In politics, all abstract terms conceal treachery.

C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins.

To prove a negative, the argument must be capable of being expressed in this form:–

No one who is capable of self-control is necessarily vicious;

I would like to begin this essay with some designedly naïve remarks about the construction of philosophical heroes versus philosophical villains, remarks that will help define the opposing poles in more or less current philosophical receptions and reconstructions of the work of John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick. Perhaps it is especially appropriate, at this bicentennial moment, to engage in some such reflection on what is living and what is dead in Mill and Sidgwick – or, to adapt a recent title by John Skorupski, ‘Why read Mill and Sidgwick?’ Clearly, there is much that is living in both cases; Mill has become, in Skorupski's words, a ‘talismanic liberal’, a virtual paradigm case of the liberal mentality, and Sidgwick's reputation as the great classical utilitarian successor to Mill has never been higher. And yet, developments in the relatively recent literature on these figures point up some very important and very worrisome topics that we must confront in our readings of Mill and Sidgwick, increasingly enthusiastic as these may be. When it comes to the reception of Mill and Sidgwick and classical utilitarianism generally, we are in an age of transition, and there are some indications of progress. All the more reason to take care that the case for reading Mill and Sidgwick be made in ways that take the full measure of the critics, particularly those critics who make a forceful case for reading both Mill and Sidgwick as representing certain forms of imperialist and racist thinking.

To begin with the positive. Happily, for Mill's current reputation, one finds today a valuable and flourishing literature that casts Mill as a multiculture hero. Prominent public intellectual Martha Nussbaum has increasingly incorporated Millian materials in her ‘capabilities’ approach and feminist work, calling Mill ‘a vital resource for all who care about the future of women and men, and of the justice that may possibly exist between them’. Mill, according to Nussbaum, ‘shows with daring and clarity how thoroughly the preferences and desires of women have been deformed by male power’. And what is more, Mill's critique of male power is strengthened by a conception of happiness that makes it ‘a richer resource’ for ‘contemporary feminist and, more generally, anti-hierarchical thinking’.Footnote ¹ The Mill celebrated by Nussbaum can be deployed for purposes of the new cosmopolitanism that Nussbaum champions against those given to excessive love of country or of communitarian particularity. Indeed, Georgios Varouxakis, in his compelling work on Mill on Nationality, has driven the point home: ‘Mill's conception of the relationship between obligations to country and obligations to mankind was close to that of Nussbaum.’ For both, patriotism is commendable only when it conduces ‘to the interests of the whole of humanity’.Footnote ²

The cosmopolitan account of patriotism and particular loyalties and attachments generally is indeed at a far remove from old-fashioned communitarian love of country right or wrong. Even farther when, as has sometimes happened, Nussbaum overstates her opposition to patriotic loyalty, making such loyalty sound wholly derivative of rather than merely subordinate to one's larger duties to humanity. But in an important interview, Nussbaum explains:

Still, against such types as Richard Rorty, she urges:

Thus, for Nussbaum, Mill emerges as a hero of feminist, anti-hierar-chical, cosmopolitan thinking, one who, better yet, ruthlessly adapted for the modern era the valuable bits in Aristotle about happiness as a complex whole, involving activity. She is in effect worrying about an analogue, at the level of the nation, of the old Bernard Williams challenge that the person who puts ethical impartiality above his or her particular loves may have one thought too many. Like many a defender of impartialism, notably Peter Singer, she deems it more worrisome to have one thought too few – a worry that seems especially apt when it comes to the subject of patriotism, where thoughts are too few to begin with.

Nussbaum's work on Mill tends to accentuate the positive, and she scarcely addresses those critics of Mill who worry that he is an unlikely hero for anti-hierarchical thinking, given his colonialist entanglements. But if she does not directly address the charges of Mill's ethnocentrism, colonialism, imperialism, racism, etc., Anthony Kwame Appiah, her seeming ally in the new cosmopolitanism, does, and in very sharp terms. Mill is in fact the main protagonist of Appiah's subtle work on The Ethics of Identity, a book that moves gracefully between a breathtaking range of positions. But on one point, Appiah is quite uncompromising: against the charge, which he takes as common to Uday Mehta, Bhikhu Parikh and John Gray, that ‘Mill was an autonomist, and that autonomism is an ethnocentric preference, ruled out by pluralism’, he argues that the critics have it backwards. Thus,

Appiah continues precisely by invoking Mill versus Carlyle on ‘the Negro Question’ – about which more directly – in support of the conclusion that:

Now for the negative, the case against Mill – or, more accurately, that case against Mill that I want to see more effectively addressed (or acknowledged) in cosmopolitan defenses of Mill. Recent decades have also witnessed a minor flourishing of critical literature in which, as Appiah suggests, the younger Mill is cast as grotesquely Eurocentric, complacently and arrogantly imperialistic, and politely racist, arbitrarily confining his liberalism to home turf. These charges are not always made together, but I will review, briefly, some works in which they are raised together, works suggesting that Mill's ethnocentric, Eurocentric, and colonialist or imperialist predilections amounted to racist tendencies.Footnote ⁶ For some, Mill's admiration for his father's History of British India and his own work with the East India Company are deeply suggestive of his complicity in the growth of the British empire and in justifications for that growth grounded on racial difference. As Uday Mehta put it, in his influential work, Liberalism and Empire:

Indeed, in a rather too discreet footnote, Mehta suggests that the younger Mill was a ‘surprising exception’ to the generalization that at this historical juncture ‘race is seldom deployed as an explicit political category in the writings by British liberals’. Rather, Mill

For Mehta, Mill and the whole lot of classical utilitarians were as wanting in humility as they were overbrimming with fatuity:

The unlikely hero of Mehta's book turns out to be Edmund Burke, the last holdout of a humbler form of liberal pluralism before the fanatical onslaught of utilitarian confidence men (never mind that Burke himself was anti-Semitic).

Mehta's line is presented as in some respects a more forceful variant of the arguments of Bhikhu Parekh and John Gray, to the effect that comprehensive Millian liberalism failed badly on the count of sensitivity to culture difference and receptiveness to genuine pluralism. Just as the Calvinists were depicted in On Liberty as fundamentally out of sync with the progressive tendencies of civilization, so too the Indians, the black Jamaicans, the Irish, and others were in the rearguard of history, not the vanguard, and might need stern discipline.Footnote ¹⁰ Come to that, as Mill admitted in his Autobiography, he was in the later decades of his life not all that confident that the English were fit for democracy. Still, the English, even if they were Calvinists, did not bear the burden of different ‘blood’.

Intriguingly, the historian Thomas Holt, in his work The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938, finds that it is Mill's Burkean tendencies that are the problem, since his admission of cultural difference or otherness was often a type of racism in effect:

Thus, Mill can be effectively damned for either racistly failing to recognize cultural difference or for recognizing cultural difference in a way that played into racist hands. But in any event, and leaving Burke out of it, his views are suspect. David Theo Goldberg, in his important essay ‘Liberalism's Limits: Carlyle and Mill on “The Negro Question”’, has put the point with maximal severity:

Goldberg is of course referring to Mill's 1850 response to Thomas Carlyle's virulently racist essay ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’,Footnote ¹³ which was republished in pamphlet form after Mill's response with the contemptuous title ‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question’. It would be difficult to find a more baldly racist tract in all of western history: Carlyle parades every vicious prejudice towards blacks known to humanity, depicting a stereotype of ‘Quashee’, a lazy, laughing, watermelon (or ‘pumpkin’) eating inferior fit only for paternalistic control and direction by ‘the beneficent whip’ of whites, who are superior by birth. Indeed, Carlyle calls for – or at least strongly suggests the desirability of – the reinstitution of slavery, condemning, in his usual way, the cruelties of laissez-faire. The entire odious performance is cast in an offensively humorous vein, satirizing a ‘Universal Abolition of Pain Association’.

Goldberg admits, of course, that Carlyle's essay provoked a scathing critical rejoinder from Mill, who remarked of the slave trade ‘I have yet to learn that anything more detestable than this has been done by human beings towards human beings in any part of the earth.’Footnote ¹⁴ Mill charged Carlyle with:

Moreover, the ‘great ethical doctrine’ of Carlyle's Discourse ‘than which a doctrine more damnable, I should think, never was propounded by a professed moral reformer, is, that one kind of human beings are born servants to another kind’. Mill identified himself with the ‘thinking persons’ who ‘either doubt or positively deny’ the innate inferiority of blacks. And he had much sport with Carlyle's insane views about work being the be-all and end-all of existence.

Still, Goldberg has serious doubts. ‘It was Carlyle's call to reinstitute slavery to which Mill principally objected . . . [His] critical concern with Carlyle's racist sentiment was only secondary and much more understated. Moreover, not only did Mill not object to colonial domination, he insisted upon it, albeit in “benevolent” form.’Footnote ¹⁶ And Mill only doubted that blacks were biologically inferior; he did not, alas, effectively deny Carlyle's claim that blacks were somehow inferior, so much as recast the inferiority as a historically contingent matter. As Joseph Miller has also observed, ‘Mill agrees with Carlyle that blacks generally are less capable than Europeans, comparing blacks to trees that grew in poor soil or poor climate or that might have suffered from exposure, storms or disease.’Footnote ¹⁷ And in this case, for Goldberg, Mill's defense of laissez-faire, rather than limitation of it, was suspect on racial grounds. In

Thus, if Carlyle's racism was ‘bald and vicious’, Mill's was merely ‘polite and effete’. Still, ‘polite and effete’ racism remains dreadful. Mill's

However, Goldberg also supports his case by bringing in Mill on India and the claims about people of different blood being unfit for representative government. Mill represented ‘colonialism with a human face. The world was to be directed by the most developed and capable nations whose self-interests nevertheless would be mitigated and mediated by the force of utilitarian reason.’Footnote ²⁰ Essentially the same line is helpfully developed in a recent essay by Anthony Bogues, ‘John Stuart Mill and “The Negro Question”: Race, Colonialism, and the Ladder of Civilization’, which argues:

These various critiques are harsh: Burke teaming up with Frantz Fanon to blast Mill as a racist and nascent neo-conservative. Like one of those racists, and the Bush administration is indeed full of them, who talk the talk of compassion (some even believing what they are saying) even while whipping up support from racist constituencies with carefully encoded sermons on what makes America great – not to mention discreetly working behind the scenes to remove blacks from the lists of eligible voters by targeting supposed criminals. Not quite what Gertrude Himmelfarb had in mind, at least one hopes. At any rate, on these readings, taken collectively, Mill is suspect, on the count of racism, both when urging the spread of representative government and laissez-faire and when qualifying their applicability, both when recognizing difference and when being ‘blood blind’. Goldberg is incensed both by Mill allowing the English to play Charlemagne in India and by his supposed call (which, incidentally, was in fact quite qualified) for laissez-faire in Jamaica.

Now, at first blush, it might seem that Nussbaum and Appiah are, as Appiah explicitly suggests, utterly at odds with the Mehta, Parekh et al. criticism of universalistic, monistic Millian liberalism. And yet, intriguingly, in the very passages that I cited, Mehta, at least, was spelling out this charge with respect to the very same Millian claim about how despotism might be best for ‘backward societies’ – a claim that Appiah concedes is ethnocentric. Indeed, Mehta's distaste for Millian arrogance is apparently not for Mill's monistic autonomism, but for his lapses into forms of particularism congenial to hierarchical racist thinking, for his allowances for peoples for whom representative political institutions might not be appropriate. Despite its appearance, Mehta's basic critique is rooted in the very same point that Appiah concedes. Moreover, it is a point also at the heart of Holt's reservations about Mill, which painted him as a racist fellow traveler thanks to his concessions to otherness and difference, and that figures in half of Goldberg's critique. And needless to say, Nussbaum's Millian work with Indian feminists, for example, more often finds itself at odds with people defending the domination of women in terms of ‘our way of life’ than with people defending universal human rights.

Still, this is obviously not to say all is in underlying harmony in Mill studies. For one thing, there are extreme defenders of pluralism, such as Parekh and Gray. But their position is not as widely shared as it may at first seem, among those concerned to criticize colonialist and imperialist forms of racism, and in fact, the more recent currents represented by Nussbaum and Appiah suggest that the pluralist critique of Mill is losing steam, going the way of communitarianism, identity politics, and the other ill-defined movements. In some ways, the point is simple: Mill failed not when he was at his best, but when he was at his worst, and he did have his failings. And if these were not such as to make him a nascent neo-con, they do nonetheless call for censure. Thus, as Jennifer Pitts has put it, in her admirable work A Turn to Empire:

Pitts, that is, provides a very careful, even-handed analysis of Mill's theoretical and practical work on both India and Jamaica. In the latter case as well as the former, Mill was practically and politically involved; he became the moving force on the Jamaica Committee investigating –or rather, condemning – Governor Eyre's atrocities in response to the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, when Eyre brutally repressed the (perfectly justifiable) uprising and judicially murdered such rebel leaders as Paul Bogle and George William Gordon, the latter being a well-to-do mulatto landowner and member of the Assembly who had long been critical of Eyre but was not directly involved in the rebellion. Eyre's ferocity recalled the British response to the Sepoy Rebellion, and Mill's response to it is, as Goldberg, Bogues and Pitts agree, singularly revealing, suggestive of what he did and did not dissent from in Carlyle (who was a leader of those defending Eyre).Footnote ²³ Mill wanted Eyre brought to justice, but that was apparently all he wanted, beyond his usual hopes for improving the quality of imperial rule. Mill's

Like Mehta, Pitts allows that Burke was more attuned than Mill to the abuses of colonial rule. But like Goldberg and Bogues, she recognizes how Mill's context was more virulently racist: ‘liberal colonial reform itself, and liberal cosmopolitanism, had changed by the mid-nineteenth century. British superiority and the justice of British colonial rule were nearly taken for granted by the bulk of the population by the mid-nineteenth century.’Footnote ²⁵ Thus, in this context, ‘Mill's continued opposition to racist argument and his commitment to benevolent and improving colonial government was perhaps the most ambitious posture liberalism could muster. The Eyre trial gives some indication of the constraints on humanitarian discourse more generally in the nineteenth century.’Footnote ²⁶ Although Pitts does not label Mill a ‘polite and effete’ racist, she does come quite close: ‘both Mill and Tocqueville insisted that claims about biological differences or inequalities were unprovable and morally and politically pernicious. And yet their willingness to see the moral and political standards that governed relations within Europe suspended in dealings with other peoples bore the mark of a discourse increasingly founded on the assumptions about the inequality of different peoples.’Footnote ²⁷ And after all, fierce as Mill's response to Carlyle was, he did not deny that there might be biological racial differences; he only claimed that scientific knowledge was insufficiently advanced to demonstrate these. This construction has the support of no less a Mill scholar than the late John Robson, who wrote, in his essay ‘Civilization and Culture’, that although Mill had little to say on ‘race’ – the term ‘national character’ being his more common idiom – which he considered an ‘accident of birth’ like sex, he did, like others of his time, tend ‘to apply it to groups that were indeed genetically loosely interrelated, but distinguished from one another by behaviour and belief’. His position was made clear in a letter to Charles Dupont-White, in which Mill emphatically denied that his condemnation of the ‘vulgar error’ of attributing everything to race meant that he attributed no influence to race – ‘he did not deny, but in fact admits “pleinement,” “l'influence des races.” ’Footnote ²⁸ But for the critics, agnosticism in this context is deeply suspect.

Such worries are not, to my mind, effectively addressed or even acknowledged by such figures as Nussbaum and Appiah. The most forthright defenses of Mill have come from others with some sympathy for their cosmopolitan line, such as Georgios Varouxakis and H. S. Jones. Against Goldberg, Varouxakis has forcefully argued that the difference between Carlyle and Mill should be counted as a difference between racist and non-racist: ‘I think that the two things are separate and that the term “racism” is not appropriate to describe Mill's attitude; “Euro-centric” would do.’Footnote ²⁹ But even so,

In essence, for Varouxakis, to label Mill a type of racist, or even to say, with Parekh that ‘From time to time Mill. . . came pretty close to the crude racism of his time’, is just too much, given how good he was in the context of his times, even if we admit that his ‘open-mindedness did not reach far enough’. Varouxakis carefully demonstrates, against Mehta, that what ‘Mill actually means when he talks of colonists “of our blood” is their cultural traits, coming from the mother county, the metropolis. He does not use “blood” literally.’Footnote ³¹

And Jones, for his part, urges that ‘Varouxakis has definitively refuted the surprisingly resilient belief that Mill had recourse to racial explanations in history and political thought’, and condemns Goldberg's case as ‘curiously slight’. Against Goldberg's claims about Mill erasing racial subjectivity, Jones argues that:

Furthermore, Goldberg's argument for regarding Mill as racist is akin to claims that he was not really a feminist; ‘the case for regarding Mill as a racist depends on the belief that his “civilizational perspective” betrayed an unspoken assimilation of “civilization” to white European civilization: the white European, then, embodied the universal standard of human excellence’, much as radical feminists charge him with measuring women by male standards, in effect recognizing their worth as men without penises. Jones stresses in response how Mill ‘was a consistent believer in the importance of “nurture” rather than “nature”’ and how he was ‘unsympathetic to “equal but different” arguments: that is, arguments for equality founded on the distinctive qualities of the oppressed. Mill tended to believe that oppression made people oppressed, not that it made people good in some distinctive way.’Footnote ³³

These defenses of Mill have surely gone very far to clarify just how Mill used such key terms as ‘race’, ‘blood’, ‘national character’, etc. But, despite appearances, they concede a lot to the critics. Varouxakis objects to ‘the rather promiscuous use of the term “racist” evinced in the writings of many scholars’, but he allows that Mill ‘did show himself deplorably ignorant and prejudiced about non-European cultures, not least those of the Indian Peninsula’. Jones allows that Pitts, especially, makes a powerful case: in effect, ‘the case of the radical emancipationist against the liberal emancipationist’, since Mill ‘did not appreciate the extent to which his understanding of what emancipation must entail was itself rooted in domination’.Footnote ³⁴ Even if we refrain from calling Mill a racist, we are right to call him arrogantly Eurocentric, too complacently accepting of difference as ‘inferiority’, and blindly paternalistic on the subject of subject peoples being allowed to rule themselves, making their own mistakes, etc. And all this in the name of bare historical accuracy, rather than ‘political correctness’, whatever that is supposed to mean. And this is not to mention Mill's avowed receptiveness (acknowledged by Robson) to the possibility that science might in the future make out some significant (biological) racial differences. Apparently, when it comes to arboreal metaphors about stunted growth, Mill's depictions of, say, the Jamaicans were rather more sinister than his depictions of subjected women in England. One can make a case, as Nussbaum does, for Mill as anticipating (at least in the English context) some elements of radical feminism, what with his keen sense of the distortions resulting from power and domination; one cannot make such a case with respect to his account of black Jamaicans.

But Varouxakis and Jones do not, I think, bring out just how far Mill's views on, say, the Jamaicans really could have justified a Victorian version of racial profiling.Footnote ³⁵ Given the conceptual confusions that swirl around the notion of ‘race’ even in our own day, such that one can find biological essentialists about race casting themselves as anti-racists and anti-biological essentialists cast – not usually by themselves – as racist, one might be forgiven for thinking that on the count of racism, Mill was close enough for imperial government work.Footnote ³⁶ Unfortunately, it cannot be said that Nussbaum and Appiah candidly acknowledge what a close call this matter is, which is especially surprising in Appiah's case, given how eloquent he has been on the long history of black identity politics, even in the nineteenth century. As Appiah notes, the early W. E. B. DuBois held that ‘people are members of the same race if they share features in virtue of being descended largely from people of the same region. Those features may be physical – hence Afro-Americas are Negroes – or cultural – hence Anglo-Americans are English.’Footnote ³⁷ Which is to say that DuBois, writing within twenty-five years of Mill's death, used the term ‘race’ in much the way Mill used the term ‘blood’, while seeking ‘to revalue one pole of the opposition of white to black’.Footnote ³⁸ Contra Jones, there clearly was an anti-racist, black subjectivity for Mill to ignore.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, he obviously did so when he was fairly confronted to his face (figuratively speaking) by the Jamaicans Paul Bogle and George William Gordon, who, as Holt argues, effectively used an eclectic blend of Christian and African religious ideas to provide ‘a vehicle for cultural resistance, giving moral authority to an alternative world-view’.Footnote ⁴⁰ As a relatively recent history of Jamaica puts it, Bogle and Gordon, in their last years,

In short, they were freedom fighters.Footnote ⁴² As Bogues notes, during the Morant Bay rebellion, the rebellious crowds at points confronted those police officers who were black with cries of ‘Cleave to the black’.Footnote ⁴³ And Gad Heuman also compellingly demonstrates how the Morant Bay rebellion ‘was preceded by a long history of slave rebellions as well as a series of riots in the post-emancipation period. Many of the people involved in these riots continued to look to the rebellions as models of resistance’, though after emancipation their agenda ‘included resisting any attempt at re-enslavement and regarded access to land as a measure of full freedom’.Footnote ⁴⁴ With respect to hero worship, Heuman has a good eye for the historical irony here: ‘although Eyre was regarded as a hero by many of the whites and browns in Jamaica for suppressing the rebellion, he is now nearly forgotten. Instead, Paul Bogle and George William Gordon are Jamaican National Heroes.’Footnote ⁴⁵

Thus, it is safe to say that even when confronted with a compelling, pragmatic black resistance movement and a possible extension of (genuine) political equality to Jamaican blacks in response, Mill, as Pitts puts it, ‘sought a solution in the imposition of reforms through the colonial authority’.Footnote ⁴⁶ To say that he was good for his cultural context is to define his cultural context by (a problematic construction of) English ‘whiteness’, when he himself was actively engaging with the Jamaican situation and an avowedly black liberation movement. Surely, as the entire field of postcolonial studies demonstrates, contextualist history need not be a mask for ornamentalism.Footnote ⁴⁷

The point here needs to be underscored: it is not enough to try to exonerate Mill, in the fashion of Varouxakis and Jones, by showing that he was not working with a biological racial essentialism. The racialism involved in racism is never coherent, and although the term ‘racism’ may have gained currency in the early twentieth century and have many gray areas, there is little reason to resist applying it to earlier periods, when such terms as ‘blood’ etc. seemed to carry a mix of biological and cultural features, just as they sometimes did in more recent times. Indeed, this point is compellingly made by George Fredrickson in his book Racism: A Short History. As Fredrickson puts it, ‘Deterministic cultural particularism can do the work of biological racism quite effectively.’ As he observes, with reference to the case of South African apartheid, the

On Varouxakis’ argument, South African apartheid ought to be called ‘Eurocentric’ rather than ‘racist’ – which is surely absurd. At any rate, it is scarcely anachronistic or judgmental to worry about racism in the context of Mill and Sidgwick; it is more anachronistic and judgmental to insist in advance on accepting the ‘limits’ of their cultural context, etc. As Fredrickson argues, although we must take care not to make ‘racism the ideological essence of imperialism’, we must, nonetheless, recognize how the ‘view of colonial rule as a lengthy and problematic apprenticeship for civilized modernity can be viewed as functionally racist to the degree that it justified denying civil and political rights to indigenous populations for the foreseeable future’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Admittedly, of the treatment of Gordon, Mill said some wise things, relevant to our own times: ‘The great majority of people, especially people in power, are ready to believe almost anything against their political enemies, especially those who have said or published things tending to excite disapprobation of their conduct.’Footnote ⁵⁰ But he did not pursue such thoughts to their uncomfortable conclusions. Complain as he might about ‘the overbearing and insolent disregard of the rights and feelings of inferiors which is the common characteristic of John Bull when he thinks he cannot be resisted’, he did not rethink his view of the ‘inferiors’.Footnote ⁵¹ As all, or at least most, sides admit, about the best ‘anti-hierarchical’ thought one can find in Mill on this subject comes in an 1866 letter to David Urquhart:

But Mill prefaces this late-in-life explanation with the admission: ‘You approve of my speech because you see that I am not on this occasion standing up for the negroes, or for liberty, deeply as both are interested in the subject – but for the first necessity of human society, law.’ Again, his overwhelming concern, throughout the Eyre business, was with the rule of law. As Kinzer, Robson and Robson remark, ‘The moral legitimacy of such imperial rule turned on the intent and capacity of the dominant country to provide the subject people with a government better – in the sense of promoting “the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” – than they could provide for themselves’, but the ‘men representing the British crown in Jamaica in the autumn of 1865 had disgraced the British Empire and desecrated the principles for which it ought to stand’.Footnote ⁵³

The best possible construal of Mill's position is judiciously developed by Joseph Miller: ‘Mill pursues Eyre not simply because Eyre threatens a colonial system whose weaknesses Mill refuses to acknowledge. Rather, Eyre represents a particular vision of colonialism (arbitrary despotism wielded only to the advantage of the colonizer) that is fundamentally at odds with Mill's considered conception of colonialism.’Footnote ⁵⁴ And of course, although he was recalled and his career effectively ended, Eyre never was brought to justice; rather, Mill lost his seat in Parliament in thanks for his efforts against the former Governor, the Jamaican Assembly was dissolved (by itself, out of fear of black participation) and Crown rule imposed.Footnote ⁵⁵ That (along with the death threats he received) should have provided Mill with rather more food for thought than it apparently did, though of course he was, at this point in his life, very outspoken about his views and willing to accept the consequences of this forthrightness. Alas, it is pure fantasy to suggest, as some have, that Mill was keeping his better angels under wraps for political purposes.Footnote ⁵⁶

Now, on the matter of Henry Sidgwick's development of such ideas, I can be uncharacteristically brief. As is well known, Sidgwick, by his own account, early on became a disciple of Mill's, when in the late 1850s he was a Cambridge undergraduate reading Mill's works with the famous secret discussion society, the Apostles. Sidgwick corresponded with Mill in the late 1860s, soliciting his ego ideal's advice on the sticky question of religious subscription – something that the younger and quite unorthodox philosopher was finding very problematic, since swearing to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church was required by his academic position. (Sidgwick of course famously resigned his position on such grounds in 1869, though he continued at Cambridge as a lecturer, in due course, after the law changed, regaining his Fellowship.) They were also, in the late 1860s, fellow members of the short-lived ‘Radical Club’. And Sidgwick's great work, The Methods of Ethics (1874), contained one of the most extended and probing treatments of utilitarianism ever penned, albeit one that was qualified by the ‘dualism of practical reason’ – that is, Sidgwick's frustrated conclusion that he had to concede that rational egoism appeared to be just as reasonable as utilitarianism.

Thus, although Sidgwick's views were sophisticated, eclectic and heavily qualified, such that he might better be called a dualist than a utilitarian, it nonetheless remains the case that he himself preferred the title ‘utilitarian’ and that when it comes to great nineteenth-century utilitarian successors to Mill, he is clearly the main claimant to the title. And when it comes to the recent critical reception of Sidgwick's works on the themes central to this essay, there is a much simpler story to tell. For better or worse, it is largely a case of Schultz versus Schultz – that is, of the different possible interpretations of his politics set out in my book, Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe.Footnote ⁵⁷

Here, however, I will let one of my reviewers make the point. As Rob Shaver puts it, in his review of Eye in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Well, I take that as something of a compliment, to the effect that I succeeded in bringing a certain Sidgwickian even-handedness to a very difficult – indeed, explosive – subject, one made all the more difficult by Sidgwick's well-known penchant for putting his political theoretical views in an excessively abstract way, such that it can be very difficult to figure out just what concrete examples he had in mind. But I would also underscore that however ‘good for his times’ some aspects of Sidgwick's work might seem, his agnosticism, which was much like Mill's, clearly had an even more problematic side, the more so given that, unlike Mill, Sidgwick in his correspondence sometimes used the ‘N word’ – ‘nigger’ – and this in an alarmingly offhand way. Indeed, despite ample opportunity to blast ‘bald and vicious’ forms of racism of the Carlylean type – as in the case of his review of Charles Henry Pearson's book, National Life and Character – Sidgwick never did so, preferring instead to politely sidestep such issues.

Still, I worry that I did not, in my book, get matters quite right. I do not think that I sufficiently stressed just how close Mill and Sidgwick were on this score, since I tended to read Mill as largely working in a much less virulently racist context than Sidgwick's,Footnote ⁵⁹ without stressing how he could be cast as a ‘polite’ racist. Although Sidgwick does not, in any of his major (or minor) works, actually comment on Mill versus Carlyle, his line is extremely close to Mill's – while conceding that historically, things are not so simple and that the Egyptians and other non-whites played important roles in cultural advance, he nonetheless allows that future science might demonstrate significant racial differences, that ‘savages’ are ‘inferior’, even if it is a contingent inferiority, and that ‘civilized’ Europeans, to whom we owe constitutional government, are for the foreseeable future to be the judges and schoolmasters of the world.Footnote ⁶⁰ It is in an extremely Millian fashion that he recognizes how the rights of subjected peoples must be protected from the abuses of colonial governments. Indeed, on that count, Sidgwick might be construed as rather better than Mill, bringing to his work a much keener sense of the ferocious cruelty and bigotry that marked the history of colonialism and that promised to mark growing British imperialism. Mill's late-in-life mistrust of British political judgment on such matters was in fact developed and systematized by Sidgwick, who dealt with the subject far more extensively in such works as The Elements of Politics. He was every bit as cosmopolitan as Mill, looking to a future in which duty to humanity would increasingly trump love of country. But he was perhaps rather soberer than Mill when it came to recognizing the obstacles to this.Footnote ⁶¹ It had not occurred to me how on this count, at least, I might actually defend the superiority of the late Victorian Sidgwick, the friend of imperialist ideologue Sir John Seeley, against the mid-Victorian Mill, who was, it had seemed to me, that much closer to the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist Bentham.

On the other side, however, are some very problematic passages in the Elements, passages in which Sidgwick sounds rather more like the defenders of Eyre than like a good Millian. Towards the end of his section on ‘Principles of External Policy’, Sidgwick discusses ‘special restrictions on freedom of contract’ in a singularly disturbing way:

The plausible suspicion that Sidgwick is here referring to the Jamaican case, as construed by Mill, is strengthened by a footnote a couple of pages earlier that reads: ‘in our own empire, the South African colonies form, from this point of view, a series of links intermediate between Australia and New Zealand which are clearly colonies of settlement, and the West Indian islands which are clearly not’. ‘Colonies of settlement’ are those in which ‘the manual labour can be and will be supplied by the civilized race’, the other colonies, only loosely so called, being those ‘in which it can only supply capital and superior kinds of labour’. Moreover, Sidgwick does emphasize that:

For all of Sidgwick's Millian tendencies, these passages certainly lend themselves to a far from Millian reading. The Morant Bay rebellion was set off precisely in reaction to reassurances in ‘the Queen's Letter’ that ‘The prosperity of the labouring classes, as well as of all other classes, depends, in Jamaica, and in other countries, upon their working for wages, not uncertainly, or capriciously, but steadily and continuously, at the times when their labour is wanted, and for so long as it is wanted.’Footnote ⁶⁴ This only served to evoke memories of slavery and fears of an attempt to reinstitute it by other means. And of course, the defenders of Eyre were the very ones who complained vociferously about how unfair it was to insist on ‘pedantic adhesion to the forms of civilized judicial procedure’ in the case of a rebellion by those whose labor was needed but not forthcoming, these rebels being equally identifiable by race. Such racism is not all that polite and deserves to be recognized as such.

Moreover, such openness to the case for Eyre appears to have been a longstanding Sidgwickian position. At the very time when Mill was working for the Jamaica Committee, when Sidgwick was supposedly a younger and more radically Millian figure, Sidgwick confided to his mother that although all of his friends (this would have included such figures as T. H. Green and A. V. Dicey) were joining the Committee, he could not make up his mind on the matter.Footnote ⁶⁵ There is in fact no record of his having departed from that agnostic stance. Rather, he was apt to complain, at that time, about Mill's influence waning because of the public displays of his radicalism. And in his own defense, he might well have been able to invoke Mill's own (earlier) words, from The Principles of Political Economy:

The somewhat paradoxical point that the Jamaicans might need a more stringent materialistic work ethic to bring them to the civilizational level of the English, who need to get over their materialistic work ethic, suggests how far from innocent Mill's use of the notions of civilization and barbarism really was.Footnote ⁶⁷ Sidgwick would have had a case for claiming that the older Mill's criticisms of Carlyle obscured their potential points of agreement. And after all, Mill and Sidgwick were as convinced as Carlyle that, in Hall's words, ‘colonization could provide a key to a better world’,Footnote ⁶⁸ however much they differed from him in the grounds for such convictions.Footnote ⁶⁹

A final point. In Eye, as Shaver notes, I allowed that, like Mill, Sidgwick ‘did a great deal to defend some of the accomplishments of other historical civilizations, that he thought nurture far more important than nature in determining human differences, and that he was mainly impressed by European achievements in science and constitutional government’.Footnote ⁷⁰ But this, as remarked earlier, does not do justice to the forms of nineteenth-century racism, which often did blend biological and ethnic notions in conceptions of race featuring such things as capacity for self-government. To again cite Fredrickson:

In short, an emphasis on certain European civilizational contributions to self-government is not, in this context, all that reassuring, since such a construction often served quite obviously racist purposes.Footnote ⁷² If Sidgwick's notions of race, civilization, etc. seem worrisome in this respect, it should be noted that the Millian notion of ‘blood’ was no more or less incoherent, and in both cases, their agnosticism about the determinants of ‘nature’ got washed out at the practical political level, where the ‘character’ of the ‘savages’ – the stunted trees, whose growth had been ‘retarded’ – was immutable enough for purposes of maintaining colonial rule and de facto racial segregation and domination. More theorizing went into the problem of who was fit for manual labor than how to grant self-rule. This form of racism was perfectly consistent with support for abolitionism, the cause of the North in the American Civil War, etc.

Thus, my uncomfortable conclusion is that Mill and Sidgwick do have some deeply problematic sides, when it comes to matters of race and imperialism, and that the leaders of the resistance in Jamaica and other countries would and could have effectively labeled them as racist, in the equivalent terminology of the day. This is a truth that the new cosmopolitans would do well to admit, rather than simply pronouncing favored philosophers ‘progressive in their time’ on the issue of race while busily reconstructing them for current use on other counts.