John Stuart Mill by Gregory Claeys

Author:Gregory Claeys [Claeys, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191067105
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2021-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Equality and class

The ideal of equality championed in the Principles must be weighed against Mill’s much better known commitment to liberty. The jurist Albert Venn Dicey thought that here his views belonged ‘to the school rather of Rousseau than of Bentham’. But Mill agreed with Bentham in 1848 that equality, ‘though not the sole end, is one of the ends of good social arrangements’, and that ‘a system of institutions which does not make the scale turn in favour of equality, whenever this can be done without impairing the security of the property which is the product and reward of personal exertion, is essentially a bad government—a government for the few, to the injury of the many’. Occasionally Mill reveals a Platonic vein on this subject, as in the comment that ‘It is only the high-minded to whom equality is really agreeable. A proof is that they are the only persons who are capable of strong and durable attachments to their equals; while strong and durable attachments to superiors or inferiors are far more common and are possible to the vulgarest natures.’ (Remember that Plato’s Guardians in the Republic were communists.) Yet equality was the basis of the best life; as he commented elsewhere, ‘In my estimation the art of living with others consists first & chiefly in treating & being treated by them as equals.’ This is very much the spirit of The Subjection of Women, which presents his most impassioned defence of the principle.

Mill’s approach to class involved the collision of two principles: a growing commitment to equality, and recognizing that striving for wealth entailed permitting its accumulation to some degree, thus fostering inequality. In 1825, Mill did not object to ‘a class of rich men, I care not how rich, if they become so no otherwise than by the natural operation of the laws of property’. By 1831 he modified this, stating that

the wealth of a country is upon a footing most favourable to human happiness, just in proportion to the number of persons whom it enables to obtain, by their bodily and mental exertions, a comfortable subsistence; while on the contrary, a further increase of the wealth of particular individuals beyond this point, makes a very questionable addition to the general happiness; and is even, if the same wealth would otherwise have been employed in raising other persons from a state of poverty, a positive evil. (XXII. 249)

Mill continued to insist that a reasonable reward for the loan of capital was justified, and viewed capitalists as adequately recompensed by a 3–4 per cent return on investment. Limiting inheritance would prevent too great an accumulation of wealth. Like Owen, Mill tended to see the chief enemy of the working classes as the middlemen who enhanced the price of goods:

It is the enormous number of mere distributors who are not producers that really eat up the produce of labour, much more than the mere profits of Capital, which, in a great majority of cases, are not more than a

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