14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
On Mill, November 8, 2008
This review is from: John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Hardcover)
A very good look back on the life of the famous public thinker and activist.
Richard Reeves provides the basic information necessary for a modern reader to understand John Stuart Mill's impact on his own age and afterwards, especially as related to the concept of personal liberty and the fight for women's rights. While his unusual personal life (e.g., an unequaled childhood education and a long love interest with a married woman who, upon widowhood, became his wife) is covered by Mr. Reeves, the main thrust of this book is Mill's thinking and actions related to the great liberal issues of 19th century Britain.
One area I did find lacking in Mr. Reeves' otherwise strong effort is the absent of analysis on Mill's direct impact on India given the subject of this biography's long career in a leadership post at the East India Company.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent choice for a first book to be introduced to Mill's thoughts, July 3, 2010
I cannot imagine the amount of effort it must have required to evaluate all the relevant material needed to write this book. Roland Barthes once quipped that a biography is a novel that dare not speak its name. If I had to name one biography that would make that aphorism less applicable, it would be this one. The second part of the book title might mislead one to think that this is a page turner, but it is not. When a thoroughly written book is written about a thoroughly reflective writer, the necessary exposition dilutes any feeling like suspense.
As the book reveals the flaws in some of Mill's statements, this book isn't a lengthy adulation, but it generally seems to be a gallant defense of Mill. This book sweeps away two of the lingering myths about JSM: the idea that he never said anything aphoristic and that he was emotionally numb.
The flaws in this book are minor overall. I point out that the endnotes and bibliography of the book are far more generous than the index. I cite this single example: One of the most memorable things that Mill ever said about conservatism (pp 374-375) can't be found using the index, even though the index makes eight other entries under 'conservatism' that reveal nothing as memorable as what can be found on those two pages. I also wish that the book had attempted to show more about Mill's stances on social issues that are still contentious in the current decade (like animal rights.) Unfortunately, the greater number of words are written about Mill's stances on issues that are nearly settled (slavery and women's suffrage.) I realize that the author's aim was to explain to readers how stances that are uncontroversial today are only so because of the earlier confrontation by thinkers like Mill.
I suppose, like all other great biographies, the book's thoroughness didn't end my curiosity but incited even more. I wish I had been introduced to Mill through this book when I was an undergraduate rather than starting with Utilitarianism. Of all the non-fiction books I've read in the past few years, I feel like this one has taught me the most about any person or any age. I wish I could have written it.
There's a superb review of this book found in the NY Times.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fine biography of Mill, December 1, 2008
Richard Reeves, the newly appointed director of the think-tank Demos, has written a fine biography of John Stuart Mill, `the foremost public intellectual in British history'.
Reeves notes Mill's economic egalitarianism, his belief that "the only properly `private' property was the fruit of a person's labour." But Mill also had utopian free trade beliefs, for instance he wrote, "It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete." He also held, but later abandoned, Ricardo's wage fund theory, that there was only a fixed amount of money available for wages, which meant that collective action to raise wages was self-defeating.
Mill produced the classic, `The subjection of women'. He wrote that in Britain "there remain no legal slaves except the mistress of every house." As Reeves writes, "British feminism has many mothers, but only one father. ... gender equality ... was also a distillation of the major concerns of Mill's thinking: the innate equality of all human beings, the corrosive power of dependency, the triumph of reason over custom, the intrinsic value of individual liberty, and the role of institutions and social customs in shaping character." Mill opposed faith schools, noting that they taught `bad morals: passivity, blind faith, fatalism, complacency and prejudice against other religions'.
Mill dismissed the notion of "waging `war for an idea' as being as criminal as to go to war for territory or revenue ... it is as little justifiable to force our ideas on other people, as to compel them to submit to our will in any other respect." But he was no pacifist, writing that war was "infinitely less evil than systematic submission to injustice." In the American Civil War, Mill campaigned for the North's victory over the slaveholding South.
Mill supported a rational, progressive nationalism, writing, "We do not mean nationalism in the vulgar sense of the term: a senseless antipathy to foreigners; an indifference to the general welfare of the human race, or an unjust preference of the supposed interests of our own country; a cherishing of bad peculiarities because they are national; or a refusal to adopt what has been found good by other countries. We mean a principle of sympathy not of hostility; of union, not of separation. We mean a feeling of common interest among those who live under the same government."
But Reeves' reverence for Mill leads him to reduce his rival Marx to Mill's level, as when he writes, "Like Marx, Mill did not take the side of either the Commune or the French government."
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