John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was destined to become the greatest British philosopher of the 19th century. Mill Jr. never engaged in academic activities - his life was connected with the East India Company, which he joined in 1823 and which he headed in 1856. Work in the Company did not interfere with his active scientific, philosophical and journalistic activities, which began in 40s. In addition, Mill was a politician, a supporter, like his predecessors James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, of liberalism and reformism (in 1865 - 1868 he was a member of the House of Commons). Modern researchers sometimes call Mill Jr. a “liberal feminist,” because he (speaking with his friend and then wife G. Taylor) ardently defended the political and social rights of women. Thus, he defended the idea that all women should receive voting rights and, according to their share in the population, be represented in parliament. Married women should be given the right to property in order to be able to freely choose between being a homemaker and being a professional. In Mill's time, women were almost universally deprived of these rights. Mill dedicated his book “On the Oppression of Women” (1869) to the women's question. He examined the political aspects of the problem of freedom in his famous essay “On Freedom” (1859).

A significant intellectual event in the life of D.S. Mill became acquainted with the ideas of O. Comte. Their correspondence began in 1841, although they did not meet in person. Mill always spoke highly of the French philosopher, dedicating the book “O. Comte and Positivism” (1865) to his views. At the same time, Comte's influence on Mill is often exaggerated in the literature. The latter positively assessed Comte's interpretation of scientific knowledge and its relationship to philosophy, the distinction between social statics and dynamics, as well as the “law of three stages,” considering the positive stage as the highest state of human society. However, Mill distanced himself from the political views of the “late” Comte and did not accept his “religion of humanity.” In addition, he is distinguished from Comte by his interest in the logic of the sciences (including “moral” ones, i.e. psychology, ethology - the science of character formation, and sociology), in which one should look for causal explanations, and not just describe and systematize sensory facts. Mill emphasized both the general features and peculiarities of the logic of sociological and physical knowledge. For example, he spoke of the “reverse deductive (historical) method” characteristic of general sociology.

Mill's main work is the two-volume System of Logic (1843). He also wrote “Utilitarianism” (1863) and “An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Sir W. Hamilton” (1865)12. It was in the latter, containing criticism of the views of the Scottish philosopher William Hamilton (1788-1856), that Mill developed the main provisions of his phenomenalist theory of knowledge. In this area he undoubtedly became a successor to the tradition of classical British empiricism. For Mill, apriorism in any possible form and references to the self-evidence of the data of consciousness were unacceptable. The goal of the philosopher is to improve empiricism, taking into account the development of scientific knowledge and its logical processing.

At the same time, the influence of some empiricists on others in the history of British philosophy should not be understood simplistically and speak only of continuous ideological continuity. So, for example, large-scale studies of the teachings of Hume and Berkeley began only after the appearance in the second half of the 19th century. their collected works. Mill, in particular, was one of the first to openly acknowledge the influence of Berkeleyan immaterialism on him.

At the center of Mill's views was the classical problem of the relationship between matter and consciousness. In this area, he was a decisive opponent of the thesis of the dualism of two substances. Matter and consciousness were reduced by him to certain combinations of sensations. Thus, matter appears in his teaching as a “constant possibility of sensations”, physical bodies - as complexes of “simultaneous possibilities of sensations”. In the justification of Mill's phenomenal ontology, possible sensations play an even greater role than actual ones. In this sense, he was one of the supporters of the dispositional description of the phenomena that make up our picture of the world. Such an approach deprives matter and consciousness of substantiality and essentially eliminates the psychophysical problem in its traditional formulation. Consciousness, in particular, he interprets as a predisposition to experience (experience) sensations. The human mind is inherent in the ability to foresee and expect future sensations, which is why the idea of ​​possible sensations arises in it, which, according to the general empiric-sensualist attitude, enter into various associative combinations. The laws of psychological association bring organization to our sensations. Relationships of mutual dependence develop between complexes of sensations. For example, sensations organized into a complex that make up consciousness turn out to be dependent on the complex of sensations that make up the body, and vice versa. In general, it must be taken into account that Mill and other supporters of the phenomenalistic construction of reality proceeded from the idea of ​​​​the most economical description and explanation of everything that happens, considering references to the substantial basis of phenomena as a fallacy.

One of the main means of organizing phenomenal experience for Mill is language. It is in language that the classification of all phenomena is carried out, assigning them to one or another type. Semantic theory of Mill, who continues the tradition of empiricist-nominalists of the 17th-18th centuries. (in particular, T. Hobbes) contains an empiricist theory of the meaning of names (i.e., signs). The central idea of ​​this theory is the distinction between connotation (co-signification) and denotation (signification) of names, which anticipates the modern distinction between such semantic entities as meaning and meaning (intension and extension). In the first case, we mean an indication of the set of properties of the named object, in the second - an indication of the object itself, denoted by the name (which can be either the grammatical subject of a sentence or any extra-linguistic entity).

Connotative names directly designate their subject and indirectly indicate its properties. Such, for example, is the word "man," denoting Peter, John, and the unlimited number of other individuals constituting the class for which it serves as a concrete general name. This name is given to members of this class due to the fact that they have common properties (corporality, life, presence of mind and Others). Non-connotative names either denote only an object or indicate only properties. So: “A non-meaning word is one that means either only an object or only a property. A co-signifying word is one that signifies an object and embraces a property. An object here is everything that has a property. So, John, London, England are names that mean only objects. Whiteness, length, virtue mean only properties. Therefore, none of these names is a co-signifier. But white, long, virtuous are co-signifying names. The word “white” means all white objects, such as snow, paper, sea foam, etc., and embraces or, as the scholastics put it, signifies the property of whiteness.” The meaning of names, according to Mill, lies precisely in what they signify. Therefore, grammatical proper names have no meaning, because they do not indicate any properties. Such names are simply signs that make it possible to express the objects they designate in language, or marks that evoke images of what is designated.

Mill's concept also explains the functioning of words that do not designate any real objects, but which are nevertheless defined by a set of properties (for example, "centaur" or "griffin"). Behind all this was hidden the general philosophical problem of searching for the meaning of broad philosophical abstractions and generalizations, which have always aroused distrust among philosophers of the empiricist tradition. As a representative of this tradition, Mill was very sensitive to those errors and misunderstandings of a philosophical nature that are generated by the incorrect use of linguistic means. He, in particular, drew attention to the polysemy of various words (primarily the connective “is”), which should be eliminated from scientific language. This is the subject of the chapter “Fallacies of Confusion” in the System of Logic. Here Mill appears as the forerunner of analytical philosophy, which developed in the 20th century.

The basis of Mill's teaching on the scientific method is his theory of induction. His predecessors in this matter were Francis Bacon and David Hume. In the first half of the 19th century. in-depth studies of induction in the context of the development of scientific knowledge were carried out in Great Britain by William Whewell and John Herschel. In addition to the methodological aspect of the problem of induction, Mill was also interested in a purely cognitive question: how can we substantiate our knowledge, according to which what is inherent in a limited number of certain phenomena is also inherent in all phenomena of this kind? He critically assessed the possibilities of complete induction, rightly believing that it cannot be the basis of science. Therefore, we have to rely on the so-called imperfect induction, which is a genuine conclusion from the particular to the general. In modern language, such induction provides an increase in information. It is a method of experimentation, the discovery of new knowledge, movement from the known to the unknown. Induction is based on the implicitly accepted principle of the uniformity of natural processes, which states that everything happens in accordance with general laws. Although this principle cannot be proven by rational means, constituting one of our main beliefs, it, like any other scientific principles, has an inductive origin.

Herschel (in his book Discourse on the Study of Natural Science, published in 1830) and Mill improved the techniques of Baconian eliminative induction. Mill began to view them as research techniques that translate hypotheses into causal laws. There are five such methods: the method of (single) similarity (if in two or more cases a phenomenon is associated with a number of repeating circumstances, then these circumstances are either the causes or consequences of this phenomenon); method of (single) difference (if, on the contrary, a certain phenomenon W does not repeat in the absence of a certain circumstance A, then the phenomenon W depends on the circumstance A); combined similarity and difference method; method of residuals (if W depends on A = A1, A2, A3, then by establishing the degree of dependence on A1 and A2 it remains to determine the measure of dependence on A3); method of accompanying changes (if the phenomenon W changes when the phenomenon U changes, and the strengthening and weakening of W occurs when U strengthens and weakens, then W depends on U). These rules were subsequently included in all textbooks of traditional logic. Mill himself, as a methodologist, hesitated in assessing inductive methods as ways of either discovering new knowledge or testing the validity of a certain hypothesis.

The emphasis in Mill's logic, which should be considered precisely as the logic of scientific research, is on inductive procedures. However, this does not mean ignoring deductive procedures. Mill considers syllogistics in detail and quite highly, emphasizing the importance of an accurate representation of knowledge obtained inductively. However, in general, a syllogistic conclusion cannot be the main thing in science and therefore has only technical significance for a scientist. The combination in Mill's methodology of the process of putting forward a hypothesis with the deductive verification of the consequences arising from it gives grounds to talk about the English philosopher's anticipation of the so-called hypothetico-deductive method, characteristic of 20th-century science.

Mill, who emphasized the importance of mathematical processing of scientific data, is also considered one of the main representatives of the psychological explanation of logical-mathematical knowledge. Thus, he considers the apodictic laws of logic as stable associations of thinking in the psychological sense. The propositions of mathematics are derived from axioms, but the axioms themselves are inductive generalizations of individual facts. The analyticity of mathematical truths, emphasized by apriorists, should not, according to Mill, hide their inductive origin. Abstract mathematical knowledge depends to a large extent on the sensibility, which provides the raw data for induction. Influential in the mid-19th century. Mill's concept began to be criticized by anti-psychological philosophers and scientists already at the end of the century (Francis Bradley, Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl). However, the attitude of modern logicians and scientific methodologists towards Mill’s psychologism is no longer so negative. The current situation and new topics in science (for example, the task of creating artificial intelligence programs, modeling mental activity) urgently raise the question of reassessing the relationship between logic and psychology.

Like the doctrine of induction, Mill's closely related doctrine of causality presupposes the principle of uniformity (lawfulness) of nature: “To use the word “cause” in our sense, it is necessary to be convinced not only that the preceding has always been followed by the subsequent, but that the first and the second will always come as long as the present order of things continues.” Mill recognized that we have a concept of causality taken from ordinary experience (i.e., not innate or a priori), which is refined in the process of scientific research. At the same time, in the spirit of the Humean approach to causality, he sought to give it a psychological explanation.

He views causation as a strong associative connection of sensations, as a stable sequence of phenomena that makes it possible to predict future events (including behavior based on knowledge of human characters and motives). This ability of foresight, according to Mill, should be taken into account when creating the logic of the “moral sciences.” So, causal relations develop between complexes of possible sensations. A cause is defined as a set of phenomena (or their necessary conditions) preceding some given phenomenon. “If an unchanging sequence,” writes Mill, “ever exists between a subsequent fact and one preceding one, then it is very rare. Usually it occurs between a subsequent fact and the sum of several preceding ones. Their totality is required for the production of a subsequent act, i.e. for so that he certainly follows them... The definition of a cause is incomplete until we introduce into it, in one form or another, all the conditions.” In a certain sense, for Mill, the cause of a certain phenomenon is the totality of all phenomena in the world. Based on our subjective attitudes, we usually select certain antecedent phenomena, for example, adjacent in space and time to the phenomenon for which we are looking for the cause. In response to possible objections, Mill noted: “But even on the assumption that an effect can begin simultaneously with its cause, the view I have adopted of the relation of cause to effect is practically in no way undermined. Whether the sequence of the cause and its effects is necessary or not, the beginning of the phenomenon is that , which presupposes a cause, and the connection of cause with effect is the law of the sequence of phenomena." By the way, according to Mill, the possibility of foreseeing human behavior on the basis of knowledge of causes does not prevent the manifestation of free will. Rigid, unambiguous determinism does not at all follow from his concept of causality. Freedom in this context turns out to be the ability of the human will to self-determination.

In social philosophy and ethics, Mill views freedom in a broader context. Here he connects freedom with the principle of utility. Individual freedom in society should not be limited, because it helps people achieve happiness and prosperity. Moreover, the happiness of an individual depends on the happiness of other members of the community. Each person can realize all his abilities without denying this opportunity for other people. Fair democratic legislation should contribute to this. Utilitarianism in Mill's interpretation does not have an egoistic tendency. Mill makes a number of additions and changes to the classical utilitarian doctrine. Thus, he refuses Bentham’s quantitative “calculus of pleasures”, emphasizes the qualitative differences between types of pleasure, and gives preference to spiritual pleasures over sensual ones. He, to a greater extent than his immediate predecessors, appeals to human nature and connects utility with its improvement. In this, according to Mill, proper upbringing and education should play a large role, contributing to the development of people's social feelings towards each other and strengthening their solidarity. By means that can help realize these values, D.S. Mill, in the spirit of the traditions of English liberalism, considers freedom of speech and press. They, according to Mill, are associated with the philosophical concept of truth, for truth in science, philosophy, and politics is easier to seek with a free, unhindered exchange of opinions and with freedom of scientific and moral search. In the introduction to his work “On Freedom” D.S. Mill wrote that the struggle between freedom and authority became a hallmark of human history as early as the era of ancient Greece and Rome. The struggle for freedom permeates the history of England. For centuries, freedom has been understood as the protection of the oppressed from tyrannical power. At the same time, it was believed that the contradiction between the rulers and the managers was irremovable. But then insightful people noticed that society can become a kind of collective tyrant - the social tyranny of the majority is no less dangerous than the tyranny of individuals or small cliques. Therefore, protection against the tyranny of holders of high government positions is not enough: protection is needed against the tyranny of prevailing opinions and emotions. There are limits to the legitimate intervention of collective opinion in the sphere of individual independence. And finding this border and protecting it from encroachment is just as necessary for the normal state of human relations as it is to ensure protection from political despotism. (D. S. Mill defended this opinion in contrast to the views of his father, an ardent supporter of the majoritarian principle.)

Mill clearly defends the rights, freedoms, and dignity of the individual. Even if the entire society, minus one single person, held a certain opinion, it would still be contrary to the principles of freedom and justice to force this single person to give up his opinion, to force him to remain silent. Such measures would not lead to the affirmation of the greatness of the human race, but to the infringement of the dignity of humanity. A person who loses faith in himself also loses trust in society, in the “world” - after all, the world is a part of the person himself, just as an individual is a part of the world, a part of the social organism. And let a person sometimes make mistakes. The ability to judge is given to him so that he can use it. It is the duty of governments and individuals to ensure that opinions are formed as true and never imposed on other people - such is Mill's judgment.

The culture of democratic education and expression of opinions is based on the developed ability of people to independently form judgments and conclusions, pose questions and find answers, and provide arguments and evidence to support their judgments. And such habits are best cultivated by science. For example, when studying geometry, we memorize both theorems and the necessary proofs. But the specifics of mathematics should also be taken into account: it does not allow doubt in axioms and proven theorems. Meanwhile, in natural science (as in practical life) opposing judgments about the same facts are always possible. In the field of morality, religion, politics, social relations, we have to fight against the monopoly of one opinion or one doctrine, which gains dominance over minds.

If an individual is included in a socially significant process of expressing and defending opinions, this imposes great obligations on him: the opinion must be expressed clearly, distinctly, convincingly; the person expressing it must be ready to intelligently and without irritation respond to alternative arguments. However, Mill rightly notes, ninety-nine people out of a hundred do not want or do not know how to do this, which also applies to educated people. Some express their opinions unclearly, others do not listen to opposing opinions. And then noisy debates, the most heated discussions may turn out to be unproductive, not only not leading to the birth of truth, but also preventing its emergence.

The strength of Mill's concept was the internal connection between logic, ethics, social philosophy and the liberal course in politics. D.S. Mill was one of the representatives of English political economy. He criticized extreme interpretations of the principle of free competition, whose proponents considered it almost a “natural law.” Mill was of the opinion that the free market and its laws are not some kind of “state of nature.” They are introduced thanks to the special actions of people, institutions, and regulations. Mill also emphasized the importance of well-designed legislation and legal reform in the processes that help advance market relations.

Researchers believe that D.S. Mill played a decisive role in the transformation of liberalism into “social liberalism” - a concept that was able to develop the liberal ideas of its predecessors further, adding to them considerations about specific socio-political mechanisms that promote democratization and liberalization of society.

MILL, JOHN STEWART (Mill, John Stuart) (1806–1873), English philosopher and economist. Born in London on May 20, 1806, into the family of James Mill, a Scottish economist and philosopher who held a high position in the East India Company. Calvinist views, Scottish education and friendships with Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo led James Mill to become a strict and dogmatic follower of utilitarianism. Locke's theory of consciousness was of decisive importance for his philosophy. According to James Mill, at the birth of a person, consciousness is like a sheet of blank paper on which experiences are further recorded. Following this theory, he gave his son a home education that was extremely intense and rigorous. By nature, John Mill was a gifted boy, so his father’s system was confirmed in practice: as a child, John read Greek and even began to write the history of Rome. When he was fourteen years old and his education was considered complete, he received, as he himself put it, “a quarter of a century head start over his contemporaries.”

A high price had to be paid for this: Mill had no peers, he did not play games, was a physically weak child and shunned society. He was not allowed days of rest, children's pranks and recreational reading. In addition, the boy was charged with the responsibility of passing on knowledge to his sisters and brothers, for whom his father no longer had time. The only consolation was the company of Jeremy Bentham, who was a close friend of the family and was distinguished by his cheerful disposition and eccentric behavior. Mill also spent a year in the south of France with Bentham's brother, the inventor Samuel, and his family (1820–1821). There he first “breathed in the free and warm air of the continent” and acquired a taste for everything French.

Possessing significant intellectual abilities, Mill at the same time was distinguished in his youth by stubbornness, was unsociable and cold. In 1823 he entered the employ of the East India Company and rose through the ranks, like his father, until he achieved the position of chief expert and financial independence for the rest of his life. Around the same time, he was imprisoned for a day or two for distributing Francis Place's pamphlets to workers on pregnancy prevention, which Mill hoped would help stem the tide of infanticide.

In the winter of 1826, at the age of twenty, he suffered a nervous breakdown, mainly due to overwork, and partly because endless discussions and various projects for the improvement of mankind ceased to interest him. Six months after recovery, he was determined to return his atrophied emotions at any cost. Mill read Wordsworth avidly and became acquainted with him personally. Inflamed by the ideas of the Saint-Simonists, he went to Paris at the height of the events of 1830. Mill became a close friend of the poet and essayist J. Stirling and, following his advice, joined the circle of admirers of S. T. Coleridge, at that time the high priest of conservatism. Mill deliberately sought meetings with people whose ideas differed significantly from those of his father; he felt an insurmountable disgust for everything narrow and sectarian. Sometimes his opinions about people changed dramatically, as was the case with Thomas Carlyle, whose manuscript - The French Revolution - Mill, without having such an intention, accidentally destroyed and whose autocratic mysticism he had an extremely negative attitude. Millem's highly regarded Auguste Comte eventually, in his opinion, began to suffer from delusions of grandeur. Sometimes his assessments turned out to be more fruitful - as in the case of Alexis Tocqueville, whose work On Democracy in America served as the foundation of Mill's own political theory: democracy in itself is not a panacea for all ills and can even give rise to the tyranny of an ignorant crowd if not accompanied by mental and moral education of the people.

However, all these problems soon faded for Mill next to the “chief blessing of his existence” - Harriet Taylor. A beautiful, intelligent, and naturally authoritative woman, Harriet grew up in a narrow religious circle of Unitarians who saw the essential goal of improvement in the social (not political) sphere of life. Having married businessman John Taylor early, she then, recognizing all the merits of this man, realized that he could not give her what she so needed. Harriet was endowed with the ability to intuition and thinking free from prejudice and penetrated into the essence of problems that seemed insoluble to the more cautious Mill. Mill fell hopelessly in love, and she found in him a grateful teacher and guide of ideas that at that time were difficult and even dangerous for a woman to express. Partly out of their revulsion for the servile position in which sexual relations place people, partly out of a sense of duty to Harriet's husband, their affair remained innocent for almost twenty years. However, keeping the marriage vow hardly pleased John Taylor - the nature of their relationship left no doubt, and dates and joint trips abroad inevitably caused scandals.

Despite Mill's rejection of the code of conduct bequeathed to him by his father, John Mill and James Mill took concerted action in support of the Reform Bill of 1832 and against the new Whig Parliament. With the help of William Molesworth, Charles Buller, George Grote and others, John Mill tried to continue the work of his father and founded a party of philosophical radicals, the organ of which for several years was the quarterly periodical “London and Westminster Review” (“London and Westminster Review”); It was planned to appoint the radical Whig Lord Durham as editor-in-chief of the latter. Internal divisions within the party, lack of support from public opinion and financial difficulties, as well as Durham's death in 1840, brought an end to this endeavor.

Convinced that “the intellectual regeneration of Europe must precede its social regeneration,” Mill now turned his efforts to the creation of educational literature. In his System of Logic (1843), he criticized those areas of philosophy according to which knowledge and behavior proceed from innate ideas and “moral sense.” On the contrary, he argued, knowledge has its source in experience, combined with the ability to associate ideas; Moral sciences, like physical sciences, are guided by the principle of causality. Mill continued this struggle in eight editions of Logic, in Utilitarianism (1863), Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, 1865 and other writings.

Mill's next work, Principles of Political Economy, 1848; second edition with significant additions 1849, was based on the ideas of Ricardo, although the conclusions were more radical. According to the author, economic motives, along with personal gain, include habit and custom. He challenged the classical school's ideas about the immutability of natural law, showing that wages, rent and profit can be changed by the will of man. Instead of a wage labor system, Mill proposed introducing a system of cooperative communities in which workers jointly own capital and exercise control over managers. Reserving every person's right to the money he earned through his own labor, Mill demanded strict taxes on income that was not based on labor, including inheritance. As a result, he believed, the formation of new capital would cease, the development of industry and population growth would be stopped. In such a “static” society there will be more free time, which could be spent on education and solving social problems. Mill summed up his views on social issues in his Autobiography (1873): "To unite individual liberty and the general possession of the natural resources of the planet, and to secure an equal share to all in the benefits resulting from common labor."

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Harriet's husband died in 1849, and in 1851 she and John married. The coldness of Mill's relatives led to him breaking off relations with them. For the next seven years, John and Harriet lived quietly in Blackheath, where they discussed all the works that were published in the future, and even made the first sketches of future works together. Mill published his works only when he felt that their time had come. As for the Autobiography and Three Essays on Religion (1874), they were published posthumously.

In 1858, when control of the East India Company passed into the hands of the state, Mill retired and decided to take a vacation to the Mediterranean with Harriet. He had been suffering from tuberculosis for several years, and the disease apparently passed on to Harriet. During the journey, she died suddenly in Avignon. Mill experienced the incident in the most difficult way. He bought a house next to the cemetery in Saint-Veran and lived there for almost all his remaining years. His adopted daughter Helen Taylor sacrificed her personal life to fill, as far as possible, the void left in Mill's life after Harriet's death.

Having slightly recovered from the misfortune, Mill in 1859 published the famous Essay on Liberty, in which “such a significant contribution was made by the one whom I lost.” In 1861 he wrote the work The Subjection of Women, published in 1869. Both books promoted the principle of equality, which Mill shared from the first days of his acquaintance with Harriet and could be called the main rule of their life together.

Mill slowly returned to normal life. In 1865 he was elected Member of Parliament for Westminster, a Liberal stronghold. He participated in several public protests when his sense of justice was offended, particularly regarding the brutal repression of Governor Edward John Eyre in Jamaica. Mill was also the first in modern legal history to raise the issue of women's participation in voting. However, he lacked political aplomb, and in 1868 he did not get elected, mainly because he supported the atheist candidate for parliament, Charles Bradlow.

In 1867, Mill took part in the founding of the Women's Equality Society and tried to persuade its members to be more assertive in defending their rights, advocated for the introduction of public ownership of natural resources, and completed his autobiography. In Avignon, he spent his free time studying botany in the company of entomologist J. Fabre. Mill died in Avignon on May 8, 1873.

Mill's work on logic and economics can largely be considered outdated, and in ethics his position remains unclear, since he was never able to draw up any convincing list of morally acceptable actions "done in the care of oneself and one's own interests." Mill, apparently, did not want to understand the most important events and trends of his time, since he underestimated the significance of the works of his contemporaries - Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, as well as the prospects and dangers of the era of complete mechanization of labor. Most of his recommendations on specific issues brought their solutions closer (equality for women, compulsory education, cooperatives, universal and equal rights, self-government of the dominions, birth control, smarter divorce laws, national parks), some of them were discarded as chimerical ( proportional representation according to Hare's scheme, nationalization of land, introduction of an open voting system). These recommendations were set out in his works Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859) and Considerations on Representative Government (1861). His judgments about current events were not always entirely sound. Hatred of Napoleon III did not allow him to see the more serious danger from German militarism. Loyalty to his own company led him to obstruct necessary changes in the system of government in India. At the same time, Mill's authority was extremely high, covering various classes of society; he was known and revered in many European countries.

“Those who knew Mill only from his writings knew the man only half, and that was not the better half of him,” said Fitzjames Stephen, one of his most famous opponents. W. Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal Party, who called him “the saint of the rationalist church,” and his godson B. Russell both believed that Mill’s greatness rested on his exceptionally high moral authority. He was an absolutely complete personality. Scrupulously fair, he, without fear, achieved what he considered right. Extreme mental discipline enabled him to achieve remarkable transparency and persuasiveness in the presentation of ideas; it also endowed him with the ability to distinguish truth from prejudice, to consider each issue from different points of view, without losing his own convictions in the quagmire of necessary compromises. He considered all knowledge to be the result of a synthesis of various ideas. He in no way rejected approaches that differed from his own, and if he believed that they had something valuable, he sought to use them in his own system of ideas. The most terrible thing for him would be what he called “the calm sleep of a finally resolved issue.”

Mill is best known for his Essay on Liberty, which sets out the reasons why society, in pursuing its own vital interests, should provide people with the maximum freedom from moral or physical oppression. “The value of a state is ultimately measured by the value of the individuals who compose it; a state that... infringes on people in order to make them obedient instruments in its hands, even when it proclaims good intentions... will soon discover that with little people it is impossible to achieve anything great, and the improvement of the administrative apparatus, which everything was sacrificed, but in the end nothing was achieved...” These words of dedication to “my friend, wife, inspiration and partly the author of all the best in my writings” have not lost any meaning over the years.

John Stuart Mill was born on May 20, 1806 in London, in the Pentonville area. His father, James Mill, was an eminent historian, philosopher and economist. The boy's mother's name was Harriet Burrow. Following the instructions of social reformers, Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place, the father directs all his efforts to raising his son. John is deliberately protected from all communication with his peers. The thing is that his father, an ardent follower of Jeremy Bentham, sought to raise a genius who would continue the work of utilitarianism after Bentham and himself. Mill Jr. was indeed a very smart boy. At the age of three he is given Greek lessons, and by eight he is already reading Aesop's fables, Xenophon's Anabasis and the works of Herodotus. He also became acquainted with the works of Lucian, Diogenes Laertius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato. John is taught arithmetic and an advanced history course. At the age of eight, Mill Jr. studied Latin, Euclidean geometry and algebra, and was already quite capable of independently teaching his younger brothers and sisters. Taking up the works of famous Greek and Latin authors, John is fluent in reading the original works of Plato and Demosthenes.

The father believed that it would be useful for his son to study poetry and write poetry on his own. John's earliest attempt at writing was the continuation of the Illiad. In his free time from studying, the boy reads the novels “Don Quixote” and “Robinson Crusoe”, which were popular at that time. At the age of twelve he studied scholastic logic, guided by the original works of Aristotle. A year later, John becomes acquainted with political economy. Together with his father, he studies the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, refining their classical view of the factors of production. Thanks to daily studies with his son, James Mill completed work on “Elements of Political Economy” in 1821. When the boy turns fourteen, he is sent to France for a whole year, to the family of Samuel Bentham, brother of Jeremy Bentham. John liked the beautiful mountain landscapes and lively nature of the French. However, he does not forget about his studies, and devotes the entire winter to chemistry, zoology and logic lessons in Montpellier. In Paris, he stays at the house of Jean-Baptiste Say, a friend of his father. During his stay there, Mill met many leading representatives of the Liberal Party and prominent personalities, including Henry Saint-Simon.

However, such intensive, excessive activities caused significant damage to the boy’s mental health. At 20, he experiences a serious nervous breakdown. But, largely thanks to his passion for the Memoirs of Jean-François Marmontel and the poetry of William Wordsworth, the depression soon recedes. In the early 1820s the boy meets Augustine Comte, the founder of positivism and sociology, with whom he will correspond for a long time. Comte's positive philosophy contributed to Mill's complete rejection of Benthamism, and later to the rejection of Anglican religious principles. The consequence of this is John's refusal to enter Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, Mill Jr. works with his father at the East India Company, for which he will work until 1858. In 1865-1868. he will be honorary rector of the University of St Andrews. At the same time, he is a member of Parliament for the City and Westminster constituencies, actively advocating for the easing of oppression on Ireland. In 1866, Mill led the fight for women's rights in Parliament. However, his achievements as a political figure do not stop there: he also works hard for social reforms, advocating the creation of trade unions and agricultural cooperatives.

Scientific works

Mill's treatise On Liberty deals with the nature and extent of the power that society can justifiably have over the individual. One of Mill's most significant contributions was his proposal of the theory of harm principles, which argues that a person has the right to act in accordance with his desires as long as it does not harm others. He also argues that free discourse is a necessary condition for intellectual and social progress. According to Mill, it is permissible to express false opinions in two cases. In the first case, a person will be more willing to give up his false opinion if he is involved in the process of exchanging ideas. In the second, if a person is forced to revise and reaffirm his beliefs in the process of debate, this will help to avoid turning false opinions into beliefs.

Mill considered the position of women in society to be an important issue, and therefore made a lot of effort to expand their rights. His activities can safely be called one of the earliest examples of feminism. In his article “The Enslavement of Women,” he discusses the role of women in marriage and the changes needed in it. According to Mill, three factors prevent a woman from establishing herself as a full-fledged member of society: social and sexual constitution, education and marriage. This article is one of the first feminist works written by a male author. According to Mill, the oppression of women is a relic of the past and greatly retards the progress of mankind.

In his work Utilitarianism, Mill formulates his famous “principle of greatest happiness,” according to which, within the limits of reason, a person should always act so as to bring the greatest possible happiness to the greatest number of people. Mill's main contribution to the theory of utilitarianism is his arguments for the division of pleasures according to qualitative criteria. His views differ from Bentham's in that the latter considered all forms of happiness to be equal, while Mill argued that intellectual and moral pleasures are superior to physical forms of joy. According to Mill, happiness is of greater value than satisfaction. He calls confirmation of the difference between higher and lower happiness that people who have experienced both of its forms tend to prefer one form to the other.

For a number of years he was a member of the British Parliament.

Biography

From an early age he showed intellectual talent, the development of which his father contributed in every possible way. John began learning classical Greek at the age of three, at the age of about six he was already the author of independent historical works, and at the age of twelve he began studying higher mathematics, logic and political economy.

As a teenager, he experienced a strong mental crisis, which almost led him to suicide. A trip to southern France in 1820 was of great importance in his life. It introduced him to French society, to French economists and public figures and aroused in him a strong interest in continental liberalism, which did not leave him until the end of his life.

Around 1822, Mill with several other young people (Austen, Tooke, etc.), ardent followers of Bentham, formed a circle called the “utilitarian society”; at the same time, the term “utilitarianism” was first introduced into use, which subsequently became widespread. In the Westminster Review, an organ founded by Benthamites, Mill published a number of articles, mainly of economic content.

The turning point in Mill’s life dates back to this same time, which he so vividly described in his Autobiography. As a result, Mill freed himself from the influence of Bentham, lost his former confidence in the omnipotence of the rational element in private and public life, began to value the element of feeling more, but did not develop a specific new worldview. Acquaintance with the teachings of the Saint-Simonists shook his previous confidence in the beneficialness of a social system based on private property and unlimited competition.

After Mill's death, "Chapters on Socialism" (Fortnightly Review, 1872) and his "Autobiography" (1873) were published.

Major works