I. Radicalism

As noted above, a core strength of Persky's contribution to Mill scholarship is his emphasis on Mill's consistent radicalism, making sense of this not only in terms of Mill's own development, but also via a better understanding of the radical milieu in which Mill was born and raised. It is also worth emphasizing the nature of radicalism, which is a mindset, or attitude towards the world, rather than a fixed ideology or set of proposals. In this way, it makes sense to speak both of Mill as consistently radical, and also of people as diverse in their views as Karl Marx and John Rawls as ‘radicals’.

Persky is not the first to link Mill with the radical tradition, but his intervention is illuminating as it is founded in political economy, not political theory.Footnote ⁵ Mill was both a ‘radical’ in an historical sense (being brought up to be the standard-bearer for a specific form of philosophic radicalism) and a ‘radical’ in a more expansive sense (being committed to root-and-branch reform of existing society, however incrementally, and – at least from the 1830s onwards – seeing existing institutions as ‘provisional’ and ‘transitional’, rather than set in stone).

In modern parlance, being ‘radical’ can be seen as a synonym for being ‘extreme’ in the content of one's desires for reform and also in being ‘revolutionary’ and violent in the means (and speed) by which one thinks reform should be brought about. A proposal that we combat climate change through the immediate, violent overthrow of capitalism and a return to pre-industrial modes of production and political organization might be called ‘radical’, whereas a proposal that governments use a combination of infrastructure funding, tax incentives and regulation to ensure people only drive electric cars by 2030 might not be. But though we often overlook how ‘radical’ Mill's ideas were in this sense,Footnote ⁶ this is not the most useful way of understanding ‘radicalism’, either historically or for the modern day.

Instead, we should see radicalism as a particular attitude or mindset. Radicals often support very different policy agendas, but they are united in a commitment and openness to root-and-branch reform. That is, a ‘radical’ approach to politics sees nothing as sacred – institutions, beliefs, practices – and thus, nothing is seen as worthy of preservation merely on the prima facie grounds that it already exists. Nor are arguments for something's ‘naturalness’ or ‘inevitability’ (e.g. private property, gender, inequality, poverty) taken at face value, or as being synonymous with ‘good’. Radicalism, then, is always an iconoclastic challenge to the status quo. Not seeing Mill's writing on property, poverty, equality, democracy, good government, liberty and gender-relations as ‘radical’, then, is to miss something vital in his outlook and proposals. As Persky rightly notes, this attitude is particularly evident in Mill's writing on property and capitalism.Footnote ⁷ Mill saw both property and laissez-faire capitalism as ‘provisional’,Footnote ⁸ and thus his endorsement of capitalism (where he makes it at all) is necessarily temporary.Footnote ⁹

Persky's key focus is on Mill's radical political economy. However, a key strength of The Political Economy of Progress is how Persky ties Mill's view of contemporary institutions as ‘provisional’ and ‘temporary’ to his philosophy of history. In particular, Persky's work is illuminating on how Mill not only saw technological and economic progress as being conditioned by, and dependent on, the level of knowledge in a society, but also on more normative elements, such as people's underlying concepts of justice.Footnote ¹⁰ Others have also engaged with how Mill adopted Comte's tripartite view of history (moving from the theological stage into the metaphysical, and finally to the positive, stage), and charted the impact of the Saint-Simonian view of history moving between ‘organic’ and ‘critical’ ages,Footnote ¹¹ but Persky's account is particularly interesting because he focuses on the moral element of Mill's philosophy of history. He brings to the fore Mill's Auguste Comte and Positivism, where Mill expresses the hope that people would ‘develop a more moral and social view of … work’.Footnote ¹² Persky reminds us that Mill felt:

To this ‘opinion’, Mill added, ‘we entirely subscribe’.Footnote ¹⁴

This links with a further useful insight presented by Persky, into Mill's view of ‘the progress of justice’.Footnote ¹⁵ One element of Mill's radical outlook, on this view, is that he saw even contemporary notions of justice as ‘provisional’. That is, Mill had a non-provisional commitment to the idea that ‘[t]he equal claim of everybody to happiness … involves an equal claim to all the means of happiness’, but a more ‘provisional’ view as to what this entailed in different periods of history, adding to this commitment the proviso, ‘in so far as the inevitable conditions of human life, and the general interest, in which that of every individual is included, set limits to the maxim’.Footnote ¹⁶ Still, though recognizing ‘social limits on egalitarianism’, Persky rightly points out, ‘the key Millean utilitarian insight into justice is that those social limits are themselves historical entities, subject to material and social progress. They are matters of “expediency” [in Mill's terminology] and not of principle.’Footnote ¹⁷ Expediency ‘is conditional on historically changing conditions’, but equality remains ‘objectively’ just, even if not achievable.Footnote ¹⁸ As Mill puts it, ‘all social inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the character not of simply inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so tyrannical that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have been tolerated’.Footnote ¹⁹

Persky rightly points out that Mill has in mind economic inequalities, not just legal ones.Footnote ²⁰ Mill uses the phrase ‘accident’ in several places to refer to the kind of unjustified inequalities he wants to see eradicated – e.g. ‘accident of birth’.Footnote ²¹ Persky argues that Mill was a luck-egalitarian, seeing ‘Progress’ as ‘allow[ing] a temporal ordering in the historical movement toward the taming of luck’.Footnote ²² I agree that Mill saw ‘accident[s] of birth’ as being a form of luck which had no relevance to justice, and also that his critique of, for instance, the ‘aristocracies of colour, race, and sex’Footnote ²³ could be read as instances of ‘brute luck’ in modern luck-egalitarian parlance. Moreover, one might see Mill's critiques of ‘proportioning of remuneration to work done’, even if currently ‘highly expedient’, as luck-egalitarian because he writes that such proportioning is:

That is, one might read this passage as suggesting that option luck is an acceptable basis for inequality of outcome/remuneration, but not brute luck. Still, I am not convinced that luck-egalitarianism is the best view of Mill's egalitarianism. In the main this is because I think there is something more relational in Mill's account of justice and equality, as the line about our motivations for working which Persky himself cites (see above) shows.Footnote ²⁵ This said, it is both important, and one of the many virtues of Persky's book, that he details and emphasizes Mill's commitment to egalitarianism, and shows its consistency throughout Mill's life (sometimes masked by his differentiation between the just and the expedient), having its roots in Bentham's utilitarianism.Footnote ²⁶

Mill's radicalism, then, both entailed a view that contemporary notions of justice might be ‘provisional’ (though expedient), and a deep-rooted egalitarianism.Footnote ²⁷ This, in turn, entailed a commitment to root-and-branch reform, and comprehensive transformation, of existing social, political and economic institutions, including property, class-relations, gender-relations, working conditions, political institutions, the law, religion, the family, and education (among others). Mill's view of what was achievable – and desirable – in terms of both contemporary reform and the possibilities of human society, changed over his lifetime in response to contemporary economic, political and intellectual ideas and reforms.Footnote ²⁸ Most obviously, as he charts in his Autobiography, he started life as a committed Benthamite ‘philosophic-radical’; lost some of this faith during his mental ‘crisis’, exploring other forms of radicalism (including what might seem like an oxymoron – conservative radicalism, associated with Carlyle and Coleridge); and finally came, as he puts it, ‘under the general designation of Socialist’.Footnote ²⁹

Persky does not use this term for Mill's radicalism, separating out the question of ‘socialism’ from that of Mill's radical political economy of progress; acknowledging only that ‘towards the end of his life he moved toward a cautious socialism’;Footnote ³⁰ and treating the issue of Mill's socialism in a short ‘note’ at the end of Part 2, after a discussion of ‘Cooperatives, Unions and Economic Democracy’,Footnote ³¹ the first and last of which are core elements of Mill's socialism.Footnote ³² He does say that Mill ‘viewed his endorsement of workers’ cooperatives as a component, perhaps the chief component, of his socialism’, and that Mill ‘welcomed with the greatest pleasure and interest all socialistic experiments’ and ‘identifi[ed] … cooperatives with socialism’.Footnote ³³ Persky also rightly notes that Mill thought socialism could be brought into being incrementally and via the expansion of small-scale experiments as those proved feasible and desirable, rather than through violent, immediate, wholescale revolutionary action; and that Mill's socialism was decentralized and involved ‘competition’ of some kind between cooperatives, rather than being centrally planned; and was intended to come into being within the existing system of private property, transforming ‘transitional’ capitalism from within.Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, he engages in detail in Part 3 (‘Echoes’) with Mill's connection to and influence on Marx, the Fabians, and Rawls's understanding of ‘liberal socialism’, making socialism a core element of the book.Footnote ³⁵ Lastly, Persky provides an interesting engagement with the question of whether Mill might have approved of European (and particularly Scandinavian) social democracy.Footnote ³⁶ Still, he does not identify Mill's radical political economy with socialism.

Because of this, I will focus on Mill and socialism (and Mill's socialism) in the rest of this piece, an important element of understanding which is to recognize, as part of his utilitarianism, his fundamental commitment to egalitarianism (and the ‘provisional’ nature of expediency) and to progress, as well as to ‘the free development of individuality’ (while also noting the fundamental reforms of the economy and particularly the workplace that that commitment led him to endorse).Footnote ³⁷ It also necessitates further engagement with Mill's commitment to ‘fraternity’ or harmony, hinted at in the passages from Comte quoted by Persky. This forms an important element not only of Mill's political and social account of how society will sustainably, peacefully and spontaneously transform into socialism, but also of his political-economic account, which explains how people will be motivated to work in, as well as for, a socialist future.

II. Socialism

Persky rightly emphasizes that Mill saw laissez-faire capitalism as ‘a transitional stage in social evolution’ rather than ‘as the final achievement of progress’.Footnote ³⁸ This helpfully challenges most preconceived notions of Mill as a ‘classical’ laissez-faire liberal in economics and in politics.Footnote ³⁹ Central to this view of capitalism was an underlying view of private property as similarly ‘transitional’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Mill's normative critique of capitalism arises from his egalitarianism – a critique which developed over his lifetime (as, in his youth, he saw institutions we would now consider ‘capitalist’, plus some not-traditionally-capitalist taxation practices, mainly on inheritance, as the last word in social reform).Footnote ⁴¹ A core element of his critique of capitalism was a normative critique of class structures and interaction as unfair, unjust, and bad for utility. Mill complained that the current unjust structures did not reward workers fairly for their labour. ‘[T]he produce of labour’, ‘as we now see it’, was:

As noted above, ‘accidents of birth’ led to people receiving unfair shares in the product of labour generated by all the workers in society. Moreover, the economic system both exacerbated these ‘accidents’ (e.g. people who inherit capital in a capitalist system do better, such that ‘the rule that they who do not work shall not eat’ is only applied to ‘the paupers’ instead of ‘impartially to all’Footnote ⁴³) and structured rewards in a non-ideal fashion. Mill writes, ‘[t]he rough method of settling the labourer's share of the produce by the competition of the market, may represent a practical necessity, but certainly not a moral ideal’.Footnote ⁴⁴ ‘Its defence’, he continues, ‘that civilisation has not hitherto been equal to organising anything better than this first rude approach to an equitable distribution … in no way affect[s]’ ‘the true moral and social idea of Labour’.Footnote ⁴⁵

What is more, ‘[p]rivate property’, Mill writes, ‘in every defence made of it, is supposed to mean, the guarantee to individuals of the fruits of their own labour and abstinence’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Though this is not the same as a guarantee of equality, Mill calls it ‘an equitable principle’ of ‘proportion between remuneration and exertion’, whereby the more the extortion, the higher the share of the product of that exertion. This does not lead to equality of outcome, and elsewhere – as noted – Mill criticizes this as not being ‘really just’ where – at least – the difference in work done is caused by superior strength or talent, rather than choice. But it is an egalitarian principle (even if a rough one), whereby equal exertion should result in equal reward.

Mill expressly notes: ‘[t]hat all should indeed start on perfectly equal terms, is inconsistent with any law of private property’ – that is, this system cannot result in equality of outcome (nor, therefore, equality of starting position for the next generation, if we allow any kinds of inheritance of property). But, he says, respect for the guarantee of the fruit of one's own labour might approximate justice, or as much justice as it is currently possible to attain, given the contemporary moral state of humanity.Footnote ⁴⁷

However, contemporary capitalism cannot even claim this much. First, under contemporary capitalism, many people do not receive the fruit of their own labours, while others receive ‘the fruits of the labour and abstinence of others, transmitted to them without any merit or exertion of their own’, which ‘is not of the essence of the institution, but a mere incidental consequence, which, when it reaches a certain height, does not promote, but conflicts with, the ends which render private property legitimate’.Footnote ⁴⁸ That is, it ‘conflicts with’ an ‘equitable principle, or proportion between remuneration and exertion, on which in every vindication of it [i.e. private property] that will bear the light, it is assumed to be grounded’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This ‘equitable proportion’ is not only not ensured by contemporary capitalism, but basically turned on its head, with ‘the produce of labour … apportioned … almost in an inverse ratio to the labour’ done.Footnote ⁵⁰

Second, contemporary capitalism is not a system founded in order to achieve this kind of justice. Rather, that is, than being ‘the result … of just partition, or acquisition by industry’, current property-holding (and property law) is the outcome ‘of conquest and violence: and notwithstanding what industry has been doing for many centuries to modify the work of force, the system still retains many and large traces of its origin’.Footnote ⁵¹ Property has been allowed in ‘things which never ought to be property’.Footnote ⁵² Property laws ‘have not held the balance fairly between human beings, but have heaped impediments upon some, to give advantage to others; they have purposely fostered inequalities, and prevented all from starting fair in the race’.Footnote ⁵³ Rather than ameliorate, existing capitalist institutions ‘aggravate the inequality of chances arising from the natural working of the principle [of private property]’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Legislation has tended to ‘the concentration of wealth’ rather than its ‘diffusion’.Footnote ⁵⁵

In Chapters on Socialism, Mill furthers this position, noting that even if the ‘race’ in which capitalism makes people run was, in itself, fair, and people had indeed started from the same position, it is not true ‘that … no one has any reason to complain’ that the ‘race’ provides the vast majority of workers with their ‘daily bread’, for it gives them nothing but their ‘daily bread … and that often in insufficient quantity; almost always of inferior quality; and with no assurance of continuing to have it at all’.Footnote ⁵⁶ He responds to those who say this is fair because ‘this hard lot … befalls only those who are outstripped by others, from inferiority of energy or prudence’,Footnote ⁵⁷ first by questioning if this is indeed true (given, as he has just noted, that this applies to almost all working people), and second by saying:

He adds: ‘to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune’.Footnote ⁵⁹ On the one hand, his reasoning for this is in line with a traditional utilitarian desire to minimize suffering as one way of maximizing happiness (understood as more pleasure over pain over time), and perhaps even reveals something of a paternalistic attitude towards those who suffer: ‘[i]s weakness a justification for suffering? Is it not, on the contrary, an irresistible claim upon every human being for protection against suffering?’Footnote ⁶⁰

But the concern with insulting the ‘weak’ reveals more of a relational egalitarian position.Footnote ⁶¹ Moreover, Mill recognizes that inequality remains unchallenged because people refuse to acknowledge relationships with others, or that people as remote from capitalists as workers might be owed the same sort of duties of justice as their own family. He asks: ‘[i]f the minds and feelings of the prosperous were in a right state, would they accept their prosperity if for the sake of it even one person near them was, for any other cause than voluntary fault, excluded from obtaining a desirable existence?’Footnote ⁶² (Though here, too, the idea of ‘voluntary fault’ links to luck-egalitarianism.)

Overall, then, Mill makes multiple critiques of capitalism on egalitarian grounds, several of which – as he notes – echo the critiques of contemporary socialists. As well as this, Mill also criticized capitalism on the grounds of liberty. For instance, he writes:

He also endorsed more of contemporary socialist critiques of the efficiency of capitalism than one usually thinks, as well as criticizing contemporary ideas of laissez-faire.Footnote ⁶⁴

Mill's answer to many of these criticisms of capitalism – and what he called his ‘Utopia’ in 1845 – was to ‘heal the widening breach between those who toil and those who live on the produce of former toil’ by ‘raising the labourer from a mere receiver of hire – a mere bought instrument in the work of production, having no residuary interest in the work itself – to the position of being, in some sort, a partner in it’.Footnote ⁶⁵ In 1845, he only speaks of profit-sharing, which he also details in the first edition of Principles (1848). In later editions, however (and in other relevant essays on economics), Mill endorses cooperation.Footnote ⁶⁶ And, in Mill's period, cooperation was synonymous with, and was an extremely influential and famous form of, socialism – was, in fact, ‘the most important aspect of socialism’ in the period, for socialists were active in cooperative societies; socialists advocated cooperation; and cooperative societies declared their socialism.Footnote ⁶⁷

Others have charted the political-philosophical reasons Mill gives in Principles for endorsing cooperation: as Baum argues, it is Mill's attempt to democratize the economy, and transfer into people's working lives his deeply held beliefs regarding freedom which are otherwise found in Liberty. (This is one reason it is no surprise we find passages almost identical to Liberty in Principles, first written a decade before.Footnote ⁶⁸) Persky's economic exposition of how Mill foresaw the transition to cooperation is a welcome addition to the usual, more political, account. In particular, it makes Mill's account of the possible transition to cooperative socialism in Principles seem more predictive than normatively prescriptive, or merely expressing a preference.

Persky links Mill's account of the transition to a cooperative (socialist) future with an excellent account of Mill's ideas regarding ‘the stationary state’, or a state of no further growth, brought about by falling rates of profit (eventually to nothing).Footnote ⁶⁹ He argues that:

Recognizing Mill's belief in the likelihood of the economy approaching a stationary state might help add weight to his assertion that part of the transition to cooperation will involve capitalists choosing to invest in cooperatives, and ultimately choosing to exchange their capital for annuities paid by the cooperatives, rather than asking for a return on their invested capital, and retaining rights of ownership over that capital. This helps explain how all capital, by an organic and spontaneous process, would become communally owned on Mill's account, which in turn destroys the current two-class system by getting rid of both privately owned capital and inheritance.Footnote ⁷¹ If the rate of profit across the entire economy is falling, then cooperatives may look like an increasingly good investment, at least compared to privately owned firms. And perhaps, eventually, guaranteed annuities will look like better rewards for abstinence (which, as Persky rightly notes, Mill sees as the root cause of capital accumulationsFootnote ⁷²) than any return one might otherwise get on an investment.Footnote ⁷³

This said, I think it would be a mistake to think Mill thought cooperation would only come about in a stationary state, as this seems to delay the democratic transformation of the economy into a very ‘eventual’ state. But Mill thought cooperation was available to people immediately (at least in industrialized countries) – it is other forms of socialism he casts as perhaps ‘the ultimate’ stage of human improvement,Footnote ⁷⁴ and the stationary state, too, is something towards which we may inexorably be heading, but it is not something we are going to reach immediately.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, it is not clear that Persky is committed to thinking that a cooperative future will only arrive once we have reached the stationary state: perhaps moving towards one will aid the achievement of the other, and vice versa.

As others have noted, cooperation would transform workers’ lives (and utility) by allowing a much greater exercise, and development, of individuality in the workplace (and thus in a very substantial part of people's lives).Footnote ⁷⁶ It would also transform social relations, doing away with class distinctions, by eradicating the difference between owner and worker, ‘idle and industrious’,Footnote ⁷⁷ capitalist and proletarian (to employ language Mill does not use). It would achieve the aim of Mill's utopia, outlined above, making people ‘partners’ in work. Moreover, it would not merely make them ‘partners’ with their employers (but not receiving an equal share of the product of their labour), but partners with their fellow-workers, democratically determining the division of the product of labour, and the rules and regulations by which their working days were governed.Footnote ⁷⁸

Mill felt that such experiences of democracy at the day-to-day, immediate level would form an excellent, and necessary, education in democracy both in the workplace and in national politics. This working experience, and particularly via the ability to determine, and live by, their own concepts of justice, was also important for generating the right kind of social sense, which in Comte and the Autobiography Mill likens to that felt in the military (‘in spite’, as he says, ‘of the anti-social character of its direct object’, i.e. war), where people are motivated – even to the extent of sacrificing their own self-interest and, indeed, life – not by the thought of personal reward or remuneration, but by comradeship and, particularly, patriotism.Footnote ⁷⁹ This Mill does not equate with nationalism (as the modern audience might) but with a care for one's fellow citizens which allowed one to weigh their interests more heavily than one's own, and actually to act in the greatest interest of the greatest number (of which one made one part, but did not count for more than one, in true utilitarian fashion).

This thought is linked to the fact that cooperatives could determine the principles of justice, which they applied to the division of their own product of labour (and would be part of a transformation of society such that all the social product of labour ‘will be made by concert, on an acknowledged principle of justice’Footnote ⁸⁰). Mill records how, initially, producer cooperatives founded by Blanc adopted Blancian principles of distribution or equal shares, but quickly abandoned them for piecework, as not all the workers were motivated to work once they knew their share of the product was assured whether they worked or not, and their colleagues were not willing to see them take a share of the product without having contributed a fair share of the labour.Footnote ⁸¹

Mill's discussion of forms of socialism which allow for an unequal division of the product of labour (e.g. Saint-Simonism and Fourierism) and forms which insist on an equal division (which he calls ‘communism’, such as Owenism) provides some guide to the range of options he saw available to cooperatives.Footnote ⁸² In turn, this helps us flesh out both Mill's concept of equality and the depth of his commitment to socialism.Footnote ⁸³

As noted above, securing for the labourer the fruit of his or her own labour and abstinence has some claim to be ‘just’. It can lead to something like rough equality, if care is taken to temper private property's general effect of tending towards accumulations of capital in fewer and fewer hands.Footnote ⁸⁴ However, Mill mitigates this endorsement by saying this is only ‘expedient’ (even if ‘highly’ so) because it is the ‘compromise with the selfish type of character formed by the present standard of morality, and fostered by the existing social institutions’. Thus, ‘until education shall have been entirely regenerated, [it] is far more likely to prove immediately successful, than an attempt at a higher ideal’.Footnote ⁸⁵ This shows Mill did not think such a principle of justice was the ‘highest’ (or even, necessarily, the highest we could attain) – instead, it was currently ‘expedient’.Footnote ⁸⁶

Earlier, Mill called ‘equal shares’ more just than the unequal ones (even ones ‘grounded on some principle, or supposed principle, of justice or general expediency, and not, like so many of the existing social inequalities, dependent on accident alone’) endorsed by Saint-Simon and Fourier. Then he calls ‘from each according to his capacities, to each according to his wants’ (or needs), which he associates with Blanc, a ‘still higher’ principle of justice.

Even this principle, then, might not be the ‘highest’ or ‘truest’ form of justice – it might still turn out only to be expedient when (if) a communist future in which we have implemented it dawns. But the ‘lesser’ principles are all ‘only’ species of expediency, and – as with all that is expedient – this expediency is rooted in specific social, historical, economic and political conditions, some of which we are already experiencing, some of which we are not.

With regard to Persky's argument that we should see Mill as a luck-egalitarian, Mill certainly does want to overcome the injustice of luck. Indeed, ‘from each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs’ is, in some sense, an extension of this: ‘from each according to his wants’ means our contributions can be meaningfully ‘equal’, no matter our talents (and the talented don't get, for instance, more leisure time simply be virtue of getting things done more easily or quickly than the less talented), and ‘to each according to his needs’ both mitigates bad (brute) luck, and ensures that reward is not unjustly affected by good luck. However, this principle does not justify inequalities via a concept of option luck, but – instead – ‘wants’ or needs. Moreover, Mill's project is something even more than just militating against luck, important though he sees that to be, because this Blancian (indeed, often thought of as Marxian) principle of justice is not just about luck. It is about a nuanced concept of equality, of both contributions and outcomes. As also noted above, it is also about a certain form of social relationship, where we are motivated to contribute what we can by recognition of each other's needs: ‘cash’ is no longer the ‘nexus’ of human relationships, but concern for each other's needs. We do not see ‘our’ fair share of the product of labour as being necessarily related to our output, but as being related to our needs.

Mill hints at this as an ideal future state, as Persky rightly notes when he emphasizes how Mill felt ‘[s]ociety was moving, however slowly, toward a point where people would “regard working for the benefit of others as a good in itself” ’ and ‘associated this progressive development with the unfolding of justice for the greater number’.Footnote ⁸⁷ But this is a socialist concept of justice, and a socialist concept of motivation and social relationships. Persky seems to pull back from this, saying ‘Mill was surely impressed by the achievements of market economics, and he hesitated at the more extreme claims of socialists’.Footnote ⁸⁸ This is true, in terms both of their critiques of current capitalism, and in terms of some of their ‘extreme’ recipes for reform (not least, wholescale revolution with no plan for future institutions). He evidently also held out some hope for a ‘perfected’ form of capitalism, in which inequalities were mitigated as much as was possible consistent with the basic functioning of private property, proving to be expedient and a plausible choice vis-à-vis communism (whose problems, serious though they might be, Mill says are ‘as dust in the balance’ compared to the evils of contemporary capitalismFootnote ⁸⁹). But it is not true that Mill ‘hesitated’ when it comes to endorsing or recognizing socialist principles of justice, except when such principles would be not only just, but expedient – and that, as Mill sees it, is not quite yet, for people do not currently have sufficient moral education to allow them to be motivated in the right ways.

Certainly, Mill ‘looked for the cooperative movement to play a transformative role in facilitating the material, intellectual and moral development of the working-classes’, but cooperation itself – or at least, cooperation as was successfully being practised in France and England at the time – was also transitional. It involved principles of justice which linked remuneration to effort, rather than the ‘higher’ principles of equality endorsed by Blanc. Indeed, as noted, Blanc's National Workshops had experimented with equal shares, and found them (currently) infeasible, adopting, instead, systems of remuneration which more closely linked remuneration to productivity. But these were early days of cooperation, and the society Mill sketches as ‘the nearest approach to social justice, and the most beneficial ordering of industrial affairs for the universal good, which it is possible at present to foresee’Footnote ⁹⁰ would be able to transcend these ‘selfish’ motivations and adopt ‘still higher’ principles of justice, achieving even more than the eradication of the moral, and remunerative, significance of luck.

As noted above, there is, for Mill, a strong connection between the ‘height’ of the principles of justice we can achieve and the extent to which we take seriously the moral claims of others. That is, for Mill, equality and fraternity are closely aligned. Indeed, Mill said that the 1848 revolution and the establishment of National Workshops represented ‘all of “liberty, equality and fraternity” which is capable of being realised now, and … prepare[s] the way for all which can be realised hereafter’.Footnote ⁹¹ We see this in Mill's writing about ending class rivalry, the ‘widening breach’ between people; his comments regarding the mindset of those who benefit from inequalities mentioned above; and in his writing in Comte about how we need to ‘regard working for the benefit of others as a good in itself, that we should desire it for its own sake, and not for the sake of remuneration’ given ‘that the moral claim of any one in regard to the provision for his personal wants, is not a question of quid pro quo in respect to his co-operation, but of how much the circumstances of society permit to be assigned to him, consistently with the just claims of others’.Footnote ⁹²

This seems an important lacuna in Persky's argument, which focuses almost solely on equality, but something which would add grist to Persky's mill (pun intended). In particular, it helps show that Mill was not only about tinkering with some of the evident problems of capitalism, but about transforming it. It is not only the fundamental institutions of capitalism that Mill sees as changing radically in the future (e.g. property, inheritance, wage markets), but the relationships between people, and their own psychological motivations. This is also a key part of how we will actually achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number in the future – in part by being motivated much more to care about that, rather than always acting in our own interests, and with careful institutional design organizing these individually interested actions into something which benefits the majority.

Of course, this emphasis also makes Mill's socialism clearer. He did have economic reasons for supporting socialism, as well as arguments founded in egalitarianism and liberty. But he also had ‘fraternal’ reasons for advocating socialism, and saw something important changing, under socialism, in the quality and organization of human relationships. Cooperation was one key mode by which such qualitative change could be brought about.

One challenge to this thought might be Mill's evident concern with freedom and ‘individuality’, most obviously in On Liberty. But though Mill evidently recognized that communism (in particular) might create a ‘tyrannical yoke’ of public opinion and a society in which ‘the absolute dependence of each on all, and surveillance of each by all', might ‘grind all down into a tame uniformity of thoughts, feelings, and actions’,Footnote ⁹³ he did not see socialism as being necessarily inconsistent with ‘the free development of individuality’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the Autobiography, he writes:

That is, if ‘the minds and feelings’ of everyone (not just the prosperous) ‘were in the right state’, people ought to be able freely to develop their individuality, but they should also be able to be motivated by concern over the interests of others, and work hard for benefits they will share (where this ‘share’, on an individual level, might also be quite small). This, evidently, was what Mill believed socialism might achieve, in his preferred form, and the two things (plus more distributive justice) were not mutually incompatible.Footnote ⁹⁶

After all, the harm principle is aimed at protecting as wide a sphere of liberty as possible for people's self-regarding actions. Having such freedom is not in itself incompatible with fraternal feelings, particularly in a society which adopts the view expressed by the harm principle – that people should be left free to do as they see best so long as they are not causing harm to others. Mill recognizes that a socialist society might not hold such a view – but he does not think it impossible that a socialist society could adopt this view.

Thus, the harm principle would not be ‘provisional’, and would still have salience in a socialist society. This said, some of the instances of potential harm-causing which Mill thinks ought to be permitted, on balance, in On Liberty, might not exist in a society motivated by fraternity. For instance, Mill notes that some ‘damage, or probability of damage, to the interests of others’ is caused ‘necessarily and therefore legitimately’ by individuals ‘pursuing a legitimate object’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Expediency requires that we allow such cases in contemporary society, and the harm principle is not designed to prohibit them. However, Mill notes, ‘[s]uch oppositions of interest between individuals often arise from bad social institutions’, which might well be eradicated in a socialist future.Footnote ⁹⁸

Similarly, the harm principle allows for the coercion of people whose inaction is causing harm – Mill gives examples where we can rightfully compel action, including ‘to give evidence in a court of justice, to bear [our] fair share in the common defence … and to perform certain acts of individual beneficence, such as saving a fellow-creature's life, or interposing to protect the defenceless against ill usage’.Footnote ⁹⁹ If people were motivated by a due concern for other people's interests, and did not discount them in comparison to much less weighty interests of their own, then these inactions would be less frequent (as might be the ill-usage which we ought to protect others from in the first place). That is, more fraternal, more moral, motivations might make the harm principle obsolete, at least in some areas. Thus, this improved social feeling might actually lessen coercion, even in a society only justifying coercion on the grounds of the harm principle.

There is certainly a tension to be further explored in Mill's writing regarding the positive role he accords to public opinion (for instance, he sees the power of public opinion in communist societies to limit family size as a ‘recommendation’ of that schemeFootnote ¹⁰⁰) and his mistrust of its power, and desire to protect people from it, in On Liberty (and Principles). It seems Mill thought public opinion could be harnessed to help achieve beneficial outcomes (e.g. controlling population size), even when we also needed to ensure that – in areas where its interference was not beneficial, of which, of course, he did not think the question of family size was oneFootnote ¹⁰¹ – it also needed to be protected against. And as the moral education of society continued, perhaps also people would recognize where pressure from public opinion was legitimate, and where not, internalizing the essence of the harm principle. That is, Mill's preferred socialist future would be one in which people did indeed ‘fe[el] that the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of wellbeing: that it is not only a co-ordinate element with all that is designated by the terms civilisation, instruction, education, culture, but is itself a necessary part and condition of all those things’, as well as being capable of much more fellow-feeling than Mill currently diagnosed in society.Footnote ¹⁰² Indeed, as noted above, his preferred form of socialism involved ‘all of “liberty, equality and fraternity” which is capable of being realised now, and … prepare[s] the way for all which can be realised hereafter’.Footnote ¹⁰³

All in all, then, a socialism which was committed to equality and fraternity and also to Mill's idea of ‘the free development of individuality’ might not only be Mill's ‘utopia’, but one which would attain the Marxist goal of a society in which ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’, as well as embodying the ideal of ‘from each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴