Three essays on unsettled questions in the economics of John Stuart Mill

Abstract

This Dissertation consists of three Essays which explore comprehensively important areas of the thought of John Stuart which have been either completely ignored or in need of reinterpretation. They are: (1) Mill, Socialism, and the English Romantics; (2) Mill and Public Goods; (3) Mill and Property Rights Analysis: Land Tenure and the "Irish Question." The first Essay is primarily philosophical in nature and assesses the ultimate impact upon Mill's thought of both Socialism and the English Romantic Movement. Mill adopted the Romantic emphasis upon the "cultivation of the inner man" as the aim of human life and as a criterion for rejecting many of the policy proposals of the Socialists. He refused the Romantic (intuitive) mode as a methodology. Mill pursued to the end of his life the means of devising a society where the "Romantic" individual could find fulfillment, a task facilitated by a methodology improved by the inclusion of Auguste Comte's inverse-deductive approach. The second Essay is comprehensive and closely examines Mill's theory of public goods from both philosophical and practical perspective, demonstrating that his treatment of the question is capable of systematic organization. The chief argument of this Essay is that Mill's redefinition of individualism to include the inner motivations of human nature coupled with his insistence upon the logical method of Bentham provides a better criterion for devising a broadened role for government than does the intuitional approach of Henry Sidgwick, another important contributor to this new field of economics.