John stuart mill contribution to philosophy
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The eldest son of economist James Mill, John Stuart Mill was educated according to the rigorous expectations of his Benthamite father. He was taught Greek at age three and Latin at age eight. By the time he reached young adulthood John Stuart Mill was a formidable intellectual, albeit an emotionally depressed one. After recovering from a nervous breakdown, he departed from his Benthamite teachings to shape his own view of political economy. In Principlesof Political Economy, which became the leading economics textbook for forty years after it was written, Mill elaborated on the ideas of David Ricardo and Adam Smith. He helped develop the ideas of economies of scale, opportunity cost, and comparative advantage in trade.
Mill was a strong believer in freedom, especially of speech and of thought. He defended freedom on two grounds. First, he argued, society’s utility would be maximized if each person was free to make his or her own choices. Second, Mill believed that freedom was required for each person’s development as a whole person. In his famous essay On Liber John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was a leading figure in nineteenth-century intellectual life. He contributed to the fields of logic, economics, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Today, he is best known for his related defenses of utilitarianism and liberalism. Mill’s rise to prominence was not an accident. Born near London, in Pentonville, England, he was the eldest son of James Mill, an intellectual and reformer closely associated with Jeremy Bentham. Bentham and Mill were the foremost members of a group called the Philosophical Radicals who were united by their commitment to Bentham’s utilitarianism as the basis for political reform. Together, the two devised a rigorous program of education designed to make young Mill a suitable heir to the utilitarian tradition. Home-schooled, he began his study of ancient Greek at three years of age, and Latin at eight. Mill was precocious, and was publishing articles defending his inherited doctrine by his early teens. At seventeen, he entered employment at the East India Company, where his father also worked. He continued working fo John Stuart Mill was born on 20 May 1806 in Pentonville, then a northern suburb of London, to Harriet Barrow and James Mill. James Mill, a Scotsman, had been educated at Edinburgh University—taught by, amongst others, Dugald Stewart—and had moved to London in 1802, where he was to become a friend and prominent ally of Jeremy Bentham and the Philosophical Radicals. John’s remarkable education, famously recounted in his Autobiography, was conducted with the intention of equipping him for leadership of the next generation of radicalism. For this, at least, it prepared him well. Starting with Greek at age three and Latin at age eight, Mill had absorbed most of the classical canon by age twelve—along with algebra, Euclid, and the major Scottish and English historians. In his early teenage years, he studied political economy, logic, and calculus, utilising his spare time to digest treatises on experimental science as an amusement. At age fifteen—upon returning from a year-long trip to France, a nation he would eventually call h
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John Stuart Mill
1. Life
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