In the Preface to his splendid new study, Mill, Fred Rosen writes: ‘I have tried to release Mill from numerous stale arguments and debates in an attempt to establish a more rounded view of his ideas as well as to capture the turmoil that surrounded his intellectual and personal life’ (p. vii). For Rosen, contemporary Mill scholarship has gone so stale because it has lost its way by becoming so infused with conceptual conundrums preoccupying contemporary analytical philosophers. In interpreting Mill, we typically turn to fretting about whether utility can be accommodated with genuine respect for liberty and moral rights and whether success or failure in doing so makes indirect, rule-utilitarianism a credible alternative to act-utilitarianism. And we regularly invest nearly as much precious intellectual energy in our accounts of Mill in defending or attacking alternative versions of hedonism. Whereas such concerns have become staple analytical gruel of so much of our philosophical thinking and writing, by contrast, according to Rosen, they were hardly seminal for Mill.

In Rosen's view, then, we wholly misunderstand Mill if we read him mesmerized by the philosophical discourse set in motion by Rawls, as if Mill was just another theorist like ourselves writing what we presently call political theory. ‘But, for Mill’, according to Rosen, ‘there was no theory of justice’ in so far as justice varied with historical context (p. 111). Hence, while modern commentators ‘may go to the heart of key issues in recent moral and political philosophy from a Millian perspective . . . they do not necessarily go to the heart of Mill's thought’ (p. 2). In other words, interpreting Mill should not be confused with appropriating him. Whenever and wherever we confuse interpretation with appropriation, we wrong-headedly risk reconstructing Mill as a brilliant and prescient anticipation of what beckons and troubles us as worthy philosophizing.

Rosen therefore quite rightly avers that if our aim is to understand how Mill understood himself rather than rewrite him through the lens of our sufficiently different philosophical prejudices and fascinations, then we need to contextualize him historically far more sensitively than has been our habit. We need to pay far better attention than we have to other philosophers besides Bentham, who were just as formative in the development of his thinking. For Rosen, we should examine more carefully Mill's intellectual relationship with Alexander Bain and his philosophical encounter with Auguste Comte in particular. And when we do this, we discover another Mill than the one we have been reinventing over and over again. Among other things, we discover that Mill struggled to make sense of liberty philosophically far earlier than we conventionally assume. We also discover just how important the science of ethology was for Mill as he formulated it in the System of Logic.

Now if Rosen is right, following Bain, that the System of Logic and Principles of Political Economy were Mill's most significant works, then the years in which Mill wrote both are contextually crucial for assessing him overall. For this reason, Rosen insists that it is especially important to pay particular attention to the Mill–Comte correspondence, which ‘mirrored’ this period of remarkable philosophical ingenuity on Mill's part. We learn from his correspondence with Comte just how powerfully influential Comte was on Mill's earlier thinking and how Mill's encounter with Comte's anti-liberalism surely had to be pivotal to Mill's renewed appreciation for the value of liberty. Indeed, in Rosen's view, Mill's explicit criticism of Comte's authoritarianism in Auguste Comte and Positivism (1865) in language anticipating Mill's subsequent defence of liberty in On Liberty bears out the absolute importance of his relationship with Comte in coming to a more rounded interpretation of Mill.

Furthermore, Bain's influence on Mill was extensive not least, according to Rosen, because he helped Mill write and edit several editions of the System of Logic, which first appeared in 1843. Bain's view of logic and its importance were therefore not much different from Mill's. Like Mill, Bain's conception of logic was modelled on Socratic elenchus, advocating liberty of thought and discussion as essential to discovering truth and fostering personal flourishing. Moreover, given Bain's closeness to Mill, we should take seriously Bain's assessment in John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections (1882) that Mill's most original work was mostly completed with the System of Logic and the somewhat later Principles of Political Economy (1848). On Bain's account, cited approvingly by Rosen, Mill's ‘subsequent years were marked by diminished labours on the whole, while the direction of these labours was toward application, exposition and polemic, rather than origination; and he was more and more absorbed in the outlook for social improvement’ (p. 99).

Rosen reinforces his conviction that Mill had already considerably worked out his conception of liberty by the 1840s by highlighting what Mill wrote about liberty in the Principles of Political Economy. For instance, there Mill claims that:

And just as importantly, by circumscribing what concerns individuals only, this circle of liberty, suitably sheltered, ensures everyone, including especially women, the equal opportunity to cultivate their faculties, develop their characters and flourish. The ‘continued exercise of active character’ was the most ‘important foundation for the circle of liberty’ (p. 149).

Why, on Rosen's reading, ethology was so elemental for Mill is palpable. As the science of the purported universal laws of the formation of character, it amounted to no less than a science of human flourishing and liberty. Whereas the ‘art of life’ establishes our normative ends, ethology discloses the fundamental psychological principles we must take account of in pursuing the former. The ‘art of life’ sets the target and ethology explains psychologically how to hit it. Because, according to Rosen, Mill devoted most of the System of Logic to ethology rather than to the art of living, he privileged psychology over practical reasoning, contrary to Bentham. Indeed, Mill appended the final chapter on the art of life to the third edition of the System of Logic (1851) ‘almost as an afterthought’, which is as much as to say that moral thinking was pretty much an ‘afterthought’ for Mill in the text. And because this text was so seminal and so formative for Mill, we seem led to conclude that Mill was much less a moral philosopher than we now take for granted because of our contemporary fixations with such philosophical dilemmas as whether utilitarianism is compatible with liberalism. We misread Mill in his own terms and out of context, making him more the moral philosopher than he was and would have ever recognized. This is a remarkable implication that could well be correct.

By recontextualizing Mill differently, Rosen therefore compels us to consider him differently. Rosen, then, may also be entirely correct that ‘from the perspective of Mill's own thought’ and what he ‘actually wrote’, there may ‘not be much point in looking to a consequentialist theory’ if this means reading what we now call consequentialism back into Mill (p. 206). Mill could not possibly have been a consequentialist from his historical perspective. He therefore could never have been concerned, as Rosen claims, ‘only with narrow technical [philosophical] problems’ that indeed animate many of us these days (p. 259).

But just because we would go wrong interpreting Mill as a consequentialist, it hardly follows that we should not hesitate to appropriate him for our own ‘technical’ purposes as long as we do not confuse what we are doing with him with interpreting him. We can use Mill however we like to stimulate creative thinking about whatever philosophically troubles us. We can manipulate or rewrite him however we choose in order to tackle our philosophical problems such as, for instance, the incoherence objection to attempting to combine liberal moral rights with consequentialist practical reasoning. (I would, though, remind present-day users of Mill that his contemporary critics like James Fitzjames Stephens and F. H. Bradley challenged Mill on similar grounds, though they never referred to their challenge as the ‘incoherence’ objection and though they never pressed it with the same technical acumen as David Lyons and others more recently.)

Rosen nevertheless seems to grant at one point that using Mill is permissible as long as we recognize that we are using him rather than interpreting him in so far as interpreting him requires attempting to recover him in his own terms. Rosen insists that Mill, properly restored, remains relevant philosophically for us. We should ‘use’ him as a ‘profoundly contemporary thinker’. He remains ‘a “living” thinker who still plays an important role in numerous academic disciplines from logic to moral and political philosophy, from economics to social science, and in the debates that are part of contemporary social and political life’ (p. 258). Though Rosen does not mention Amartya Sen for instance, Sen has clearly found Mill exceptionally relevant and useful in exposing the productivist bias of contemporary measures of economic growth and wealth. Sen has often acknowledged his immense debts to Mill without pretending to offer a comprehensive interpretation of him, conceding that the extensive similarities between Mill's ideas and his own were ‘tremendously pleasing’, making him extremely proud that his own ideas were not ‘rootless’ and belonged to a tradition founded by illustrious thinkers such as Mill. So, to repeat, using Mill is indeed fully warranted as long as we recognize explicitly that we are using him and not really interpreting him.

Rosen concludes his book's Introduction by wondering ‘whether or not we have lost the capacity to understand’ Mill (p. 27). While, following Rosen, we can indeed manage to understand him more or less well provided we doggedly do our very best to contextualize him historically, we will never completely succeed in understanding him as he understood himself. And we need not read continental theory to become convinced of that. All we have to do is look to English-speaking philosophers and historians of political philosophy from Collingwood to Skinner to appreciate that while recovering texts in their own terms should be our goal in interpreting them, interpreting them is unavoidably a ‘fusing’ of horizons.