John Stuart Mill on History: Human Nature, Progress, and the Stationary State

350 Pages·2018·2.19 MB·English

by  Jay M. Eisenberg

John Stuart Mill on History
John Stuart Mill on History
Human Nature, Progress, and the
Stationary State
Jay M. Eisenberg
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Group, Inc.
4501 FORBES BOULEVARD, SUITE 200, LANHAM, MARYLAND 20706
www.rowman.com
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB
Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
LCCN 2018951374 | ISBN 978-1-4985-6395-6 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-
4985-6396-3 (ebook)
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Acknowledgments
Research for this book began as a series of essays on Mill’s
socialism and ambivalence about progress, which were then
expanded into my doctoral dissertation at Drew University.
My gratitude goes to my advisors at Drew, Erik Anderson,
Jonathan Rose, and Ken Alexo, who counseled, critiqued, and,
most of all, encouraged me through that project. I also wish to
acknowledge my friend Luis Campos, who decamped for the
University of New Mexico before I could ask him to serve on my
committee. Luis’s interests range far wider than his expertise in
the history of science, and our many conversations reflected his
marvelous curiosity and knowledge. Thanks also go to James
Miller for his friendship, advice, and many conversations about
liberalism, democracy, and just about everything else. Rob
Goldstein put me on my guard against prolixity and challenged
me with his insistent determinism. Arthur Rose’s vibrant
intellectual openness has always kept me on my toes. Richard
Wolin encouraged my return to graduate studies, and was very
generous with advice and support along the way.
In my first go-round in graduate studies at Brandeis
University more than forty years ago, I was privileged to study
with the late George Armstrong Kelly, Mark Hulliung, and
Alasdair MacIntyre. I am grateful to all of them, and want to
note the enduring impact of Professor MacIntyre’s year-long
seminar on the philosophy of the social sciences.
Many friends and family have contributed to this project in
direct and indirect ways.
They include Larry Aronson, Linda Aronson, Don Austin, Iris
and Phil Berman, Cecilia Cancellaro, Peter and Theresa Chu,
Steve Eisenberg, Lloyd Eubanks, James and Mary Francoeur,
Sandy French, Tim and Susan Gill, Richard Goldsmith, Michael
Jorrin, Joan Kapfer, Peter Katz, Ruth Klue, Andrew Kronengold,
Sue Marcus, Lauren and David Meisels, Jane Newton, Suzanne
Nutt, Ellen and Michael Opell, Bruce Rafel, Keith Safian, Jan
Saltiel, Walter Schauben, Joanne Sockle, Claudia Wagner, Susan
Saltiel, Walter Schauben, Joanne Sockle, Claudia Wagner, Susan
Wolfson, and Steve Yablon. Special thanks go to my children,
Eric Eisenberg and Julia Gonzales. I could not be prouder of
them. To my late mother, Ruth Eisenberg—professor,
consultant, entrepreneur, poet, author, an inspiration to all who
knew her—I hope that this book brings me a step closer to all
that you accomplished.
Without my wife, Gail Safian, this book would never have
gotten started, let alone completed. Her support,
encouragement, and insistence that I get on with it when I was
in a rut were instrumental in seeing it through to the finish. Gail
also provided her extraordinary editing skills, pointing to the
need for clarity when the text was obscure, and cutting the
redundant and superfluous. This book and all of my love are
dedicated to her.
Introduction
Now as soon as this is stated, it appears self-evident, that
the knowledge which is necessary to the statesman is
knowledge of men: that the experience which he stands in
need of, is experience of men: that he who knows mankind
best, if he have integrity of purpose, is the best qualified to
be a statesman, and that the volume which should be his
guide is not the book of history but the book of human
nature.[1]
All true political science is, in one sense of the phrase, à
priori, being deduced from the tendencies of things,
tendencies known either through our general experience of
human nature, or as the result of an analysis of the course
of history, considered as a progressive evolution.[2]
The Benthamite doctrine and political program which John
Stuart Mill was educated to carry forward was indifferent, if not
hostile, to the value of history. In his classic study of philosophic
radicalism, Elie Halévy concluded that “the idea of a philosophy
of history was totally foreign to Bentham’s thought.”[3] J. H.
Burns, the first general editor of Jeremy Bentham’s collected
works, elaborated on this conclusion, stating that “Bentham’s
theory of society is essentially ahistorical,” and that he
“developed a dismissive scorn towards history as a subject of
study,” despite his own substantial reading.[4] These judgments
are affirmed by Donald Winch, who notes that “Bentham
remained largely indifferent to . . . the origins and historical
development of forms of law and government . . . History was
more often regarded by Bentham not merely as a record of
error . . . but as a record of uninstructive error.”[5] In his Book of
Fallacies, Bentham claimed that reference to history risked
exposure to “error and mischievous doctrine” and questioned
“whether a blank unfilled might not have been less prejudicial
than a blank thus filled.” Blithely assuming great progressive
strides from a discredited past, Bentham denounced reliance on
the “wisdom of our ancestors” as “the Chinese Argument”:
They were as much inferior to us . . . and the further we look
back, the more abuses we shall discover in every
department of government. Nothing but the enormity of
those abuses has produced that degree of comparative
amendment on which at present we value ourselves so
highly. . . . [T]ake what period we will in the lapse of
preceding ages, there is not one which presents such a
state of things as any rational man would wish to see
entirely re-established.[6]
For Bentham, historical evidence provided neither
theoretical nor programmatic value. Declaring the past replete
with error and evil, Bentham would not even accept that it
might provide examples for political or personal emulation; even
with the discovery of “splendid instances of probity and self-
devotion,” there is the risk of being “dupe[d by] an illusion
occasioned by the very nature of an extensive retrospect.”[7] At
the root of Bentham’s disregard was the association of historical
reference with the conservative reliance on tradition; Robert
Denoon Cumming aptly characterizes Bentham’s view that
there could be “no room for compromise between the
conservative, who clings to the Wisdom of Ancestors, and their
own radical commitment to the March of Intellect.”[8] For the
Benthamites, history was irretrievably associated with the
traditions from which they wanted nothing more than to make a
clean and dismissive break.
Yet, as Burns points out, James Mill and George Grote, two
of Bentham’s most devoted colleagues, were eminent
historians. John Stuart Mill recounts in the Autobiography that
Grote was a frequent presence in his childhood household,
having been introduced to his father by David Ricardo. Despite
the generational difference, Grote and Mill were close friends,
and Grote’s History of Greece became a standard work which
Mill favorably reviewed. As for James Mill, his History of British
India was ten years in the making and though he did not quite
achieve Grote’s distinction as a scholar, it was successful
enough to lift James out of his work as an itinerant journalist and
into a lifelong and well compensated career in the East India
Company.
One might say that James Mill’s two great projects, his
History and his son, John Stuart, grew up together. Both got
their start in 1806, two years before Bentham entered their
lives, and James simultaneously pursued the dual devotions of
completing his masterwork and educating his son. Seated
together at a table, each diligently pursued his work, the father
researching and writing, the son mastering his lessons, day
after day, throughout his emotionally stunted and lonely
preadolescence. Mill recalls that his first task was the study of
Greek, begun perhaps when he was three years old, and that
following Aesop’s Fables, the first book he read in Greek was a
history, Xenophon’s Anabasis of Cyrus. Though it does not
appear that the systematic study of history was part of his
father’s curriculum, it was surely a byproduct of his education in
the Greek and Latin classics, and Mill lists Herodotus and
Thucydides among the Greek authors he read before he was
seven. With all the pressures of his father’s program, Mill recalls
that in addition to his daily lessons from 1810 to the end of
1813, there remained time for “books I read by myself.” Those
books “were chiefly histories, of which I read . . . a great
number,” and provided the topics for conversation during daily
walks with his father. Given the opportunity to choose his own
titles, Mill expanded beyond the classics to include modern
historians, including works by William Robertson, Robert
Watson, Gibbon, and Hume’s History of England. At his father’s
urging, Mill supplemented the reading of Hume with John
Millar’s Historical View of the English Government. It appears,
however, that this recommendation notwithstanding, Mill’s
father did not engage in tutoring his son on post-classical
history. Indeed, it was only after his return from France in 1821
that Mill first read a history of the French Revolution and “learnt
with astonishment that the principles of democracy . . . had
borne all before them in France thirty years earlier.”[9] Iris
Mueller drily notes that James Mill “apparently did not expect
the inspiration [to improve the world] to flow from a study of the
historical movements of mankind.”[10]
As much as Mill apparently enjoyed reading about the past
—for his “private reading,” history remained his “strongest
predilection”—he also became aware of its political uses. His
ever-present father “put me on my guard” against Tory
historians like William Mitford, whose history of Greece Mill
nonetheless “read continually,” despite “his perversions of facts
for the glorification of despots and discredit of popular
institutions.”[11] Perhaps because Mitford’s conservatism “did
not diminish the ever new pleasure with which I read the book,”
Mill took to heart his father’s admonition, and his earliest
writings on history were thus warnings against how compelling
narratives could conceal the reactionary political positions being
advanced by their authors. Mill thus found his way to sharing
Bentham’s suspicions about the value of history in political
theory. Bentham’s Book of Fallacies receives multiple
references in the Autobiography as Mill recounts the period in
which he came of age politically, and one can assume that it
played a role in influencing his style of argumentation. Mill
rarely employed historical reference or analogy in his early
career as a self-described “youthful propagandist” for the
Radicals. With precision of argument much on the mind of Mill
and his compatriots, he acknowledged that the caricature of
Benthamites as “mere reasoning machines” may well have
applied to himself. To hone his debating skills, Mill participated
in study groups on “several of the branches of science we
wished to be masters of,” namely political economy, syllogistic
logic and analytic psychology. The study of history is notably
not mentioned as part of “these conversations [which were] my
own real inauguration as an original and independent
thinker.”[12] Mill’s self-training is on display in his early
newspaper articles and speeches at the London Debating
Society, which were typically oriented to pointing out the illogic