For nearly two centuries, J. S. Mill’s thought has frustrated scholarly efforts at categorization. Indeed, although he is now almost universally identified with liberalism, little consensus exists as to what kind of liberal Mill was, or what kind of liberalism his work promotes. This may be the rightful legacy of a self-described “many-sided” thinker; it is also the reason Mill’s thought invites—demands—continued attention. The complex quality of his thought is something that Chris Barker’s book takes seriously in attempting a new and comprehensive account of Mill’s social and political writings. It is an attempt that the book largely achieves through a fresh and engaging take on the role of education in Millian liberalism.
Educating Liberty succeeds in part because it offers a broad synthesis of Mill’s writings on education. The argument comes together through a comparative study of his educative concerns with various aspects of social and political life. These include marriage (Chap. 1), labor relations (Chap. 2), the role of experts (Chap. 3), representative government (Chap. 4) and religion (Chap. 5). By working across these themes, Barker is able to showcase the breadth of Mill’s focus on education and can thus convincingly argue that it lies at the heart of his politics. As he elegantly puts it, Mill understood that “[o]ne changes majorities by educating them, and one educates majorities by changing their experience of power” (p. 2).
The book’s general observations about Mill’s investments in reforming character through educative projects are not entirely new. They echo scholars like John Robson, Alan Ryan, Richard Ashcraft, Terence Ball, and others who have examined Mill’s interest in the study of character (ethology), and the eclectic mode of reasoning he embraced. However, Barker invigorates this tradition of Mill scholarship with new momentum by drawing out the importance of things like civic cooperation and friendship for Mill’s educative reasoning. This is the most refreshing aspect of the book: Barker brings to light the essential role that collaborative relationships play in Mill’s proposals concerning gender, class, mass opinion, representative government, and religion. In each case, the author makes clear that Millian education is a deeply social enterprise—one for which individual enlightenment cannot be detached from collective engagements. It is a democratic project.
The book’s focus on gender and class politics are particularly illuminating here. In Mill’s work on marriage, for instance, Barker points out that creating conditions for marital friendship was “the first great change in the education of liberal citizens” that Mill sought (p. 50). Spousal friendship encourages intellectual intimacy between equals, an intimacy that in turn fosters esteem for the mutual recognition, deliberation, and cooperation necessary to “educate citizens for the state” (p. 48). Barker also acknowledges that Mill’s arguments were directly influenced by his own intimate friendship with Harriet Taylor Mill: “[T]he entire project of liberalism was their project,” such that the absence of her friendship and intellectual partnership would have been “disastrous” for Mill (p. 45). In this respect, Educating Liberty has the rare distinction among Mill scholarship of treating Harriet Taylor Mill with the respect Mill himself said she was due.
On class politics, Barker’s discussion similarly highlights the collaborative aims of Mill’s policies, which integrate “his educational aspirations with economic realities” (p. 71). As Barker has it, Mill maintained a commitment to “competition and private property” insofar as both could be directed toward the “education of working men and women and the reformation of the characters and habits of the owners, managers and privileged classes who rely on unearned wealth” (p. 51). Mill’s economic reforms took into account not only the material realities of class relations, then, but also the effects of those relations on mental and moral development. Although Barker readily acknowledges that Mill’s proposals do not necessarily meet these lofty goals, he is right to suggest that Mill’s educative approach can at least inform how the modern reader evaluates market democracy today (p. 82).
Of course, tackling an inclusive study of Mill’s work on education is bound to encounter challenges. One concerns narrative flow. As Mill tells us in the Autobiography, his ideas were forged through critical consideration of other writers. Studies of Mill are consequently confronted with the difficult task of striking a balance between acknowledging his interlocutors and not ceding too much of the narrative focus to them. That balance is occasionally lost in the book. Chapter 3’s discussion of expert knowledge, for example, is almost as much a study of Auguste Comte as it is of Mill. Although Barker aims to offer an exhaustive account of Mill’s intellectual orbit, some readers, nonspecialists in particular, might find themselves momentarily adrift amid the cast of characters incorporated in the book.
Barker’s extended focus on Comte does, however, reveal a schism in Mill’s educative reasoning, particularly between his rejection of Comtian expertocracy and his support for electoral controls on the masses in the form of plural voting for the most educated. Against Comte’s preference for expert rule, Mill, Barker says, sees no value in “the power of a positivist vanguard” (p. 97) and “refuses to pay for enlightenment with the coin of individual agency” (p. 115). But in electoral politics, Barker argues, Mill’s “chief emphasis is on the power of the wise” (p. 132). More, he suggests that Mill intends schemes like plural voting to be a permanent feature of representative government (a point also made in Dale Miller’s “The Place of Plural Voting in Mill’s Conception of Representative Government,” Review of Politics, 77(3), 2015). In this case, at least, Barker’s analysis reveals a Mill willing to pay for legislative enlightenment with the coin of electoral equality. Yet institutionalizing the overrepresentation of an educated elite in the franchise seems to run afoul of the experimental attitude that Barker himself suggests is crucial to Mill’s educative reasoning. This is an interesting tension that the book might have attended to more.
Another challenge is the comparatively little attention paid to Mill’s politics of empire in this otherwise comprehensive study. The same tension between Mill’s educative experimentalism and his elevation of the “wise” in governance matters permeates his writings on imperialism. Although Barker indicts Mill’s imperial writings on Ireland and India as mistaken (pp. 92, 153), and illogical (p. 114), for the most part he leaves the issue of imperialism beyond the scope of his analysis (p. 239, n. 61). This is a curious choice, particularly as early in the text the author suggests that Mill’s mistakes on empire resulted from a misapplication of principle, and not “wrong judgment after observation and practice” (p. 11). That is not likely to satisfy contemporary critics of the nineteenth-century turn to empire in liberal thought—for whom Mill is a favored object of censure. After all, Mill’s justifications of imperialism as a mechanism of social progress would seem to be a key test of his educative principles. And there are other reasons to draw his imperial writings into greater focus. For instance, might the tension between Mill’s anti-Comtian view of expert rule and his preference for elite judgment in representative government find a parallel tension in his defense of the imperial project? Such parallels between Mill’s domestic and international politics, if they can be sustained, would make for a thought-provoking rejoinder to critics of his “liberal imperialism.” One wonders if Barker misses an opportunity to directly confront Mill’s work on empire within the scope of the educative project he says is at the core of Mill’s thought.
These issues do not detract from Educating Liberty’s overall contributions to studies of Mill, and of education as a centerpiece of liberal politics more generally. They are, rather, the products of an ambitious conceptual project—one which, like J. S. Mill himself, invites thoughtful consideration.
