us to see not only into their own hearts and minds, but symbolically into the heart of their times. Our approach will emphasize both analysis and synthesis. W e shall go freely from the microscopic to the macroscopic. W e shall indulge in both minute, detailed statements concerning the Mills and those around them, and bold, soaring speculations concerning all of nineteenth-century man and society. Thus, for example, our next chap­ ter will offer a macroscopic speculation about the nature of the Oedi­ pus complex in the whole of the nineteenth century. A t the other extreme, when we come to our detailed account of Mill’s mental crisis (Chapter io), we offer a microscopic analysis of his experience, as presented by himself. Here we shall largely proceed by a “ classic” Freudian analysis of the 1920s, which comes perilously close, at least initially, to “ reducing” its subject to a patient, a psycho­ pathic “ case.” However, John Stuart Mill is not a patient, and psycho­ history, as we seek to practice it, does not wish to treat him as one. In

8 i / Introduction this, psychohistory differs greatly from clinical psychoanalysis. Thus, our intention in this particular use of the microscopic treatment is partly to show precisely how psychohistory moves from classic analy­ sis to a wider, more broadly historical and creative kind of analysis, and so to force the reader to feel this progression, when and if it comes, for himself. In Chapter io, then, we seek to show, by actual doing and then undoing, what are the limits of the purely psycho­ analytic approach. As for the macroscopic analysis of father-son conflict in the nine­ teenth century, it has the further virtue of introducing us to the basic analytic concept which will inform our study. Thus equipped, we can plunge fully into all aspects of the James and John Stuart Mill relation­ ship. First we deal with James Mill, and this time we give a detailed analysis of his life, seen especially from a psychological perspective. Next we turn to his life work, and devote separate chapters to his conceptions of government, economics, and India. Here our aim is not merely to offer a descriptive, or even critical, account of James Mill’s views on these topics, but to see them as complete “ thought-worlds,” involving his deepest feelings as well as his ratiocinations about “life,” and thus his own life. W e use the same approach, of course, with John Stuart Mill, where our documentation is even greater, and even more significant. Thus, we divide the account of John Stuart Mill’s personal development, his life, into chapters on his family, his childhood, his “ adolescence,” his “ mental crisis” (a microscopic analysis, as we have indicated), and then his early intellectual development. After this, we have separate chapters on his involvement with Harriet Taylor, who presents in flesh and blood terms the problems of sex and women, which Mill will then etherealize and make abstract in his theoretical writings. Next, we compare his treatment of economics and govern­ ment with that of his father, and add a final chapter on John Stuart Mill’s conception of social science. Such, in bare outline, is the frame­ work on which we place our detailed treatment of generational conflict in the nineteenth century, as manifested in the case of James and John Stuart Mill. As the reader will see, it is in many ways a frame for extended “ free associations” to an enormous range of topics.

Psychohistory

T H R O U G H O U T we shall try to use psychological concepts, especially psychoanalytic ones, to gain increased understanding and insight. Such an effort often goes under the label “psychohistory,” a term origi­

9 I / Father and Son nally made famous by Erik H. Erikson, but now under some attack. It has, in fact, taken on some of the polemical connotations of the word “ sex” in Freud’s time, with many of his contemporary supporters urg­ ing him to drop it as unnecessarily provocative. So, too, “ psychohis­ tory” seems to make many people bristle, as if one had uttered an indefensible word. It smacks of “ psycho,” and one thinks, perhaps, of Hitchcock’s film. Although psychohistorians protest that they are not trying to reduce great, creative figures to sick patients, on the uncon­ scious level the term itself seems for many people to undercut the better intention. Rational or irrational as such objections may be, they must give one pause. W hy not accept the “rose by any other name” response? One reason is that no better term has been suggested. In Political Science there does exist a subfield, called “Personality and Politics,” but its name indicates its clear limits. Some have suggested “Psychol­ ogy and History,” or “Psychological History,” and at one point I myself recommended the unwieldy term, “Psycho-social History,” partly to take the curse off the first part of the phrase.4 But psychohistory does have the undoubted merit of pointing directly to the application of psychoanalysis to history. There is no “ rational” reason why, any more than economic history or social history, psychohistory cannot be con­ sidered a subfield of general history, one that adds to rather than reduces the latter. In fact, there may be a virtue in the term if it forces us to confront our “irrational” dislike for it; as Freud said, to tone down his remarks about sex might make people more comfortable, but would scarcely advance the field of psychoanalysis. The important thing is to recognize that we are trying to gain enlightenment by using psychoanalytic theory and concepts in relation to fairly traditional historical materials; the test is not what name we use, but what results we obtain. Our aim, however, is not merely to apply Freudian psychoanalysis to a study of the Mills. It is also to reexamine Freudian concepts in the light of our general historical materials. Freud was a late nineteenth- century figure, only a few generations after John Stuart Mill. How culture-bound was Freud, and therefore his ideas? Universal in its pretension to being a science, is psychoanalysis simply a parochial outgrowth of a particular period of Central European history, limited in its range and applicability? Hopefully, we shall be able to reexam­ ine a few key components of psychoanalysis, such as the Oedipus complex, mourning and melancholia, death feelings, and the psychol­ ogy of woman, and emerge with satisfactory answers. In short, we are 10 i / Introduction as concerned with examining anew the psychoanalytic “ tools” we are about to use as we are with using them. There are, of course, clear dangers in the use of psychoanalysis, even reexamined, in biography or history. Richard Ellmann puts one such danger well. Discussing psychobiography, he warns:

As we push back into the mind of a writer, we are apt to lose sight of his conscious direction, of all that gives shape to what might otherwise be his run-of-the-mill phobias or obsessions and that distinguishes his grand para­ noia from our own small squirmy one. It is relevant, though already suspi­ ciously pat, to point out the existence of an Oedipal situation in childhood, but in the works of a writer’s maturity this is usually so overlaid with more recent and impinging intricacies that we run the danger of being too simple about the complexes. We may reduce all achievement to a web of causation until we cannot see the Ego for the Id.5 W e are very concerned about the Oedipal situation in the lives of the Mills. Our problem, therefore, is not to be “too simple about the complexes,” not to reduce complicated and complex works of maturity to a single childhood impulse. Further, we must exercise great caution not to see only the psychological line in isolation from the manifold influences normally dealt with under the heading of political, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural history. In reality, individual life- history, family history, and the history of the group, for example, are all commingled. With all the dangers involved in this sort of work, and with all the demands made on the psychohistorical investigator, the effort still seems eminently worthwhile. As one analyst has put it, once one has become used to “listening with the third ear,” traditional history ap­ pears thin; it is like listening to music on single-track after one has heard stereo. Nor is it just “ identity,” the life-histories of great individ­ uals, that are illuminated; ideas also yield new and fresh meaning to the psychoanalytic inquisitor. W e have known for a long time that ideas are related to the social context in which they are conceived; now we can add the personal context, and see the baffling and complex ways in which these relationships work themselves out.6 In the end, our answers can never be simple. They must be built in complicated fashion, out of numerous, often seemingly trivial de­ tails. The exact words of our subjects must be scrupulously and repeti- tiously examined, for they are our primary clues. What we are putting together, to repeat Freud, is a puzzle, and only after we have assem­ bled the entire puzzle do we see the actual picture.7 To use another image, our analysis of James and John Stuart Mill is not so much a

li I / Father and Son psychoanalytic case study as a “ detective case.” Our solution, i.e., our full analysis, comes only at the end, often after we have been misled by various single clues. Only then, after we have carefully analyzed each piece and synthesized all the evidence, can we feel that we have solved the “ case.”

Universal Men

JAMES AND JOHN STUART MILL were impressively educated men. The range of their interests and, moreover, of their writings is extraordinary. T o live with them and to share in their intellectual concerns is itself a form of liberal education. For an age trembling on the edge of professionalization, they were “ universal” men, ranging freely over philosophy, political economy, political science, social science, history, psychology, pedagogy, science, religion, and litera­ ture, and making contributions of a high level of sophistication. They wrote on logic and poetry, morals and legislation, mind and matter. They were also men who often acted on what they wrote, shaping domestic and colonial policy, espousing specific reform measures, edit­ ing periodicals, and leading the Radical opposition in Parliament. In trying to deal with such a variety of talent and concern, we must be sorely taxed. There is, so to speak, a whole Mill industry, even to the extent of a Mill News Letter.8 Some scholars may be disturbed by the fact that we omit whole sections of the Mills’ work on sundry topics: missing from our account, for example, is any systematic treat­ ment of such choice items as John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of mathe­ matics, his views on religion, and his and his father’s prolonged consideration of the correct nature of pedagogy. Our answer can only be that we are not attempting a formal “ life and works” of either James or John Stuart Mill, but rather a psychohistorical study of the two men, seen as a father-son case symbolic of nineteenth-century genera­ tional change. While we hope that the portraits of our two major subjects— and of the people who surround them— are interesting and true in themselves, our further intent is the presentation of these por­ traits as part of a larger museum gallery, or historical exhibit: Western society in the period of rapid social and cultural change surrounding the first industrial revolution. T o this end, we have resorted to work done in a wide range of areas other than the traditional Mill studies. W e have, as already stated, appealed to psychoanalytic theories and concepts; here again 12 i / Introduction we run the risk of being faulted by experts in the field. The psycho­ analytic literature on, for example, the Oedipus complex is vast. Have we been faithful to Freud’s interpretation? Have we taken sufficient cognizance of the changed thought on the subject by post- and neo- Freudians? Then there is family history, one of the fastest-growing branches on Clio’s tree. Have we managed to keep up with the latest evidence and views on the existence of the nuclear family? Is the nuclear family a new entry on the domestic scene, appearing with the advent of industrial society, or is it the norm as far back as we can trace it? Similar problems and questions arise with childhood history, a study related to but nonetheless separate from family history. Medi­ cal history, the history of economics, class stratification, the history of the women’s rights movement, the history of the social sciences, and many other areas have lured us into their specialized and secret com­ partments, with what results the professional and general reader alike must decide.

The Divine Comedy

IN M Y F IR S T A T T E M P T to relate psychoanalysis and history, I con­ cluded that psychoanalysis was “like the figure of Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy, indicating the way to the circles of man’s under­ ground life.” I then quoted W. H. Auden’s poem, “In Memory of Sig­ mund Freud” : . . .he went his way, Down among the Lost People like Dante, down To the stinking fosse where the injured Lead the ugly life of the rejected . As I pointed out then: Freud himself had recognized the comparison, At one point he remarked in a mood of deep pessimism to his friend Fliess, “it will be a fitting punish­ ment for me that none of the unexplored regions of the mind in which I have been the first mortal to set foot will ever bear my name or submit to my laws.” Then, later, defiantly, he said of his psychoanalytic work: “It is an intellectual hell, layer upon layer of it, with everything fitfully gleaming and pulsating; and the outline of Lucifer-Amor coming into sight at the darkest corner. M y conclusion at the time was that: In the light of this fitful gleaming we can see that only by man’s pushing on to the “darkest corner” of his being, by experiencing the “divine comedy”

13 I / Father and Son of his past, can he rise to the heights of his noblest aspirations. This is the promise held out to us by the union of psychoanalysis and history. At the moment, we stand, at best, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita . . . per una selva oscura.”9 A t this point, I like to think that we have advanced some w ay out of the “dark forest.” Recent developments in psychohistory suggest that our concern is not limited to the “ injured,” leading the “ ugly life of the rejected,” but that, as was true of Freud himself, we have gone beyond the sharp dichotomy between the normal and the abnormal, the “ healthy” and the “injured,” and now treat of the complex, creative, and elusive “ human, all too human” being, great or small, in all his depths and heights. Such is our ideal as we enter upon the study of James and John Stuart Mill. In their lives we shall find whole “ thought-worlds” encased. With the mental submarine (or should it be called a “ spaceship” ?) of psy­ chohistory, we shall attempt to enter these spheres of thought and feeling, ranging from the “ lowest” to the “ highest” elements. In this new space, perhaps we shall find that such hierarchical terms are meaningless, and that we must navigate in both our inner and outer worlds with a new psychological gyroscope. To go “down” in this world may also be to go “up.” Only actual entrance into the “ thought- world,” conscious and unconscious, of James and John Stuart Mill will tell us whether we have lost our bearings completely, or entered upon a more abundant and ever-expanding universe of human meaning.

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