John stuart mill contribution to economics

John stuart mill theory of utilitarianism
John stuart mill father
John stuart mill born

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John Stuart Mill

English philosopher and political economist (1806–1873)

"Stuart Mill" redirects here. For the town in Australia, see Stuart Mill, Victoria.

John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 7 May 1873)^[1] was an English philosopher, political economist, politician and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political economy. Dubbed "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century" by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,^[2] he conceived of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control.^[3] He advocated political and social reforms such as proportional representation, the emancipation of women, and the development of labour organisations and farm cooperatives. The Columbia Encyclopedia 5th ed. says of him "at times Mill came close to socialism, a theory repugnant to his predecessors".^{[citation needed]} He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an

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Mill credited his lover, Harriet Taylor, as the co-creator of his best-known works.Illustration by Ralph Steadman

It is a hard thing, being right about everything all the time. Nobody likes a know-it-all, and we wait for the moment when the know-it-all is wrong to insist that he never really knew anything in the first place. The know-it-all, far from living in smug superiority, has the burden of being right the next time, too. Certainly no one has ever been so right about so many things so much of the time as John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century English philosopher, politician, and know-it-all nonpareil who is the subject of a fine new biography by the British journalist Richard Reeves, “John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand” (Overlook; $40). The book’s subtitle, meant to be excitingly commercial, is ill chosen; a firebrand should flame and then die out, while Mill burned for half a century with a steady heat so well regulated that it continues to warm his causes today—“Victorian Low-Simmering Hot Plate” might be closer to it.

Mill believed in complete equality between t

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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