Current understanding of Mill as a founding father of liberalism is a Cold War creation. Discarding this conception opens the way to a general reassessment of his thought: who was the historical Mill? He did not define himself as liberal and there is no simple template. Most obviously he is a pluralist, defined by a plural heritage received through his father. This framework permitted great creativity in political and social theory, but it was diffuse. The one clear unifying theme is (...) a unique conception of a hierarchy of intellect founded on the inexorable accumulation of positive knowledge. The one important exception to this is political economy. What stands out overall is his individuality, where Mill embodies his own ideal. So apart from political economy, where he could be identified in more conventional terms, his nineteenth-century legacy was personal and incalculably diffusive rather than doctrinaire. This left it ripe for twentieth-century re-invention. (shrink)

James Mill'sHistory of British India(1817) made a rather strange claim: first-hand experience of India was not vital in writing a history – potentially, it led to false ideas about its subject-matter: eyewitnesses are susceptible to bias. The historian was thus to perform his task as a judge: sifting through various testimonies to obtain a ‘more perfect’ conception of the whole than those who witnessed its various parts. Although strange, Mill's claim does not bewilder his readers: after all, Mill was a (...) ‘militant’ exponent of theorizing utilitarianism. I argue that such a reading of Mill's method is injudiciously restrictive. Not only did Mill draw on well-known methodological concerns in contemporary historiographical practice, not necessarily linked with Jeremy Bentham or the Scottish theoretical historiography, but he also seemed to adopt the vocabulary of forensic rhetoric, making his claim that his was a ‘judging’ history more literal than it has been supposed. (shrink)