John Stuart Mill

Mill was the eldest son of James Mill, Bentham's closest ally, and was raised by his father as the heir of utilitarianism: Greek at three, Latin at eight, logic and political economy at twelve, with no playmates and no childhood. He later said he had started with an advantage of a quarter of a century over his contemporaries. At seventeen he joined the East India Company, where he worked for thirty-five years while founding the Utilitarian Society and editing Bentham's manuscripts.

In 1826, at twenty, he fell into depression. He asked himself whether he would be happy if every reform he worked for were achieved; the answer was no. He recovered his feelings through Wordsworth's poetry and thereafter joined Bentham's system to Romanticism, Coleridge and Goethe. In 1830 he met Harriet Taylor, a married intellectual; they kept a platonic relationship for twenty-one years and married in 1851 after her husband's death. He said his best work was written with her.

A System of Logic (1843) built an inductive logic for empiricism, holding that even mathematics comes from experience, and extended inductive method to the social sciences. The Principles of Political Economy became the standard textbook and leaned further toward socialism with each edition. After Harriet's death in 1859 he published On Liberty, arguing that freedom of thought, speech and ways of living is the condition of social progress, that the opinion of the majority can be a tyranny, and that only the prevention of harm to others can justify limiting an individual's liberty.

Utilitarianism accepted Bentham's principle but distinguished the quality of pleasures and stressed conscience and the sense of justice. Elected to Parliament in 1865 he moved an amendment for women's suffrage and defended Irish tenants and Jamaican blacks; in 1869 The Subjection of Women called the subordination of one sex the last barrier to human progress. He spent his last years beside Harriet's grave at Avignon writing his Autobiography and was buried next to her. Russell, Rawls and the whole liberal tradition descend from him.