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John Stuart Mill: A Biography

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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.

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.