Bernard Semmel: John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1985. Republished with permission.
John Stuart Mill may understand the problematic character of modern reason better than any subsequent liberal. He faults both Jeremy Bentham and Auguste Comte for inclining toward despotism, for misusing reason in ways that undermine liberty.
Semmel reports that Mill’s father impressed upon his son the lesson of a story from Xenophon’s Memorabilia. The Sophist Prodicus relates that the young Hercules met two beautiful young women at a crossroads. Hercules rejected the advances of one, called “Happiness” by her admirers, “Vice” by her detractors. He preferred “Virtue,” who taught that true happiness comes from exertion, particularly exertions in the service of others. According to Semmel, this lesson “shape[d] at the root the character of John Stuart Mill’s liberalism.” Far from choosing the easy way of false “Happiness,” Mill was animated by the “spirit” of “Hercules and the Christian-Stoics of the Renaissance.” “We live by myths, sometimes without being fully aware that we do,” Semmel writes. “The choice of Hercules may be seen as Mill’s personal myth,” a myth he “translated… into a public myth as the necessary basis of a good society.”
To say that Mill lived by a myth is to question—perhaps without being fully aware of it—Mill’s status as a philosopher, as one capable of transcending myth. Semmel never suggests that a third, ‘middle’ way between private vice and public virtue might have been available to Mill. (See Leo Strauss: Xenophon’s Socrates, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972, pp. 35-38). He does not remark that the man who tells the story of Prodicus telling the story of Hercules is the philosopher, Socrates. This confirms Semmel’s own observation that he does not “adopt the approach” of “political theorists and philosophers” in seeking to draw close to Mill’s thought but rather takes the approach of “the historian of ideas.” But if that approach forecloses the possibility that Mill really is a philosopher, then the ‘history of ideas’ turns away from the virtues of history and towards the false satisfactions of mere erudition.
This notwithstanding, Semmel does provide a good introduction to Mill’s principal concerns and to the ethos in which Mill operated. Perhaps without being fully aware of it, Semmel shows that the young Mill was no philosopher but an intellectual who could sympathize, up to a point, with the antics of the Saint-Simonians. Semmel retells the amusing story of B.-P. Enfantin, the “Père Suprême” of the group, who called for a “female messiah” to save women from marriage on the one hand and from prostitution on the other—from both Lady Virtue and Lady Vice. “Enfantin an forty of his disciples retired to a monastic retreat at his Paris estate of Menilmontant, where they took up a celibate life” in anticipation of the feminist redeemer’s arrival. Understandably enough, this austere way of life soon gave way to a more active one. “[C]onvinced that this new messiah would soon be found in a Turkish harem,” they departed on a pilgrimage to Constantinople “Pour chercher la femme libre.” Viewing these incidents from the other side of the English Channel, “Mill’s patience was exhausted.” He “could suggest only that such was the inevitable consequence of a good idea [the equality of the sexes] fallen into the hands of Frenchmen.” Sober Virtue was better loved in England.
To strengthen the case of Mill’s “Stoicism,” Semmel quotes remarks praising the Stoics and criticizing the Epicureans. He omits remarks praising the Epicureans and criticizing the Stoics. In his post-1840 writings, Mill never hesitated to make use of divers allies—as he did, for example, in Utilitarianism, wherein the young Socrates, Epicurus, Bentham, and Jesus are all commended as exemplars of utilitarian ethics. “Mill’s mind was essentially illogical,” the unreconstructed Benthamite W. S. Jevons charged. Alternatively, one might wonder if Mill was a philosopher who had mastered rhetoric. (See Paul Eidelberg: A Discourse on Statesmanship, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974, pp. 402-403). The latter possibility implies an interesting Mill. It deserves more extended investigation by someone who understands the issues.
Meanwhile, we have Semmel’s essay, which says things worth saying about a neglected aspect of Mill. Semmel reminds contemporary liberals of several facts: Mill opposed the practice of paying government debts with inflated currency; he opposed the abolition of capital punishment; he endorsed a wartime government’s right to seize enemy goods in neutral ships; he praised the Swiss practice of universal military conscription. “Mill saw himself countering the tendencies of a weak-willed, commercial, modern democratic society and providing a basis for a virtuous one.” Semmel traces this spiritedness to Machiavelli, perhaps without being full aware of all the issues involved.
Semmel regards the unsystematic nature of Mill’s writings as deliberate, but not rhetorically deliberate. System-building “would merely confirm the tendency toward liberticide” seen in Bentham and Comte. As noted previously, Semmel does not sufficiently reflect upon possible additional motives for apparently unsystematic presentation. However, the avoidance of intellectual despotism and the consequent insistence that the reader think for himself surely explain some of what Mill is about. Intellectual and moral activity guard against tyranny. Passivity does not. “Like the ancient philosophers whom he admired, and their Christian-Stoic disciples of the Renaissance, as well as the moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment and the humanists Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, Mill understood that a good society could not long survive the eclipse of a freely chosen virtue.” On the basis of that sentence, Semmel may be said to be wiser than he is learned.
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