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Mill's Socialism Re-examined

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2019

Joseph Persky Open the ORCID record for Joseph Persky [Opens in a new window]
Joseph Persky*
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University of Illinois at Chicago
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*Corresponding author. Email: jpersky@uic.edu
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Abstract

McCabe and Turner raise a number of perceptive points concerning my treatment of John Stuart Mill's political economy of progress and its relation to socialism. In giving context to their points this article first tries to clarify Mill's understanding of socialism as anchored in his positive classical economics. Mill the utilitarian philosopher endorses socialism, but he anticipates its arrival based on his materialist understanding of history. In this materialist context, the article argues that Mill expects the economy of worker cooperatives to advance from one focused on relational equality to one focused on luck egalitarianism. This shift is again supported by Mill's own utilitarian principles, but it is ultimately the product of what he anticipates will be the political economy of the cooperative mode of production.

Keywords

MillSocialismRelational EqualityLuck Egalitarianism
Type
Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 165 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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References

1 Persky, Joseph, The Political Economy of Progress: John Stuart Mill and Modern Radicalism (New York, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 A very different version of this article was presented at the PPE Society Conference, 2019. I am grateful to Piers Turner for organizing the session. As can be seen in the adjoining pieces, he and Helen McCabe have both generated insightful articles for this exchange.

3 Piers Turner, ‘Mill's Evolutionary Theory of Justice: Reflections on Persky’, Utilitas and Helen McCabe, ‘Mill's ‘Modern’ Radicalism Re-examined: Joseph Persky's The Political Economy of Progress’, Utilitas.

4 Turner, ‘Mill's Justice’.

5 Persky, Progress, pp. 21–5.

6 Helen McCabe (‘Mill Re-examined’) rightly faults me for paying Taylor too little attention in PEP. McCabe points to Taylor's influence on Mill's understanding of the difference between laws of production and laws of distribution, certainly a fundamental proposition for the Principles. And she might have added Mill's own attribution to Taylor of all in the book ‘that concerned the application of philosophy to the exigencies of human society and progress’ (Mill, John Stuart, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume I: Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. Robson, John and Stillinger, Jack (Toronto, 1981), p. 257Google Scholar). Since I chose as a title for my volume: The Political Economy of Progress, my lack of emphasis here seems more than careless. Indeed, that title might have sent just the right message if I had suggested that Mill himself supplied the political economy (as he himself claimed) and Taylor contributed much to the broad progressive thrust. This is the direction of modern scholarship on Mill and Taylor. I think it is reasonable. Further work on this relationship is important for the building of a feminist history of economic thought.

7 McCabe, ‘Mill Re-examined’.

8 McCabe, ‘Mill Re-examined’.

9 McCabe, Helen, ‘Navigating by the North Star: The Role of the “Ideal” in John Stuart Mill's View of ‘Utopian Schemes and the Possibilities of Social Transformation’, Utilitas (2019), pp. 291–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Turner, Piers Norris, ‘John Stuart Mill on Luck and Distributive Justice’, Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Luck, ed. Church, Ian M. and Hartman, Robert J. (New York, 2019), pp. 80–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Baum, Bruce, ‘J. S. Mill and Liberal Socialism’, J. S. Mill's Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment, ed. Urbinati, Nadia and Zakaras, Alex (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 98–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Miller, Dale, , ‘Mill's “Socialism” ’, Politics, Philosophy, & Economics 2 (2003), pp. 213–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I continue to be amazed by the number of Mill scholars from a range of academic disciplines doing serious work. Clearly this is a field that demonstrates the rich utility of interdisciplinary study.

11 I use the term ‘positive proposition’ here in the sense common in economics, i.e. as descriptive, whether theoretical or empirical, as distinct from a normative (or judgemental or value-laden) proposition.

12 For example McCabe (‘Mill Re-examined’) speaks of Mill's ‘normative critique of capitalism’ and certainly he has one. Capitalism doesn't do as well on utilitarian grounds as possible alternatives. But as I argue throughout this piece, the socialist alternative Mill endorses is one that he sees as actually emerging through the political economy of progress.

13 Mill, John Stuart, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. Robson, John, vols. 2–3 (Toronto, [1848] 1965), p. 938Google Scholar. McCabe (‘Mill Re-examined’) rightly notes that while Mill is quite hostile to centralized government, he is sympathetic to decentralized local governments.

14 Mill, Principles, p. 954.

15 Mill, Principles, p. 138.

16 Mill, Principles, p. 775.

17 Mill, Principles, p. 794.

18 But see Jossa, Bruno, ‘Marx, Marxism and the Cooperative Movement’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 29 (2005), pp. 3–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Marx, Lenin and the Cooperative Movement’, Review of Political Economy 26.2 (2014), pp. 282–302. Jossa argues that Marx and Lenin saw cooperatives as a transition stage to full-scale planning. Also see the discussion in Persky, Joseph, ‘Producer Co-operatives in Nineteenth-Century British Economic Thought’, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 24 (2017), pp. 319–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 See for example Lebowitz, Michael, The Contradictions of ‘Real Socialism’: The Conductor and the Conducted (New York, 2012)Google Scholar and Burawoy, Michael, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism (London, 1985), ch. 4, pp. 156–208Google Scholar.

20 Mill, Principles, pp. 791–2.

21 Turner, ‘Mill's Justice’. As discussed in section D of the present piece I agree with Turner (and I suspect with McCabe) that Mill endorsed such principles.

22 See Persky, Progress, pp. 81–8 and 145–8; Mill, Principles, p. 793.

23 McCabe, ‘Mill Re-examined’.

24 Mill, Principles, p. 738.

25 See Persky, Progress, p. 84 for a discussion of Mill's list.

26 Mill, Principles, p. 793.

27 Mill, Principles, pp. 793–4.

28 The peacefulness of this transition is emphasized by Miller, ‘Mill's Socialism’.

29 Mill, Principles, pp. 774–5.

30 Mil, Principles, p. 775. Mill notes that the confiscation of existing capital is ‘imagined’ by many persons and pretended by more to be the meaning and purpose of Socialism’ (775).

31 McCabe, ‘Mill Re-examined’.

32 See for example Webb, Beatrice's critique of producer cooperatives in The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain (London, 1899)Google Scholar and the discussion of cooperatives in Bernstein, Eduard, Evolutionary Socialism (New York, [1899] 1967), pp. 109–34Google Scholar.

33 Mill, Principles, p. 794. Mill added the section on competition and cooperatives in 1852 as he was expanding his commitment to this new industrial form. Neither Turner nor McCabe pay serious attention to the question of competition, although McCabe (‘Mill Re-examined’) mentions in passing that the issue had been broached in PEP.

34 Mill, Principles, p. 794.

35 Mill, Principles, pp. 794–5.

36 Mill, Principles, p. 795. Mill here as throughout remains vague on exactly how cooperatives are expected to recruit their membership.

37 Mill, Principles, p. 795.

38 Mill, Principles, p. 208.

39 Mill, Principles, p. 201.

40 McCabe, ‘Mill Re-examined’.

41 Mill, Principles, p. 201.

42 Mill even suggests that shares may be set so as to compensate for the ‘injuries of nature’ (Principles, p. 201). On this issue, see the discussion of luck egalitarianism in the next section.

43 This is the point where Mill makes his famous assertion that under such circumstances ‘all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance’ (Mill, Principles, p. 207).

44 Mill, Principles, p. 207.

45 Mill, Principles, p. 208.

46 Mill, Principles, p. 208.

47 Mill, Principles, p. 208. On the ‘humility’ of classical economists, and especially of Mill, see the discussion in Colander, David and Freedman, Craig, Where Economics Went Wrong (Princeton, 2019), ch. 2, pp. 20–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York, 1974)Google Scholar.

49 Explicitly for Nozick and implicitly for Mill, these ‘experiments’ smack of natural law. This must be a bit uncomfortable for Mill the utilitarian. But even in this hypothetical world Mill leaves the ultimate ‘choice’ of the colony to utilitarian considerations.

50 Mill, Principles, p. 208.

51 Mill, Principles, p. 208.

52 We should recognize two important, but partial, exceptions here. In the real world, Mill supports the abolition of slavery and land reform. But these exceptions prove the rule as in both cases he generally argues for substantial compensation.

53 Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York, [1867] 1906), p. 19Google Scholar. There is a missing link here in Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who translated into Russian much of Mill's Principles. Marx favourably cites Chernyshevsky's notes on Mill. The irony is that Chernyshevsky was himself a supporter of workers’ cooperatives. See for example his novel, What Is To Be Done? (Ithaca, NY [1863], 1989).

54 McCabe, ‘Mill, Re-examined’.

55 Sam Hollander suggests that Marx's hostility to Mill was rooted in his unwillingness to admit the similarities of their understanding of surplus value. Hollander, Samuel, John Stuart Mill: Political Economist (Hackensack, NJ, 2015), p. 456CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 But notice that the dominant interpretation of Mill does not accept the argument made here. For example, see Hamburger, Joseph, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control (Princeton, 1999), ch. 2Google Scholar. For a more extensive development of this debate, see Persky, Progress, pp. 157–60.

57 Mill, Principles, p. 776. Elsewhere in Principles, he comments, ‘We cannot, indeed, foresee to what extent the modes of production may be altered, or the productiveness of labour increased’ (p. 199).

58 Mill, Principles, p. 756.

59 Mill, Principles, p. 757.

60 McCabe, ‘Mill Re-examined’.

61 See the next section for a discussion of relational equality.

62 Mill, Principles, p. 210.

63 In that body of thought cooperatives are constructively addressed in a fully socialist context. The Guild Socialists brought up the questions of motivation and reward in a particularly rich fashion. More clearly than most they seriously considered the path from the modern economy to these semi-utopian visions. See the discussion of their programme in Persky, Joseph and Madden, Kirsten, ‘The Economic Content of G. D. H. Cole's Guild Socialism: Behavioral Assumptions, Institutional Structure, and Analytical Arguments’, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 26.3 (2019), pp. 427–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 See the discussion of Cohen's position in Persky, Progress, pp. 214–15.

65 Turner, ‘Mill's Justice’.

66 Turner, ‘Mill's Justice’.

67 Keep in mind that, apart from any moral case, and apart from any reform efforts on his own initiative, as a political economist Mill sees the major thrust towards a cooperative society as emerging from the economic history in what I describe above as a materialist conception of history.

68 Anderson, Elizabeth, Private Government (Princeton, 2017)Google Scholar.

69 Persky, Progress, p. 215.

70 McCabe, ‘Mill Re-examined’.

71 Admittedly, as McCabe points out, this long-run goal received little attention in PEP.