In Our Time - Mill

Episode Date: May 18, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great nineteenth century political philosopher John Stuart Mill. He believed that, 'The true philosophy is the marriage of poetry and logic'. He was one of the first thinkers to argue that a social theory must engage with ideas of culture and the internal life. He used Wordsworth to inform his social theory, he was a proto feminist and his treatise On Liberty is one of the sacred texts of liberalism. J S Mill believed that action was the natural articulation of thought. He battled throughout his life for social reform and individual freedom and was hugely influential in the extension of the vote. Few modern discussions on race, birth control, the state and human rights have not been influenced by Mill's theories. How did Mill's utilitarian background shape his political ideas? Why did he think Romantic literature was significant to the rational structure of society? On what grounds did he argue for women's equality? And how did his notions of the individual become central to modern social theory? With A C Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London; Janet Radcliffe Richards, Reader in Bioethics at University College London; Alan Ryan, Professor of Politics at Oxford University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill believed that, quote, the true philosophy is the marriage of poetry and logic, unquote.

He was one of the first thinkers to argue that a social theory must engage with the ideas of culture and the internal life. He used wordsworth, to inform his social theory. He was a proto-feminist, and his treatise on liberty is one of the sacred texts of liberalism. J.S. Mill believed that action

was the natural articulation of thought. He battled throughout his life for social reform and individual freedom, and was hugely influential in the extension of the vote. Few modern discussions on race, birth control, the state and human rights have not been influenced by Mills' theories. How did Mill's utilitarian background

shape his political ideas? Why did he think romantic literature was significant to the rational structure of society. On what grounds did he argue for women's equality, and how did his notions of the individual become so central to modern social theory? With me to discuss J.S. Mill, our A.C. Grayling, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck University of London. Janet Rutgers, reader in bioethics, at University of College London, and Alan Ryan, Professor of Politics at Oxford University.

Anthony Grayling, can you just give us an idea of Mill's significance as a philosophical and political thinker, an outline. Well, he's certainly the major British philosopher of the 19th century, I think. And the impact that he's had on subsequent debate in all the different fields that you've just mentioned there has been very considerable. I mean, you find him being mentioned, cited in technical philosophical discussions in theory of perception, logic and philosophy of mathematics. Not always with approval, but he's there anyway. and he is certainly a very, very large figure in political philosophy and social philosophy. So his classic on liberty is a much read, much cited, much discussed book.

In fact, for all it's apparent clarity and simplicity when you read it. It's a short book, a very interesting and eloquent book. It is very rich in topics for discussion and has been the center of an industry, really. So his influence has been enormous. When you said industry, can you just elaborate that a little? Well, when you open the essay on liberty and you read the first paragraph or so, he says in it, I've got a very simple thesis to argue, and that is that society has no right to coerce an individual other than to prevent that individual from harming others.

And you might think that that's a pretty straightforward thing to be pushing as a line and a worthy line too. But then it turns out immediately to have all sorts of inner rich complexities. and they've been the basis of a lot of scholarly discussions since. He was born in 18006 and was writing until the end of his life in 1873. What were the big themes of British politics at that time? What was his context, Anthony? Well, when he was born 1806, of course, the United Kingdom was at war with France and it was going through tremendous change socially and economically.

It was the very earliest phases of the Industrial Revolution, agricultural revolution had already happened. So it was a pollulating age, really, with a lot of different things happening. And one of the important things that was happening was the attempt at reform, led by Bentham and John St. Hugh Mill's father, James Mill. And they were the inheritors of a tradition in the 18th century, mainly led by dissenters who were trying to get more social justice, reform of parliament, rights for working people, all of which had been stymied in the 1790s

because of the French Revolution. And so the effort at social reform had had to reinvent itself in the early decades of the 19th century. And John Stuart Mill was an inheritor of that. So he was riding on the back of this great wave of nationalism, industrialization, inequality, the women's question, and so on. And he, as it were, sort of surfed that in his work as well as going deeper in other areas. Well, I mean, it was certainly not just happening all around him, but the people who were directly influences on him, his own father. Bentham, Ricardo, who was a big friend of his fathers, were themselves at the very center of these endeavors. And when, after the great reform bill of 1832, which extended the franchise

somewhat, Mill became disillusioned by the process of reform that had been going on in the previous decades, he felt it necessary to settle down and rethink how this reform process was going to be best conducted. And a lot of his best work really done later on in political economy and in politics, the essay on liberty and his work on utilitarianism, stems from the rethinking that he did of his legacy from Bentham and his father. Janet Wright of Riches, he was influenced, Mill was influenced by utilitarian thinking, particularly by Jeremy Bentham, who was his godfather. Can you give us the basis of utilitarianism and how it influenced him? Well, the essence of utilitarianism is it gets you out of a lot of

traditional ways of thinking about ethics, in that it has nothing to do with revealed religious ethics, of course, and it has nothing to do with simply appealing to your, at least it's not supposed to have anything to do with simply appealing to your intuitions about what's right and wrong. Bentham had the idea that ethics could be turned into a science where you could calculate what the right thing to do was. And the idea was that you should be trying to produce happiness, which was the really important thing. And if you regarded yourself as trying to produce happiness, then you had to understand the workings of the world and the workings of people in order to try to work out the best way to produce the best outcome. So it wasn't a matter of

sitting with pre-existing rules in the assumption that, say, God knew how to bring about the best outcome. We actually had to do the science to work out what the best outcome was. Now, there was, of course, an intuition in the root of all that, which was the idea that happened. was the important thing to go for. How was it different from hedonism in that sense? Well, it wasn't in a way, except that it had the idea that every person's happiness

counted as much as anybody else's. As I understand it, Bentham's idea of happiness was quantitative, wasn't it? Well, it couldn't be quantitative in itself because you have to have something to have a quantity of, but are you now drawing in contrast with Mill? Yes.

Well, Mill was pushing to a different kind of idea of the sort of happiness we should be aiming for. And it's often said that Bentham's happiness was that of a contented pig, and it's better to be a discontented human being than a contented pig, or that it's better to be a discontented Socrates than a contented fool. So Mill was committed to certainly producing the best outcome, but he went for what he called what were the higher pleasures, which he thought were not just those of contented pigs. It was better to have a kind of discontenturemberg, didn't he? Well, yes, he did, except that his view of the hierarchy of pleasures was that if you'd had

experience of all of them, you would go for these higher ones, which essentially means that if you'd had experience of them, they would make you happier. So it's not clear that there's qualitative and quantitative difference. Bentham was also interested in penal reform and the abolition of capital punishment, and great social issues. Did he pass on, did Mill pick up, Mills pick up those views from him? Well, he certainly picked up the general idea

of the approach to social reform and the like. But interestingly, he was different on capital punishment in a way which is quite interesting for illustrating the way utilitarians think. Mill was in favour of capital punishment, but on a rather curious ground. The utilitarian idea of punishment is that you shouldn't do harm to the,

the person being punished just in itself because suffering is always bad. So the only justification you have for punishment is preventing worse kinds of harm. Now, Mill had the idea that penal servitude for life, which was the alternative to capital punishment, was in fact much worse than being killed. On the other hand, people were more afraid of being killed than they were of penal servitude for life. So you actually caused less harm. but at the same time deterred people more effectively with capital punishment than you did with penal servitude. Alan Ryan, Mill's father, James Mill, as I've said, was a friend of, colleague of Bentham's ideas.

And can you tell us what impact they had on J.S. Mills' upbringing and is this fabled and most singular education he gave his son? Mill's autobiography is Mill's own record of that education. And he tells the reader that the only thing the reader is to pay any attention to about this autobiography is that it is a record of an education. And it's actually on Mills' view a record of two educations, the first of which he got from his father and the second of which he got from Harriet Taylor later in. life. And Mill was immensely clever. People who try to calculate IQ on flimsy evidence reckon he had an IQ of 192, which is pretty high. And everybody who encountered him

thought he was immensely clever. His father told him that he wasn't, persuaded him that his abilities were rather below average. This included learning Greek at the age of three, learning English by way of learning Greek. I'd say learning how to read English by reading Greek. He could read Latin fluently by nine. He was reading Plato and Demosthenes at the age of 10, learnt logic and economics between 12 and 14, and as everybody said, by the age of 16, he had an advantage of about a quarter of a century on any of his contemporaries. A lot of people thought it was bad for him, even at the time. People like Leslie Stephen said it was a pity he never learned to play cricket,

given that he said rather unhappily in an early draft of the autobiography that he didn't actually learn how to tie his shoelaces until he was 12, learning cricket might have been a bit difficult too. he did go to France when he was 14 and learnt to fence and to dance. So some of the graces of life came. Why did his father impose that educational experiment in such a draconian fashion on this little boy? Was it to do with Bentham's ideas and his own ideas? But it does seem that the boy was a laboratory because then the boy then to go on and teach his eight siblings

and he was punished if they didn't answer his father's questions. It's a strange business that's going on there. So what's the purpose of it? It's half strange and half not. Quite a lot of Mill's contemporaries were tremendously well read by a very, very early age. I mean, Mill didn't in fact get much further in a literary direction than McCauley did. A lot of children just learned a great deal, particularly of a literary kind, very quickly. But Mill's father was obsessed with education, and this is, in a way Mills,

Mill's father's side of the whole Bentham story. If what you're obsessed by is calculating the consequences of people's behaviour, then one of the things you very much want is for everybody to be good at calculating consequences. And you also want to know how to get people to have the right kind of aspirations and the right kind of wishes so that you can organise society and such a way that they become happy. So there's a sort of natural alliance between utilitarians and the early educational theorists of the 19th century. And the people who disliked it because they thought it was too calculating and it didn't

give enough scope to the emotions, included, for example, Dickens, who mocks the whole thing in the picture of Mr. Gradgrind. So Bentham and James Mill in a sense were experimented. with little John Stuart. But at the same time, of course, they wanted him to grow up and become a leader of advanced opinion and to push the whole reforming movement forwards.

At 16, he seems to be in quite a... 16 or 17, quite a leader of opinion anyway. He was, as an agnostic, he couldn't go to Oxford or Cambridge. He joined his father, who worked in the East Indian Company and worked, as I understand it, for his father. At the same time, he begins to write for magazines and journals. What are his written, what preparations do we gather from his written work at that time? Well, not really very much because he's still essentially writing under the influence of his father and Bentham.

So it's pretty much early simple pieces on economics and on social reform. He doesn't really begin to find his own voice until 10 years later after the nervous breakdown. and when he becomes much more interested in what was happening in France and really begins to strike out on his own. What he calls youthful propagandism, he pretty much dismisses, and much of it was taking up with helping Bentham and helping his father. And he himself had a very strong sense that he was really their creation. Anthony Greenling, Alan Rangelang, referred to the nervous.

breakdown when he was about 20. Can you describe that and tell us what effect it had on his thinking? Well, it's an interesting episode in his life because it seems not to have been much noticed by other people. In other words, it was a very internal event and the crisis of it lasted for about six months. And he managed to survive that period by reading. I think it was a marmantel he read, wasn't he, he became conscious of the fact that the effective side of life, the sentiments were very important. He read a passage, I think, in which somebody's father dies, if I remember this long time ago since I read it, and he burst into tears when he read this passage. There's a rather Freudian connection here between that episode and his relationship with

his own father. But afterwards, he read Wordsworth, and of course felt a tremendous liberating influence of Wordsworth's poetry on him. And the great importance of the great importance of of the feelings, of the emotions, and the fact that they had to be wedded to the life of the mind burst in upon him and had a great, great effect on him. It changed his whole attitude towards the kind of work that he did later. For a great number of reasons, can you elaborate a little on what he got from words with us, Anthony? I think it was the sense that there is beauty to be found in the world to which one can respond emotionally and not rationally, that there is this whole other dimension to experience that one can admit, one can allow it

and it can feed into the rational side of one's life as well by informing it as to what's really important. I mean, it had been argued often enough by people beforehand that reason by itself, this is a point that David Hume made a century before, reason by itself, couldn't tell you which things to choose and to value which direction to go in life or in some particular circumstance, and that the engagement of your emotions was very important in that process. And by the way, it's very interesting mentioning Hume there. Hume also had a nervous breakdown when he was about 20. And in fact, this is a very, very common feature of the lives of intellectuals

that in early adulthood some sort of crisis of this kind happens, and it happens in this transforming way. It certainly did for Mill. Janet Rodden Bridges. He believed that the inner life of individuals should be linked with society in the public realm. How radical was this idea, do you think? And what effect did Harriet Taylor have on his inner life? Well, Harriet Taylor had an enormous effect.

in showing him about the emotions and having very strong emotions herself and he addressed his reasoning to linking this with the public life. But one of the problems that he had to face was the extent to which you could develop the individual while still having the kind of social constraints which you needed for any functioning society.

And one of the interesting things about Mill is that he doesn't, cover up any of these conflicts. He really wrestles with them. So he's feeling about the individual is that the individual's good, good for the individual, is to develop as fully as they can, as as an individual. He's very worried about social, the sort of pressures which society can impose on you and stifle your thinking. He's afraid of, not, it's a kind of later version of a fear of tyranny. It isn't an external individual bullying you into something. It's something much more subtle that social pressures put on you. And he's aware that social pressure is necessary

for any functioning society, but still he's trying to work out how that society can best liberate the individual at the same time. Can we link it to Harriet Terra and mention something not mentioned by so far about his autobiography, that he doesn't mention his mother in it, all. And he meets Harriet Taylor, who's already married to John Taylor, and they have a relationship which we understand is very chaste and respectable, so as not to hurt the feelings and social standing of John Taylor, and only two years after John Taylor dies, do they marry? And then it seems to be, even though they'd been around together before then, it seemed to be a marriage among all the things of true minds. He said she helped him, he gave an enormous credit for the

work he did very soon after he met her. So did that drive forward? what Anthony Grayling described, drive further forward the idea of discovering a new way to think through feeling. There seems to be no doubt at all that it did, though, of course, he was the one with the expertise in pushing it into an intellectually structured form. It's interesting that he comments in his work on women how early it is in life that a boy starts to feel superior to his mother. So I presume it's later in life when he got a sense of what women were capable of, that he fully realised quite how oppressed his mother had been with all these children. He clearly felt two things which in a way were a bit unkind to both of his parents. He thought that his mother had been turned into a drudge,

that she had no intellectual interest, that she became incapable of sharing feelings with her children. and he suppressed various passages of an early draft of the autobiography in which he said that he just lacked the kind of love that he could have had from a mother who had enough sense of her own existence. And of course that, even he must have thought, reflected pretty badly on his father, who after all was the person who turned his mother into a drudge. And the thing about Harriet, I think, is that Harriet had a very much. is that Harriet had a very strong sense

that people had to live their own lives. And the whole push of On Liberty is an argument in favour of autonomy, in favour of people saying, I have a life of my own to live. The thoughts I steer by must be my thoughts. They must be thoughts I have critically examined. I have got to work with.

and it's a curious sort of mixture of what he picks up from Wordsworth and how that pushes back against Bentham and his father because he has this sort of two-level picture of ethics and of what moral philosophy is meant to be about. One level that he always associates with Bentham and his father is the matter-of-fact question about how do you make society work in a successful economical functioning fashion so that people are made happy to the extent

that social arrangements can do it. That's that story. You then ask yourself the question, what would it be like for me to be truly, fully, really happy with my existence? And that, he thinks, is where the poets and other imaginative writers comes in. And so the intellect is doing the calculating Bentham-like end of the story.

The imagination is doing the non-calculating receptive part of the story that comes in with the arrival of the romantic poets in his life. And then what is wonderful about the whole thing is, of course, that it's Harriet Taylor who injects a really strong dose of willpower into the whole thing. and instead of Mill, as it were, just elevating the imagination and the receptive side of his life, which you was happy to have got, there's also the take control of it on your own behalf side. And on liberty is a very fascinating piece of work because it's very much a story about find what is the best thing that you can do and do it. We must remember that this time he's working. for the East India Company, so in that sense,

he's a part-time writer, but he's beginning to produce Anthony Grayling, big works. In 1843, he published a system of logic. How important how useful is that still now? How important is that as a book, is system of logic? Well, I think the book, we've got to say at this juncture,

by the way, that we're all sitting here in the presence of one of the world's leading authorities on Mill, which is Alan, and Alan has written very interestingly on this subject and on the importance of the system of logic for the whole of his thought, because the view that he adambrates in that book, which I think it's you, Alan, is called inductivism, the idea that the method of inquiry and of proof in the natural sciences and in the social sciences,

and therefore in relation to questions about the improvement of society in general, are all of a piece. And so the system of logic is a crucial piece of work for understanding the whole of Mill's thought, the whole corpus of his work. In itself, it is of relatively less importance in the history of technical philosophy, because it came really just before logic underwent a revolution at the hands of people like Frege and Russell later on so that in technical respects that doesn't stand out as an enduring work. Its contributions to discussion in the philosophy of science

and especially on the notion of causation, which was in effect the same thing as induction for Mill in the sense that he thought that inductive inferences relied on the uniformity of nature and that nature is uniform in its actions because it is a causal nexus, a causal network. In that respect, that point remains part of discussion in philosophy now because causation is such an important topic. But it's, as it were, fragments like that that endure.

But for an understanding of his work, I think you really do have to go to the system of logic and read it because it informs very much else of what he had to say. Janet, can I ask you when Mill and Harriet Telefinding got married in 1851, they discovered they had TB, his seem to be worse than hers, although she died before him. Did that act as a spur to him because he began writing feverish, which is his true a word, but more books came out, didn't they?

And particularly began to work on liberty, the great book. Can you describe what was happening there? He was obviously trying to influence the world in a significant way, and it was when he got very much involved with the politics that was going on at the time, as Anthony said earlier, with the extension of the franchise and with the issues of women. And he was certainly strongly motivated and inspired by the connection with Harriet Taylor. He was dealing at that time with the lead-up to the Second Reform Act.

So he was concerned about the extension of the franchise into the working class. And also he wanted to extend the franchise to women. He wanted to achieve equality for women in other respects as well. How would you say that Unlevity illustrated the book, illustrated his radicalism? It's a fair question. Is it not a fair question? It's an extremely fair question that the trouble is that it just is the sacred text of a certain kind of radical individualism. Well, I'm asking you in a gentlest possible fashion to unravel that for our listeners. We'd be delighted if you did, sir.

Instead of actually trying to duck it, I mean, it's a fair enough question. No, no, no. The trouble is it's too good a question. No, no, no. You'll get your nowhere on this program, my friend. It's too good a question for the following reason. Mill assumes that democracy in a broad sense is just the tide that's coming in. And when I say a broad sense, what I mean is that Mill thinks that what's characteristic of 19th century society and what's increasingly characteristic of it is that it's governed by public opinion. So the actual technical form of the Constitution is almost less important than the fact that all governments

now are dominated by public opinion. The rise of democracy begins as a good radical movement because it resists the tyranny of kings and aristocrats and bishops and whoever. But it brings with it a great danger, and the great danger is that we shall all internalize public and, opinion in our own minds. So that instead of asking ourselves what is true and what is false, what should we do, what should we not do, we simply will get into the frame of mind of wanting to think like

everybody else. And this is a view that Mill shares with people you wouldn't expect him to share it. I mean, like, for example, Nietzsche. And he gets it partly from Alexis de Tocqueville, who is frightened by America. because of the American tendency for public opinion just to ride over everything. And so the radicalism of On Liberty is that it won't give up on the forward momentum

of the movement towards democracy, but it absolutely turns round and says if it's to be a real democracy and that every person takes part in governing themselves and the world, it's got to have this individualist counter pressure so that each person really sees themselves

as having a life of their own to leave. So now you say it's answerable, you've just answered it. Now there's a very important corollary to that point that Alan's just described and this is a somewhat unsung aspect in a way of male that is that he believed that the kind of individual

that the self-creating progressive individual realising a rich and flourishing life of achievement and so on was the kind of individual you could only have in a certain state of society with a certain degree of development of institutions. So, for example, when you read Mill on the colonies and on the barbarians and the people whom the British Empire was carrying civilization too, he has a slightly different idea there that such folk wouldn't be... Well, it's more than a slightly different idea. It's rather disappointing conclusion he reaches on that. and you can protect your hero for just so much. He thinks the colonies have got to grow up to deserve democracy. He thinks they like children. And therefore, until they really grow up, they can't have it.

But how are they going to grow up if they keep being patronised like that all the time? I mean, he's not the Holy Ghost. You very eloquently state both the view and the problem with the view. So I was just trying to alert our heroes to the fact that there is this subtext which is going on. I can see Alan is bursting together. That's absolutely true. And when you find Mill talking about societies, in which we can see the human race

as it were in its infancy. One begins to twitch. There are two things to be said on the other side. One thing is that Mill is, I believe, the first writer in English who comes up with the idea of Black Athena because in a spectacular controversy with Carlisle in 1850, Mill points out that so far from all blacks being designed by nature to be slaves, which is what Carlisle was cheerfully arguing, that the Greeks had learnt their civilization from nylotic peoples, who, as Mill says, from the sculptures and surviving records we can see to have been Negroes.

So Mill's notions of the infancy of races wasn't actually racist. It was about different societies being at different places on a road towards self-government. In the case of India, Mills' notion was that you should simply hand over the government of India step by step to Indian native administrators. And he was asked by the House of Lords, rather serious question. They said, if we educate the natives into this administration, How then will we preserve our government? And Mill says, I would not think it proper that we would preserve it one instant longer than was necessary. And they were deeply shocked.

I mean, the idea you had an empire in order to stop having an empire was not a very 19th century thought. He wasn't a racist and he wasn't an imperialist of the bad kind. I mean, what underlies all this? And he goes right the way back to Bentham and James Mills' ideas about his education. about his education was this idea of the sort of perfectability of man. The fact that individuals could progress, they could grow,

they could school themselves into becoming something better. And I mean, you know, some of his commentators have pointed out that he has a point when he says that the kind of liberty of the individual that he envisages in On Liberty really is something that would be most cherishable

and best practiced really by somebody who was in that kind of setting. Can I turn to Janet Raktaville, Richard died in 1858 and he'd still got quite a bit of his life left and he said his life was over but he began a huge spurt of writing, not only in his, and some of which was published after his death, of course. Let's talk about his, let's focus on the extension of the franchise because that covered various areas. Women is only one of the areas that he's discussing there. He became quite briefly but very effectively and dramatically a member of parliament. How far did he think the extension should go, and what sort of opposition was he meeting?

Well, he was meeting opposition from even liberal people who were afraid of being swamped by the uneducated majority. And it's an interesting aspect of Mill. It's another of these ways in which he's aware of a tension between two things that he's committed to but doesn't fudge it. One of them is the idea that nobody can be a relationship. liable representative of somebody else's interests. So he thinks that everybody ought to be able to speak for themselves and to that extent is keen on the idea of universal suffrage. But he also thinks that if you're not educated, this is going back to the Benthamite business, you can't understand enough about the facts to know how to bring about the things you're trying to

achieve. So he was therefore seriously worried about the idea of all these uneducated. uninformed people having adequate weight. So he suggested a version of an idea which was around at the time, which was of weighted voting that some people's votes should be worth more than others. But unlike the other people at the time, he was not saying that it should be the rich and landed that should have the extra votes, but the educated who should have the extra votes. So he was trying to balance two things,

one that nobody can speak for anybody else's interests, reliably and the other that you have to be careful about education. But it is interesting that in all this it's a version of the aberration with the colonies to some extent. He did think that people who were living on poor relief and who were not contributing to society should not have the vote. It's an early version of the poll tax. Can I move on to, with I see you running, can I move on to the subjection of women in 1869? How sensibly could his views be described in that as feminist? Oh, I think they can, yes.

You know, the situation of women at the time, the fact that if a woman got married, she, in effect, became a chattel of her husband's property, but became her husband's property. If her husband beat her up, she could be forced by law to go back to him and serve his conjugal interests, the fact that if the marriage broke down,

the father automatically had custody of the children. I mean, all these things meant that the situation of women at the time was appalling. And he'd been made very conscious of this by Harriet Taylor, of course, and by just looking about him. And for that reason, he was passionately interested in liberating that half of humankind whose subjection was depriving the world of half its talents and half its possibilities. He believed that women should be able to work. He believed they should have the vote on the same terms as men.

and he was, I think, persuaded by Harriet Taylor's own experience of married life and attitudes towards the disabilities that women suffered under, that this was a profound injustice in society that really had to be remedied. Yes, he was particularly concerned with the legal position of women. One of the interesting contrasts with later kinds of feminism is that he didn't go in for speculations about what the sexes were actually. liked by nature. He was completely agnostic about that. He obviously respected, he thought that women were men's equals, but his arguments didn't in any way depend on that. And he was particularly

opposed to the arguments of the people who said that it was natural for women to be in the position that they were in. And roughly speaking, he said that if something is natural, if something is what women are going to do anyway, there is no point in all these laws to stop them doing other things. You wouldn't need them. What women by nature cannot do, he said, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing. And he also said, as regards keeping women under subjection for men in marriage, she said, this is said to be the nature of women, but if you look at the structure of the laws, you would think that this was the last thing they wanted to do, because so much effort is kept to put into keeping them out of everything else.

So he said that, well, he was against arguments based on nature anyway. He said that the natural is an argument which this was in a different essay. The natural is an argument which only comes up when the native promptings of the mind have nothing to oppose them but reason. And so he said we can't depend on ideas about the natural. And his argument therefore was not, he wasn't claiming that all men, were brutal to women or they all treated them like slaves, but he did say that legally speaking they were in the same position as slaves. It was interesting in that his arguments about the subjection of women

were not large systematic theories like the other parts of the work he's been discussing. They were all arguments addressed to people whom he thought had certain ideas already and he was saying, if you are going to follow these things through, consistently, you must recognise that the whole position of women as a complete anomaly. He said that now that Negro slavery has been abolished, there are no slaves except the mistress of every house. This was not about how men treated women, but it was about how the law treated them. We started with the idea of utilitarianism, I mean, elliptically the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and this extraordinary education to which you subjected. Do you think

that his development as a philosopher political? thinker, thinker on social matters, followed from that, or did the breakdown throw him in a completely different direction? Do you know, I think it did follow from it in the following way. I mean, we go right back to the autobiography, which I think Alan is very convincingly in some of his writings shown to be not an autobiography,

but actually one of his polemical works really because he was trying to persuade his readers of a certain view about the nature of education and the development of the human individual. One thing that's very significant about it is this, that the picture of James Mill standing over the young John Stuart Mill with a cane in his hand and forcing him to accept certain facts and so on is just wrong.

What James Mill did was to oblige John Stewart to think for himself. And in fact, to such an extent indeed that sometimes when John Stuart Mill was puzzled about something, he couldn't get an answer from his father. His father said, you go and work it out for yourself. And it's that that remains a very living thing in John Stuart Mill later. This idea that the individual has responsibilities to himself or herself as a free agent, a self-creating agent, is, it seems to me, a direct result of that part of his tutelage when he was a boy. And you can't help but think that that beast was a rather positive aspect of it.

Janet, you spoke of the influence he had in the area of women's enfranchisement and so on. Do you see that driving straight on from then into the 20th century? Well, curiously not, because I think. what went wrong with feminism in the 20th century was they forgot the Mill element. Mill was, as I've said, agnostic about the differences between men and women, and indeed would have been entirely agnostic about the details of the kind of arrangement that would be best for them. He did in fact think that women would choose different directions from men. And in the 20th century, that agnosticism got dropped, rather. And feminism slipped back into a lot of the arguments

that Mill had refuted, saying that you cannot make a direct inference from the characteristics of men and women to the arrangements that there should be. And a lot of feminists went back to saying, we must insist that the differences between men and women are entirely socially determined, because unless we do that, if we say that they're natural, then we're stuck with the traditional setup. Now, anybody who'd read Mill could not make that mistake. And in fact, Mill is a very good introduction to political thinking because these days if you take people through Mill's arguments,

they so much like Mill's conclusions, which are very liberal, that they will accept the arguments that lead to it. And then you can use those very carefully constructed arguments. to show that some of the things which are currently believed don't need the same. It is a McAvely and use of Mill, but it's very effective. I mean, the other thing I think to end on a slightly lighter note about this is that Mill was quite good at winning arguments by not making them at all. In representative government, for example,

there's this immensely elaborate discussion of plural voting, an enormously elaborate discussion of proportional representation. The discussion of extending the franchise to women is one sentence. And it points out that there is no more reason to exclude women from the vote than there would be to exclude men who happen to have red hair. Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Janet Rutgers, Bessie Grayling and Alan Ryan. And our next week's program will discuss the signs of mathematics applied to music.

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