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V. James Mill's Politics: A Rejoinder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

William Thomas
William Thomas
Affiliation:
Christ Church, Oxford
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Extract

I am grateful to Professor W. R. Carr for giving my article on James Mill more attention than it deserved. I had many doubts about its suggestions, and more about the way they were expressed, and had hoped that an expert critic versed in Mill might help to remove them. His ‘James Mill's Politics Reconsidered: Parliamentary Reform and the Triumph of Truth’ contains so much that I can accept and profit from, that I am only at a loss to account for the captious vehemence of his language. For our arguments do not seem to me so much to conflict, as to cross and diverge. I was concerned with the Essay on Government as a practical document. I argued that it had less bearing on the movement for parliamentary reform culminating in the Act of 1832 than had been supposed. The effect of his criticism is to remove the Essay into a world of abstract speculation, even more divorced from the problems which beset the parliamentary reformers in the 1820s than I had claimed. Probably he would not admit this, because his real charge is not that I think Mill and his followers made no practical contribution to the Reform Act, but that I have not, as he has, pieced together the various parts of Mill's thought into that mosaic of ‘glittering clarity’ cemented by ‘strenuous logic’ which he conceives it to be.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , December 1971 , pp. 735 - 750
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

1 ‘James Mill's Politics: The “Essay on Government” and the Movement for Reform’, The Historical Journal, XII 2 (1969), 249–84Google Scholar.

2 The Historical Journal, XIV, 3 (09 1971), 553–80Google Scholar. I am also grateful to the editors of The Historical Journal for letting me see this article both in draft and in proof.

3 Carr, , op. cit. p. 580Google Scholar.

4 Ibid. pp. 553–7.

5 Essay on Government, p. 21; Carr, , op. cit. p. 555Google Scholar.

6 Essay on Government, p. 21, italics mine.

7 Ibid. p. 23.

8 Ibid. p. 17.

9 Ibid. p. 27.

10 Carr, , op. cit. p. 556Google Scholar.

11 Ibid. pp. 555, 564.

12 I have elaborated my reservations about the Autobiography as a historical source, in History, LVI (10 1971), 341–59Google Scholar.

13 Autobiography, ed. Coss, J. J. (New York, 1924Google Scholar, repr. 1960), pp. 72–3; and J. Stillinger (1971), PP. 63–4.

14 Carr, repeats his argument in his edition of The Subjection of Women (1970), pp. viii–ixGoogle Scholar.

15 Even the suggestion that the vote be given to men of 40 or older was not, in the conditions of the early nineteenth century, so absurd. Householder suffrage, as in Westminster, would have included few under that age.

16 Thomas, , op. cit. pp. 254–5Google Scholar; cf. Carr, , op. cit. pp. 556–7Google Scholar.

17 Thomas, , op. cit. pp. 280–2Google Scholar.

18 Ibid. p. 254, n.; Carr, , op. cit. p. 554Google Scholar: ‘In his exaltation of the middle class, Mill makes essentially two points….’

19 W[estminster] R[eview], IV, 7, p. 222 ff.

20 This is only one of a number of personal facts about Mill of which Carr takes no note at all.

21 E.g. Cartwright's, Bill of Right and Liberties (1817)Google Scholar.

22 Carr, , op. cit. p. 557Google Scholar.

23 Ibid. p. 565.

24 Hamburger, J., ‘James Mill on Universal Suffrage and the Middle Class’, Journal of Politics, XXIV, 1 (02 1962), 170–1Google Scholar.

25 Carr, , op. cit. pp. 557–8Google Scholar; Hamburger, , op. cit. p. 171, nGoogle Scholar. It is curious how Carr alters my words. I wrote: ‘The Essay originated in discusssions with Ricardo’; Carr makes this a claim that it ‘originated with Ricardo’.

26 Macaulay, T. B., Miscellaneous Writings, I (1860), 285Google Scholar.

27 Carr, , op. cit. p. 558Google Scholar.

28 Thomas, , op. cit. p. 256Google Scholar; cf. Hamburger, , op. cit. p. 169Google Scholar.

29 Carr, , op. cit. p. 557Google Scholar.

30 B.M. Add. MSS 34612, fo. 287, Mill to Napier, 10 Sept. 1819, partially quoted by Hamburger, , op. cit. p. 171Google Scholar, n.; quoted more fully by me, p. 257; and ignored by Carr, passim.

31 Carr, , op. cit. p. 564Google Scholar.

32 Ibid. p. 557.

33 B.M. Add. MSS 27841, fo. 476.

34 Mill's regard for Romilly apparently survived the latter's public statement that he was sorry that Bentham's, Parliamentary Reform Catechism had ever been published. P[arliamentary] D[ebates], XXXVI, 784 (20 05 1817)Google Scholar.

35 B.M. Add. MSS 27842, fos. 49–50, Mill to Place, 6 Nov. 1818.

36 ‘Whigs and Radicals in Westminster: the Election of 1819’, Guildhall Miscellany, III, 3 (10 1970), 174–217Google Scholar. The shift which so many extreme Whigs made about this time from universal to household suffrage (the practical significance of which Carr does not consider) was greatly influenced by the Westminster example.

37 B.M. Add. MSS 56540, J. C. Hobhouse's Diary entry for 13 Jan. 1819.

38 A Defence of the People in Reply to Lord Erskine… etc. (1819), pp. 63–4.

39 B.M. Add. MSS 56540, entry for 27 May 1819.

40 Ibid. entry for 31 Aug. 1819.

41 Thomas, , op. cit. pp. 258, 262Google Scholar.

42 E.g. W.R. IV, 7, pp. 218, 227.

43 Thomas, , op. cit. p. 261Google Scholar.

44 Carr, , op. cit. 557, 576–8Google Scholar.

45 Ibid. p. 563.

46 Ibid. p. 557.

47 E.g. Edinburgh Review, XXXI, 61, p. 177.

48 Thomas, , op. cit. pp. 259–61, 267–72Google Scholar.

49 W.R. IV, 7, p. 220, Carr, , op. cit. p. 561Google Scholar. The passage is followed by an invocation of the standard of utility, and a misleading analogy with eating, both typical of Mill's a priori view of politics.

50 A Brief View and Survey of the… Leviathan (Oxford, 1676), p. 322Google Scholar.

51 Carr, , op. cit. p. 564Google Scholar.

52 For instance, there are two accounts of the origin of civil society, one similar to the discussion in bk. II of the Republic, the other more Hobbesian: History of British India (1817), 1, 106–9, 150. A passage in my article which discussed the bearing of these on the Essay had to be cut out for want of space.

53 Thomas, , op. cit. p. 263Google Scholar.

54 Carr, , op. cit. p. 568Google Scholar.

55 Brougham MSS, University Coll. Mill to Brougham, 3 Sept. 1832. The same letter suspects Parkes of unorthodox views, and would seem to throw doubt on the view that he was a follower of Mill.

56 Carr, , op. cit. p. 568Google Scholar.

57 Austin, J., A Plea for the Constitution (1859), p. viGoogle Scholar. Some arguments in this are not far from Austin's, view in 1830 which I quoted, e.g. ‘The only remedy for the anarchical dispositions by which the more civilised nations have long been disturbed or menaced, is the diffusion of sound political and economical principles amongst the body of the people; or, at the least, amongst such a number of the more intelligent of them as would suffice to form an authority for the safe guidance of the rest’ (p. 21)Google Scholar. Following my method, I excluded this: had I followed Carr's, I could have included it.

58 P.D. 3rd ser., XX, 145–6. Cf. Thomas, , op. cit. p. 265Google Scholar. I would hesitate to call Buller an orthodox Utilitarian, because he was a pupil of Carlyle, because he became a member of the group after 1832, and because he had a sense of humour.

59 P.D. 3rd ser., XX, 151.

60 When Roebuck lost his seat at Bath in 1837 (a loss which had much to do with his support of the Poor Law of 1834) he made this comment to Place: ‘Take the masses separately and talk with them, what do you find – why profound ignorance and necessarily inveterate prejudice. How then can the compound mass differ from its component ingredients [?] There is no chemical fusion to make a hundred ignorant individuals, one instructed body.’ Add. MSS 35151, fos. 17–18.

61 Thomas, , op. cit. pp. 249, 262Google Scholar; Carr, , op. cit. pp. 565–6Google Scholar.

62 Autobiography, ed. Coss, , p. IIIGoogle Scholar; ed. Stillinger, p. 95.

63 B.M. Add. MSS 35145, fo. 101. Hume to Bowring, 4/19 Oct. 1829.

64 Examiner, 5 July 1829; Johnson, L. G., General T. Perronet Thompson (1957), pp. 155–6Google Scholar.

65 Carr, , op. cit. p. 571Google Scholar. This is because Thompson was for the wider suffrage, and Fonblanque for disfranchisement.

66 Carr, , op. cit. p. 565Google Scholar.

67 Thomas, , op. cit. pp. 276–7Google Scholar.

68 Carr, , op. cit. pp. 571–2Google Scholar.

69 The quotation gives a misleading impression of James Mill's point in the chapter, which was to determine the stage reached by the Hindus in the scale of civilization. He concludes that they are below that of Europeans in the middle ages. His aim was to combat a much more sympathetic view of Hindu culture, particularly that of SirJones, William. History of British India, I, 466–7, 469Google Scholar.

70 Carr, , op. cit. p. 576Google Scholar.

71 Ibid. p. 576.

72 Essay on Education, p. 5.

73 Bertrand, and Russell, Patricia, The Amberley Papers (2nd ed., 1966), II, 373Google Scholar.