James Mill summary

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Below is the article summary. For the full article, see James Mill.

James Mill, (born April 6, 1773, Northwater Bridge, Forfarshire, Scot.—died June 23, 1836, London, Eng.), Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist. After studying at the University of Edinburgh and teaching, he went to London in 1802, where he met Jeremy Bentham and became a major promulgator of Bentham’s utilitarianism. He wrote for several journals, including the Edinburgh Review (1808–13), and contributed articles on government and education to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He helped found London University in 1825. After completing his History of British India (3 vol., 1817), he was appointed an official in India House (1819) and later became head of the examiner’s office (1830). His criticism of British rule led to changes in the government of India. His Elements of Political Economy (1821) summarized the views of David Ricardo, and his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829) associated psychology with utilitarianism, a doctrine continued by his son, John Stuart Mill. Mill is considered the founder of philosophical radicalism.

John Stuart Mill Summary

John Stuart Mill English philosopher, economist, and exponent of utilitarianism. He was prominent as a publicist in the reforming age of the 19th century, and remains of lasting interest as a logician and an ethical theorist. The eldest son of the British historian, economist, and philosopher James

utilitarianism Summary

Utilitarianism, in normative ethics, a tradition stemming from the late 18th- and 19th-century English philosophers and economists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill according to which an action (or type of action) is right if it tends to promote happiness or pleasure and wrong if it tends to

economics Summary

Economics, social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. In the 19th century economics was the hobby of gentlemen of leisure and the vocation of a few academics; economists wrote about economic policy but were rarely consulted by

political philosophy Summary

Political philosophy, branch of philosophy that is concerned, at the most abstract level, with the concepts and arguments involved in political opinion. The meaning of the term political is itself one of the major problems of political philosophy. Broadly, however, one may characterize as political