| James Mill is a thinker whose importance to the history of political economy has long been misinterpreted. This dissertation challenges the traditional view of Mill as an exponent of a utilitarian perspective in which human happiness is reduced to the satisfaction of material wants. Rather, Mill viewed the commercialization of society as a means of politically and socially liberalizing the remnants of feudal society. Though he believed that individual happiness was tied to material comfort to some extent, he also saw the advancement of the market as important because it eroded ascribed status for to allow more equality and freedom. His advocacy of the market was largely motivated by the social transformations that he believed would result from the progress of commerce. Mill's expectations of market society become apparent when we put his work in the context of the political debate and agitation that eventually produced the Reform Act of 1832, Britain's first modern step towards liberal democracy. Mill's utilitarianism was articulated within a framework derived from his education in Scottish Enlightenment political economy, which considered the broadest consequences of economic progress upon civilization. Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, John Millar, and Dugald Stewart are explored in this dissertation as important antecedents to Mill's position on commercial society. Rather than viewing Mill as an anticipation of neoclassical economics or contemporary development economics, I argue that Mill had a broad concern for both material and non-material goods. Rather than rejecting social affections in favor of the pursuit of self-interest, Mill was a thinker who envisioned egalitarian social sentiments in a society that was transformed by both capitalist development and liberal democratic institutional change. |
