Poli 212 History of Western Political Philosophy Professor Sammy Basu	Historiography and Mill
JOHN STUART MILL (1806-1873)

	Author	Text	Context
Whig	Mill emerges from oppressive childhood with an abiding respect for rational utilitarianism tempered by appreciation for creative individuality.	On Liberty is another of the great liberal texts, in affirming individual independence and strenuously arguing for not only limited government but restraints on public social power to cajole and cow individuals into a stultifying and safe mediocrity.	Victorian era witnesses considerable liberal progress in beliefs and practices towards government. Franchise is extended (doubled, doubled, tripled, respectively) as a result of three admittedly hard-fought Reform Acts, of 1832 (1 man in 5), 1867, and 1884, extending vote to middle class and then agricultural workers. Market frees the creative energies of producers and consumers.
Marxist	Author Mill is product of upper-middle class education emphasizing rationality and industriousness and absorbs romantic myths of heroic individuals.	Text Upper middle class Mill continues the ideological work of liberal theorists by defending a conception of individuality that minimizes social interdependence and instead equates individual liberty with free trade. Emphasis on limited government serves to open social and economic spheres to the economic interests of rich capitalists and large firms.	Context Urbanization and industrialization complete the transfer of European society from agrarian to capitalist structures. Robinson Crusoe is a model bourgeois Puritan. Imperial Britain is able to withdraw from the most coercive forms of global imperialism namely slavery and colonialism because global capitalism and the spread of the international free market is now well advanced.

Feminist	Author Authoritarian father followed by a long companionate adult relationship with early feminist which sensitizes Mill to injustices and hypocrisies towards women (and implicitly men) within liberal practices. Mill champions cause of suffrage in Parliament in the face of public ridicule.	Text While there are hints of Mill’s realization that liberalism had unfinished business, this is centrally and forthrightly argued in the Subjection of Women. Though many of these arguments were already in print, Mill was the first prominent male author to articulate them effectively. Mill makes several core feminist arguments: gender is a politically salient category, gender is socially constructed, both women and men are affected by it, gender construction and discrimination are unfair and inefficient.	Context Urbanization/industrialization transform home into sphere for private emotional life and affect role of women accordingly. Ironically, though monarch, Queen Victoria represented a kind of femininity centered on the family, motherhood and respectability, which women were expected to mirror in their own domestic domains. Distinction between public man/private women hardens with the result that extension of suffrage to women is a long time coming: the Act of 1918, enfranchised all men over 21 but only women over thirty; equalized by age only in 1928 by the Equal Franchise Act. Alongside emphasis on respectable women was a salacious preoccupation with fallen women.
Post-Modern	Author Upbringing reflected the harsh culmination of the logic of the secular construction of the Lockean liberal self. Mill is saved to some extent by romanticism which usefully frees him from himself.	Text Mill diagnoses the Calvinist residues in modern liberal self with great perceptiveness. Even as overt political tyranny has been banished the engines of moral repression continue unabated threatening individuality, idiosyncrasy and ultimately openness to real progress. Mill does well to affirm eccentricity, originality, impulses and sheer energy, and so on but there is still something conservative and elitist in his affirmation of higher pleasures generally and freedom enabling the special characters specifically.	Context In the wake of collapse of legitimacy of old institutions that maintained order, new institutions are needed to maintain social control, e.g. public education, manipulation of manners, mores and standards of public respectability emerge. Calvinism is sublimated in models of secular decency and in activist societies for the reformation of manners and for attention to public ‘health issues’.

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