In this scholarly book, Robert Devigne links John Stuart Mill to the aporia of the Platonic dialogues, the romantic expressivism of Kant and Coleridge, and the great tradition of British empiricism that it was Mill's purpose to reform. In so doing, Devigne introduces us to the great thinker who remains today the most direct entry point (along with Russell perhaps) into the Western tradition of philosophy for those whose native language is English. Devigne's Mill then is the “Great Mill,” the synoptic, conceptive, comprehensive Mill, the Socrates of Gower Street and Charing Cross Road, the towering genius who bestrode Victorian intellectual life like a colossus. It is thus with Nietzsche rather than with Bentham that Devigne's Mill should be classed.

Devigne shows us Mill “anticipating many of Nietzsche's characterizations of modern culture” (p. 185). Mill feared what Nietzsche later called “Euro-Buddhism,” or the stagnation of the West (p. 193). Like Nietzsche, Mill believed that modern man is “deeper” than his Greco-Roman counterpart (p. 38), and like Nietzsche, he saw the peak of humanity in a synthesis, in his case of Knox and Pericles (pp. 164, 169–72, 181), as compared to Nietzsche's Christ and Caesar (Will to Power 983). Mill also has a “Nietzschean” view of philosophy itself as a poietic enterprise, which out of its creative energies “defines and proposes ends to be attained by different sections of society” (p. 157). Moreover, Mill understood “the challenge (to civilization) that Nietzsche will identify a few decades later” as a loss of “will to create new values and practices,” engendered by the West's “centuries-long training” at the hands of Christianity and modern justice (p. 185).

Thus, Devigne's Mill beats Nietzsche to the “Last Man”: that modern creature distinguished by his lack of “individual energy and courage,” his loss of “proud and self-relying independence,” his enslavement to “artificial wants,” his “effeminate shrinking from even the shadow of pain,” his “passionless insipidity,” his lack of any “marked individuality,” and the “dull, unexciting monotony of (his) life” (p. 60). Still, Mill insists that the “ancient view that identifies specific groups of people as higher or lower types is no longer tenable” (p. 178). In this regard, his view is distinctly more egalitarian than that of Nietzsche. For the latter, justice can only be inter pares, which in effect means that the higher types “owe nothing to the general public” (p. 183). Rather than tarry with modern Christian-liberal equality, in the section of Thus Spake Zarathustra entitled “On the Tarantulas,” the protagonist announces “Justice speaks thus—Men are not equal.” So while for Mill, “No elite could be trusted if it was not subjected to the controlling power of the people” (p. 201); for Nietzsche, “A people is just a detour of nature to get six or seven great men” (Beyond Good and Evil, p. 126).

The answer as to why Mill did not take that final step away from Christian-liberal justice has to do with his philosophy of history. Whatever the ferocity of Macaulay's attack on Mill's father in the Edinburgh Review, Mill was forced to concede that the great historian had laid his hand on a key limitation of utilitarian thought. Liberalism has to account for the historical dimension of human existence. So despite or because of the youthful crisis of confidence that arose when Mill realized he would not be happy even if his progressive-humanitarian hopes were to be fulfilled, Mill continued to see his purpose as providing mankind with the guideposts to Hegel's “End of History,” or as Devigne phrases it, “the negation of the historical process.” Mill aimed to replace the fruitless historical oscillations between “two incomplete views of human nature,” rooted in Athens and Jerusalem, with a new harmony of “human creativity and moral restraint” (p. 182). In the process, he would gain a “posthumous existence” for himself as the philosopher whose views were “the harbinger of new values and higher forms of existence” (p. 197).

In stark contrast to Mill, Nietzsche thought he would be “born posthumously” because he finally blasted the Western synthesis of the good and the right asunder and thus prevented the End of History, or the Last Man's triumph. From Nietzsche's point of view then, Mill had shirked his responsibility as a philosopher to see to it that History not be allowed to end, which is to say his obligation to ensure that human cruelty and therefore suffering will continue, these being prerequisites of humanity's fullest flowering. Indeed, it was Mill's abhorrence of the cruelty associated with the “ancient teleological views that extract norms from some conception of a species' highest point of developmental possibilities” (p. 74) that prevented him from ever making room in his thought for a summum bonum or “best way of life” (p. 163). Mill cannot advocate “the rule of perfected individuals who might enforce new ideas of the good” (p. 180). However, such an advocacy had ceased to be a problem for Nietzsche. So while Mill kicked the End of History down the road a century or two, Nietzsche punted it into “Forever” with his “Eternal Return of the Same.” This difference might be explained by the fact that Mill had the “rare fate” of never at any point in his life having believed in God (p. 141). Nietzsche's self-explanation that he was an atheist “from instinct” (Ecce Homo II, i) is something quite different.

In explaining Mill's project, Devigne inevitably has to focus on Mill's “highest intellectuals,” those Mill thought “should be the guides of the rest.” Unfortunately, this class sees “too many sides to every question (and) hear(s) so much that can be said about everything, that they feel no assurance of the truth of anything” and hence are unable to act (p. 196). Thus, Mill turned his attention to the task of “laying the philosophical foundation for unity among the intellectuals of the future” (p. 197). Devigne's discussion here reminds us that Nietzsche's reaction to the modern intellectual's ever-increasing “dwelling upon difference and celebrating ambiguity” (p. 185) was to transform Mill's “superior and guiding minds” into his Ubermenschen, who would be so strong that “attempts to blend … values from other civilizations with modern culture” would have no power to weaken them (p. 207). However, Nietzsche's “aristocratic radicalism” has been overshadowed by his postmodern solipsism in recent times, even as Mill's modified Platonism, romantic expressivism, and reformed religious consciousness have been submerged by the modern liberal focus on him as “a theorist who focuses exclusively on liberty of action” (p. 227). Thus it is that the intellectuals, from whom Mill expected so much, and who since his time have turned “from the soul to the body,” have in the end conferred on the father himself a “one sided reading” that obfuscates his many arguments that “transcend liberal concerns about protecting the individual from state and social domination” (p. 207).

When we look around ourselves today and note the lack of any “united authority of the instructed” over our society (p. 194), we cannot but conclude that Mill's Herculean effort to save liberal democracy from itself was strategically defective in some key respects. Indeed, it might be fair to say that some of Mill's contemporaries ([Carlyle, Comte, Tocqueville], p. 180) who were tending to more “Nietzschean” or “leadership-hierarchical” solutions, have proven themselves to be better tea-leaf readers than Mill (p. 161). Historically speaking, then, the Mill of a new Platonic-Coleridgean Bildung for English-speaking civilization (p. 93) did not have as much purchase on our culture as did the “Harm Principle–Greatest Happiness” Mill. However, this fate simply makes Devigne's “truly comprehensive assessment” and reopening of “the debate regarding the genesis and development of John Stuart Mill's political and moral thought” all the more significant (pp. 1–2). If it were true that the cure for the misinterpretation of any particular philosopher is more of that particular philosopher, then those interested in an accurate account of Mill's contributions to the development of modern thought can now turn to Devigne's fine study as an indispensable guide. His book performs the honorable duty of correcting Mill's epitaph to properly read: Here Lies John Stuart Mill: “Liberal” (but with an Explanation).