John Stuart Mill Timeline

During John Neal's stay in London circa 1825–1827, he recruited Mill to the cause of gender equality, making Mill one of the earliest male proponents of gender equality.

Image source: John Neal

In 1850, Mill sent an anonymous letter in rebuttal to Thomas Carlyle's letter to Fraser's Magazine, known as 'The Negro Question', in which Carlyle argued for slavery. Mill defended the equality of Black people against Carlyle's racist arguments.

Image source: Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question

Between 1865 and 1868, Mill served as Member of Parliament for City of Westminster as a member of the Liberal Party, alongside his role as Lord Rector of St Andrews.

In 1866, Mill became the second person in the history of Parliament, after Henry Hunt in 1832, to call for women to be given the right to vote, vigorously defending this position in subsequent debate.

In April 1868, Mill favoured in a Commons debate the retention of capital punishment for such crimes as aggravated murder, terming its abolition 'an effeminacy in the general mind of the country'.

John Herschel's 1830 publication incorporated inductive reasoning from the known to the unknown, discovering general laws in specific facts and verifying them empirically. This sparked a debate over the scientific method that Mill would later join.

Image source: John Herschel

William Whewell expanded on Herschel's ideas in his 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences, followed in 1840 by The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, presenting induction as the mind superimposing concepts on facts — views Mill would counter in 1843.

Image source: William Whewell

Mill countered Whewell's philosophy of induction in 1843 with A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation.

Image source: A System of Logic

In Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill praised Edward Gibbon Wakefield for his 'important writings on colonization'. The book became one of the most widely read works on economics in the period and served as Oxford University's standard text until 1919.

Image source: Principles of Political Economy

On Liberty addresses the nature and limits of the power that can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. Its contentions remain highly influential: a copy of the work is passed to the president of the Liberal Democrats as a symbol of office.

Image source: On Liberty

Written in 1861 and published in 1869, The Subjection of Women is one of the earliest written on gender inequality by a male author, co-authored with Harriet Taylor Mill's influence, and argued that gender inequality was both a moral injustice and an economic inefficiency.

Image source: The Subjection of Women

Published in 1869, The Subjection of Women was an early feminist work co-authored in spirit with Harriet Taylor Mill, whose Unitarian and rationalist views enriched its critique of gender inequality.

In Socialism (1879), Mill argued that the prevalence of poverty in contemporary industrial capitalist societies was 'pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements', and that attempts to condone this state of affairs were 'an irresistible claim upon every human being for protection against suffering'.

While the manuscript of the completed first volume of Carlyle's work was in Mill's possession, Mill's housemaid unwittingly used it as tinder, destroying all except some three or four bits of leaves. Mortified, Mill offered Carlyle £200 as compensation, though Carlyle would only accept £100.

Image source: Thomas Carlyle

Mill first contacted Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism and sociology, in November 1841, beginning a long pen-friendship between the two thinkers.

Image source: Auguste Comte

On 21 April 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor after 21 years of intimate friendship. Taylor had been married when they met, and their relationship was close but generally believed to be chaste before her first husband died in 1849.

Image source: Harriet Taylor Mill

Taylor died in 1858 after developing severe lung congestion, after only seven years of marriage to Mill. Her collaborative work with Mill, including The Enfranchisement of Women (1851), laid groundwork for modern feminist economics.

Mill died on 7 May 1873, at the age of 66, of erysipelas in Avignon, where his body was buried alongside his wife's. He left behind Socialism, published posthumously in 1879, which argued that poverty in industrial capitalist societies was 'pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements'.