John Stuart Mill: A Biography [Hardcover]

Nicholas Capaldi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 12, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0521620244 | ISBN-13: 978-0521620246

Nicholas Capaldi's biography of John Stuart Mill traces the ways in which Mill's many endeavors are related and explores the significance of his contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of education. Capaldi shows how Mill was groomed for his life by both his father James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, the two most prominent philosophical radicals of the early 19th century. Mill, however, revolted against this education and developed friendships with both Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who introduced him to Romanticism and political conservatism. A special feature of this biography is the attention devoted to Mill's relationship with Harriet Taylor. No one exerted a greater influence than the woman he was eventually to marry. Capaldi reveals just how deep her impact was on Mill's thinking about the emancipation of women. Nicholas Capaldi was until recently the McFarlin Endowed Professor of Philosophy and Research Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa. He is the founder and former Director of Legal Studies. His principal research and teaching interest is in public policy and its intersection with political science, philosophy, law, religion, and economics. He is the author of six books, including The Art of Description (Prometheus, 1987) and How to Win Every Argument (MJF Books, 1999), over fifty articles, and editor of six anthologies. He is a recent recipient of the Templeton Foundation Freedom Project Award.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While he is considered to be the greatest English intellectual of the 19th century, Mill (1806–1873) is often reduced to a set of parochial engagements with his "utilitarianism." In this authoritatively comprehensive analysis of Mill’s lifelong explication of the "liberal culture" spawned by the Industrial Revolution, Loyola professor of business ethics Capaldi presents a probing account of the personal, social and environmental influences on Mill and his relationship to major intellectual precursors and contemporaries. Interspersed with a series of close readings of his mostly political essays and reviews, Mill’s life is cast from a diverse quilt of perspectives, including schoolfriends Coleridge and Carlyle, which reveal the pluralistic character Victorian England. From his struggles with his father, James Mill, and the Benthamite Philosophical Radicals that saw him as their progeny, to his relationship with his wife Harriet Taylor (in "the most talked about affair of the 19th Century"), Mill’s immense intellectual influence is situated within the social relationships that provide a revealing depth to his views on education, politics and feminism. Perhaps the most important element of this work is its presentation of Mill’s uniquely organic synthesis of British ratiocination with German Romanticism that represented a nexus of Mill’s educational heritage and his mature encounters with Continental thinkers, such as Kant and Hegel, Comte and Tocqueville. Capaldi’s liberal use of primary texts and vigilant concern for intellectual context reveal Mill’s thought as reflective of the overall Enlightenment turn towards integrating science, logic and metaphysics into politically oriented theories aimed at creating social equality. Capaldi’s sensitivity to intellectual cross-currents breathes new life into Mill, for whom there is no other biography currently in print, and gives an outstanding account of 19th century European social-philosophical thought.
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Review

"A very welcome new intellectual life of Mill, which gives full weight not just to his philosophical and technical writing but also to his status as a public intellectual. The highly readable biography is particularly illuminating about Mill's status within nineteenth-century theories of the place of the creative artist and the imagination, and it gives extended and thoughtful treatment to his intellectual and personal relationship with Harriet Taylor." Kate Flint, Studies in English Literature

"...solidly grounded, briskly argued...a considerable achievement. Nicholas Capaldi is a deft commentator. John Stuart Mill is a good and persuasive book." Alan Ryan

"As a work of biography, it succeeds in forcefully presenting Mill as a theorist concerned above all with defending liberal culture in general, and highlights the absolute centrality of individual autonomy to that defense." Metapsychology Online

"Capaldi has succeeded nicely in bringing together Mill's life and Mill's ideas - his theories and his values - , illuminating both. This study is recommended for anyone with an interest in the man and his thought." Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"Mill scholars and students of 19th-century thought and English Romanticism will find this biography engrossing." The New York Sun

"It is solidly grounded, briskly argued, and agreeably free from the sound of grinding axes." New York Review of Books

"Capaldi's intellectual biography passes, with flying colors, the important test for the success of a biography: after reading it, I have both a sense of having learned a great deal and a desire to learn more about the part of history that both influenced and was influenced by John Stuart Mill."
P.A. Woodward, The Review of Metaphysics

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 456 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (January 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521620244
• ISBN-13: 978-0521620246
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,482,722 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Easily the Best Book on Mill, June 7, 2005

By 

Eudaimonia "Eudaimonia" (Providence, RI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: John Stuart Mill: A Biography (Hardcover)

Contemporary analytic philosophers tend to present a rather skewed view of Mill, ignoring the larger textual and personal context of his work. Capaldi's book goes a long way to correcting these errors.

For instance, Capaldi provides strong reasons to think that Utilitarianism should be read in light of On Liberty, not vice versa, as contemporary textbooks tend to present Mill. In addition, Capaldi provides an in-depth examination of Mill's intellectual growth. He starts with Mill's early education and exposure to the philosophical radicalism of his father and Jeremy Bentham, and describes how Mill spent a large part of his life struggling to keep what he believed was good about their hedonistic utilitarianism while rejecting its inadequacies. Capaldi shows us how the style of education Mill received permanently influences Mill's manner of thinking. Capaldi demonstrates how Mill is essentially a dialectical thinker attempting to synthesize Romantic deontology with its emphasis on autonomous self-development, with empiricist ethical methodology with its emphasis on pleasure and associationist human psychology. At the same time, Capaldi illuminates the precise ways that figures like Carlyle, Hegel, Comte, Coleridge, and of course Harriot Taylor influenced Mill. Capaldi helps us learn how to read Mill, based on who Mill's audience was and the purpose of his various texts. One's view of Utilitarianism, for instance, will be radically changed in light of Capaldi's biography. This text, taken as the definitive statement of Mill's theory by most contemporary philosophers, emerges as a rather restrained attempt to defend a general class of philosophies, will Mill's own beliefs quite hidden under the surface.

The picture of Mill that emerges is that of a powerful mind with continually evolving ideas. For the typical philosopher who has read at most a few of Mill's works, this book is very valuable indeed.

As an aside, by way of illustrating what the reputation of Capaldi's intellectual biography is, let me relate the following. I recently had a paper defending a thesis of Mill's accepted for publication in a major philosophy journal. The reviewer asked me to make some revisions in light of this work. This book is quickly becoming the authoritative source on John Stuart Mill. In comparing Capaldi's work with that of others who have written on Mill, one gets the feeling that Capaldi is the only one taking Mill--and intellectual history--seriously.

As such, I highly recommend that any philosopher interested in ethics or the history of philosophy read this.

9 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Capaldi on Mill, February 21, 2004

By 

J. A. Haverstick (Lancaster, PA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: John Stuart Mill: A Biography (Hardcover)

From the view of philosophy departments, Mill is frequently read as as figure in the line of traditional empiricists stretching from Locke to Russell. In that context, some of his teachings, such as the quality of pleasure and the primacy of social good seem like, well, mistakes. In fact, that's how it was presented to me in school and I'm afraid I may have passed that view on. I always wondered how a guy so smart could be so dumb. By bringing in the French connection (and Mill's intellectual environment in general), Capaldi presents the complete thinker. That's a service. Of course, given their format, no title in this series from Cambridge can be either a full scale biography or a full scale commentary.