Of all my reviewers you are, perhaps, the only one who has thoroughly understood me; who has taken a general bird's-eye view of my ideas; who sees their ulterior aim, and yet has preserved a clear perception of the details.

[T]he last and greatest of liberal thinkers.

John Stuart Mill's position as the unchallenged leader in economics and in other fields in his time was due not only to the quality of his own work but also to the happenstance that people of comparable stature did not come along at that time to contest his methods and conclusions. He was like a track star running against the clock instead of against another track star. He was never pushed — either by the criticism or the competing theories of comparably able contemporaries — to reach his utmost potential. In the long run, his reputation suffered accordingly, because in the long run there are always people of comparable stature.

The growing feeling that private life should be distanced from public life, and was in some sense opposed to it, wrecked the philosophic attempt to reconcile the two. Specifically it destroyed John Stuart Mill's attempt to combine social and moral philosophy under the unifying principle of utility. In one sense, Mill was successful. Setting out to provide a 'unifying social doctrine' by incorporating the 'major positive views' of his Intuitionist critics, he succeeded in giving Utilitarian justifications for many current social practices. Where Mill was much less successful was in linking his social doctrine with his morals.Mill's Autobiography is a brilliant dissection of Victorianism's mid-life crisis. It raised two problems which are vital for understanding the Cambridge civilisation of Keynes's day. First, how is one to reconcile the claims of personal happiness and social duty when the two diverge? And is happiness or pleasure an adequate aim for human conduct? Are there not some things worth doing some dispositions worth cultivating, which are valuable in themselves, irrespective of any Utilitarian justifications they might have? Is it not better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied?What Mill succeeded in doing was to make Cambridge Benthamite in that aspect of its thought which related to social policy. Mill's Utilitarianism, Cambridge mathematics and Cambridge's Nonconformist conscience were the chief constituents in what became the Cambridge School of Economics, whose founder was Alfred Marshall. What Mill failed to do was to make Cambridge moral philosophy Benthamite.

We are far too apt to think of Mill as a technically philosophical writer, because we cannot help thinking of him as the author of the Logic, and to forget that he, no less than Bentham and the other utilitarians, is primarily dominated by the practical interest of the social reformer. He is really far more interested in the question of how, “once the general happiness is recognized as the ethical standard,” this ideal is to be practically realized, than in the question of the ethical criterion and its proof.

He was a friend of my parents, and I didn't know him through that because my parents died when I was quite tiny; but nevertheless it made me know he existed, and so I read his books. And, well, they were the sort of books that would appeal to me. They were empiricist and liberal and humane. And I liked him very much.

The most virtuous and truth-loving man that I at least have ever known.

liberals such as Mill, and later socialists and feminists of different political sympathies, likened women's situation within marriage and their deprivation of civil rights to the state of slavery. As Mill expressed it in The Subjection of Women, a text that was first published in 1861, the year of the outbreak of the American Civil War, 'no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is'.

Reformers like Mill saw women's oppression as a 'relic of the past...discordant with the future and which must necessarily disappear.'

You must be aware of the fact, but I think can hardly appreciate the reality, that in all parts of this country (and wherever our tongue is spoken) there are thousands of earnest men and women to whom your name is as familiar as a household word, and who do not merely admire your ability and appreciate your work, but regard you with all the feeling due to that highest of all characters,—the "great, good man".