For more than fifty years now, John Stuart Mill's ‘Art of Life’, set forth in the last pages of the much-revised third edition (1851) of A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive (first edition 1843), has been laying the groundwork for revisionist readings of Mill's utilitarian theory. However, given the importance which the ‘Art of Life’ has come to hold in Mill scholarship, it is surprising that it is only now that a book appears on this extremely brief, yet quite intriguing part of Mill's A System of Logic. Thus, with an impressive array of Mill scholars, John Stuart Mill and The Art of Life fill a lacuna in the study of the implications of the ‘Art of Life’, the ‘Philosophia Prima’ of conduct (A System of Logic, 1974) for Mill's utilitarian theory.

The volume consists of an Introduction by the editors and eleven chapters by individual contributors, divided into four sections. In the Introduction, Eggleston, Miller and Weinstein begin by briefly mentioning why Mill's theory of practical reason has not received the attention it deserves and then go on to summarize Mill's account of the ‘Art of Life’ (in its three departments: Morality, Expediency and Aesthetics), tracing its origin in Mill's discussion of Art and Science. Though their brief account of Mill's ‘most general theory of what we have reason to do’ (p. 3) makes a good introduction to the volume, it leaves the reader wanting more. For example, why did the section on the ‘Art of Life’ appear in the third edition and not the first? And, given that it was a later addition, what inspired Mill to include such a section and from where did he draw the idea of an architectonic technē of living?

The first section examines an issue pertaining to the relation between Morality and Expediency in Mill's ethical theory, namely rule-utilitarianism. In ‘Mill's Rule Utilitarianism in Context’, the first chapter of the volume, Rex Martin explores two distinct versions of rule-utilitarianism: ‘ideal rule’ and ‘indirect’ utilitarianism. He then reads Mill's Utilitarianism as suggestive of the ‘indirect’ variety, and finds further corroborating evidence in Mill's ‘Art of Life’. Martin concludes that though Mill may indeed be sometimes taken to adhere to ‘ideal rule’ utilitarianism, he never seems to embrace act-utilitarianism either. Ben Eggleston, in ‘Rules and their Reasons: Mill on Morality and Instrumental Rationality’, also takes up the question of whether Mill was a rule- or an act-utilitarian by drawing on the final chapter of Mill's A System of Logic. Unlike Martin, Eggleston notices Mill's criticism in A System of Logic of those who are ‘slave[s]of [their] formulas’, i.e. those who are committed, in J. J. C. Smart's terms, to ‘superstitious rule worship’. Eggleston then tries to resolve the obvious conflict with other parts of Mill's works, where Mill seems to hold to a version of rule-utilitarianism. Like Eggleston, Dale E. Miller, in ‘Mill, Rule Utilitarianism, and the Incoherence Objection’, does not deny that Mill seems to be committed to contradictory claims, but draws on Mill to reconstruct a version of rule-utilitarianism that avoids the incoherence objection. Once again, Mill's ‘Art of Life’ is at the core of the attempted reconstruction. Beginning from Mill's shortcomings, Miller goes on to construct ‘individual-rule utilitarianism’, as the only way out of the incoherence objection. The first section also includes David Weinstein's ‘Interpreting Mill’, which actually constitutes the second chapter of the volume. It would be a fitting conclusion to the first section on Mill and rule-utilitarianism because Weinstein excellently reminds us that rarely do analytic philosophers make good intellectual historians. Weinstein goes back to F. H. Bradley's criticisms of Mill to point out that not only do moral philosophers anachronistically impose today's terms (e.g. rule-utilitarianism and rule-consequentialism) on Mill, creating an ‘improved Mill’, but also that the essence of what we call now the incoherence objection had already been identified and insisted upon by Mill's contemporaries.

Section II of the volume focuses on the relation between Morality and Aesthetics. In particular, Jonathan Riley's ‘Optimal Moral Rules and Supererogatory Acts’ expands on several aspects of what Riley calls Mill's ‘extraordinary form of utilitarianism’ and suggests the existence of three spheres of individual conduct. Moving quickly past the familiar self-regarding sphere, Riley breaks the other-regarding sphere down to two component parts: the social sphere of morality and law, where individuals ought to comply with an optimal social code which secures vital interests, and the social sphere of competitive freedom, where individuals may harm others without their consent for the most efficient allocation of social goods and services. Supererogation, Riley argues, subsists in the latter sphere. On the other hand, Wendy Donner, in ‘Morality, Virtue, and Aesthetics in Mill's Art of Life’, pauses only briefly on the relation between morality and supererogation. Donner spends more time considering the more general question of cultivating virtue and examining Mill's writings on aesthetic education and poetic imagination to identify what brought Mill closer to, or distanced him from, the Romantics. In the last section of the chapter, Donner moves much beyond the narrow bounds of Mill's Art of Life to discuss what differentiates Mill's conception of human nature from Wordsworth's but also from conceptions from deep ecology and Mahayana Buddhism.

Section III engages with Mill's principle of utility as the foundation of his theory of practical reason. Elijah Millgram's ‘Mill's Incubus’, the seventh chapter of the volume, revisits Mill's ‘mental crisis’ and casts it as a crisis of ‘moral unfreedom’. Building on this insight, Millgram goes on to examine how Mill adjusted his notion of utility to make room for what he learned from that crisis. Millgram then suggests that if Mill's Art of Life is built around a single goal, it must be ‘a goal or end in a rather thin sense’ (p. 184) since only then would the person who practices such an art be able to enjoy a plurality of higher pleasures, being morally free rather than morally unfree in being bound to pursue – and paradoxically eventually cease to enjoy – a single highest pleasure. Similarly, Philip Kitcher, in ‘Mill, Education, and the Good Life’, suggests that Mill advanced a version of consequentialism that is flexible. A flexible consequentialist is not committed to systemizing all available phenomena under one ‘grand philosophical vision’, but is rather committed to constant revision and reconstruction of the conception of the good. Accordingly, Kitcher reads Mill's Utilitarianism in light of On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government, Mill's ‘Inaugural Address’ at the University of St Andrews and other works Kitcher considers as Mill's contributions to the general theory of education. He sees Mill as advocating ‘for the joint development of the individual and of social institutions’ (p. 199), core issues of a long philosophical tradition that includes figures such as Plato and John Dewey.

The final (fourth) section is concerned with the Art of Life as an actual part of ways of living. Robert Haraldsson's ‘Taking it to Heart: Mill on Appropriation and the Art of Ethics’ compares and rejects two sorts of moral reasoning in favour of third which is not blind to the significance of an Art of Life. The first misguided form of moral reasoning, developed in A System of Logic, approaches ethics in a deductive spirit, i.e. giving an exaggerated role to first principles and evaluating particular actions always in terms of an ultimate principle. Similarly, the second misguided form of moral reasoning, suggested in On Liberty, refers to the routine acquiescence to a belief, holding fast to it as a ‘dead dogma’ rather than a ‘living truth’. Instead, the Art of Life – defined by Mill in the most general terms – allocates increased importance to secondary principles and their conscious application to one's own life by being ‘taken to heart’ rather than by rote. In the tenth chapter of the book, ‘An Alternative Modernity: Mill on Capitalism and the Quality of Life’, Nadia Urbinati explores some ancient Greek themes in Mill's thought that informed his critique of modern economic organization, contrasting the art of living with the art of getting on. The ancients, Urbinati argues, gave Mill a critical ‘tool’ to cross-examine modernity Socratically from the viewpoint of an alternative conception of the good life. The result, according to Urbinati, was Mill's vision of a stationary state in which economic development would cease to be the single object of society but also in which intellectual and moral growth would become vital components of the good life. In the last chapter of the book, ‘Mill, Life as an Art and Problems of Self-Description in an Industrial Age’, Colin Heydt seeks to define Mill's naturalistic alternative to religion as the only remedy to lives that have little or no connection to the lives and interests of others. For Heydt, the Art of Life was not used metaphorically by Mill, but it was a philosophical programme calling on individuals to approach their lives as works of art. Through Mill's interaction with Wordsworth and Ruskin, Heydt traces in Mill's rendition of the Religion of Humanity an embodiment of the poetic attitude through which institutions, the press and education can develop the sympathetic capacity of individuals and make them see themselves as part of the ‘epic of humanity’.

John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life is an important addition to Mill scholarship and offers a number of new insights about this neglected aspect of Mill's thought. Perhaps the ancient Greek element in Mill's notion of an Art of Life, it being after all a technē peri ton bion, could have been explored by one of the contributors – doing so would have given a much better understanding of its component parts. Also, Mill students would perhaps have expected Alan Ryan – one of the first to draw attention nearly fifty years ago to the significance of the Art of Life in understanding Mill's ethical theory – to be among the contributors to the third or fourth section. Still, the scholars in this volume take Mill's Art of Life in important new directions. The book is likely to interest moral philosophers, political theorists and intellectual historians and is essential reading for any student of Mill's works.