For almost thirty years Greg Claeys has been producing deeply scholarly and richly rewarding monographs that are essential reading for historians of nineteenth century political thought, especially radical and socialist political thought. Mill and Paternalism deservedly takes its place among them. Indeed in some respects it is the best of the lot, and certainly the most enjoyable. There is much here that is characteristic Claeys, not least the heavy referencing (315 footnotes in the first 60 pages alone), but there is also a previously restrained passion in his prose (“leave the poor man's private life in peace,” critics of Mill's marriage are told, Harriet Taylor “brought him happiness . . . what more can one wish?” [37]), some flashes of humor, and a more direct engagement with contemporary politics than has hitherto been the case.

In part this is a by-product of the subject matter: Mill remains a philosopher du jour to a greater degree than say Robert Owen or Thomas Paine. Thus Mill and Paternalism opens with a truism (“John Stuart Mill is chiefly famous today as the philosopher of liberty” [1]), and ends with an assertion of Mill's continuing relevance (“his unique vision remains as pertinent to our own times as ever it was to his” [225]). In between, however, Claeys conducts such a thorough act of revisionism that the Mill who is offered as our guide has been rendered something far more complex, egalitarian, and, above all, paternalistic than we might expect of a “philosopher of liberty” (1).

There is, of course, nothing new in debating the relative strength of libertarian and paternalist strands in Mill's writings, and the introductory chapter is an authoritative survey of earlier interpretations; in which he demonstrates that the libertarian Mill has a long pedigree, stretching back to H. T. Buckle, via Isaiah Berlin, and into latter-day libertarians, but that so too does an alternative reading of Mill as a proponent of self-cultivation and positive liberty. Claeys situates himself in the latter tradition, but whereas some, most famously Maurice Cowling, have found the interventionist Mill guilty of moral totalitarianism, Claeys wishes to celebrate Mill the paternalist.

His first task is to de-center the place of On Liberty (1859) in Mill studies and overcome the “fallacy of the authoritative text” (12). Mill's most enduring work, Claeys argues convincingly, was never intended to represent the totality of his thought, and On Liberty's strictures on social liberty need to be read alongside his reflections on political and economic liberty in his other books, especially Considerations on Representative Government (1861) and his Principles of Political Economy (1848). This approach allows Claeys to reconcile the libertarianism, with which On Liberty treats the self-regarding sphere, with the paternalism apparent in Mill's other works, where he is more obviously concerned with social-regarding acts. Thus chapter 1 argues that a range of interventions proposed by Mill, on everything from education to franchise restrictions, Irish land reform, and “enlightened” (107) despotism in India, were not infringements upon liberty, but part of a program of “autonomy-promoting paternalism” (57).

Chapter 2, “Mill, Socialism and Collective Autonomy,” extends this argument, and reviews the hoary old question of Mill's “qualified” (149) socialism. The chapter is a modified version of a previously published piece and the content, unsurprisingly, contains the most familiar material in the book. But after locating Mill within the radical, republican, and socialist traditions—Mill was, we are told, “a radical republican” whose “levelling proposals” (171) were more Paine than Jeremy Bentham, and who used the word socialism only “very loosely” (166)—Claeys segues into the third and final substantive chapter with the insight that forms the book's major contribution to Mill studies: an assertion of the centrality of the population question to Mill's paternalism.

On one level Mill's Malthusianism is hardly news, but Claeys contends that a key element in Mill's view of population, the need for marriage restraint, has been lost from sight “because it lies outside the spectrum of liberalism we accept” (177). Mill, we are told rather melodramatically, has been made “liberal by rendering invisible his illiberal themes, in a manner not unlike the old Stalinist erasing of unpersons from pictures” (177). This unperson Mill has been hidden in clear sight in On Liberty, where he justifies laws on marriage restraint (as well as compulsory education), but previous readers, convinced that the isolated individual was Mill's “starting point and unit of reference” (175) discounted these as exceptions to the “harm principle” (178). Claeys, by contrast, uses his broader reading to argue that Malthusianism and feminism combine in Mill's thought to make “individuals in their primary social context, the family” (178) the key concern. Mill's liberty principle, that is, did not apply to individuals qua individuals, but to the basic foundational unit of society, the family. That Mill makes the right to bear children conditional upon recognizing a basic duty to maintain them is, says Claeys, not an exception but the strongest instance of Mill's paternalism towards adults in a civilized society.

Thus Mill and his place in the history of political thought are substantially redefined. Rather than being a proponent of negative liberty, in need of correction by T. H. Green, Mill emerges as a positive paternalist, championing interventions that enhanced individual and social well-being by actively developing autonomy. This last point is crucial. Mill did not want men and women to be forced to be free; he wanted to help them become freer. His paternalism was not about preventing people crossing unsafe bridges, but developing them to build safe ones. The corollary, however, which Claeys freely acknowledges, is that Mill's thought contains an elitist strand—those who knew best were the educated—and a class bias: the moral questions entailed in breeding were different for the rich who could afford children than they were for the poor who could not.

In the conclusion Claeys sketches an outline of Mill's utopian vision, including cooperation, an end to wage labor, feminism, increased equality, and meritocracy, before admitting that these attributes “are nowhere outlined together in one programmatic statement” (213). Whether the compound Mill that Claeys's constructs from letters, books, and manuscripts is a more legitimate object of study than the partial Mill distilled on the pages of On Liberty and read by and refracted by thousands of readers over many generations ultimately depends upon whether or not one values intent over influence. Beyond doubt is the fact that Claeys has produced a monograph all Mill scholars will wish to read.