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JOHN STUART MILL, VICTORIAN LIBERALISM, AND THE FAILURE OF CO-OPERATIVE PRODUCTION*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2015

JOCELYN PAUL BETTS
JOCELYN PAUL BETTS*
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge
*
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, cb2 1rh[email protected]
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Abstract

John Stuart Mill's support for, and predictions of, co-operative production have been taken as a coherent wedding of liberal and socialist concerns, and as drawing together later nineteenth-century political economy and working-class radicalism. Despite its evident significance, the alliance of political economy and co-operative production was, however, highly conflicted, contested, and short-lived, in ways that help to shed light on the construction of knowledge of society in nineteenth-century Britain. Mill's vision should be seen as developed in contrast to the sociological and historical perspectives of Auguste Comte and Thomas Carlyle, as an attempt to hold together political economy as a valid form of knowledge with the hope of a new social stage in which commerce would be imbued with public spirit. This ideal thus involved debate about competing social futures and the tools of prediction, as well as entering debates within political economy where it was equally embattled. Even Mill's own economic logic tended more towards support of profit-sharing than co-operative production, and hopes for the latter became significantly less persuasive with the introduction of the concept of the entrepreneur into mainstream British economics during the 1870s and 1880s.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 153 - 174
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank the journal's two anonymous reviewers, and Michael Ledger-Lomas and Duncan Kelly for comments on a draft of this article.

References

1 John Stuart Mill, The collected works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson (33 vols., Toronto and London, 1963–91) (hereafter CW), i, p. 255.

2 de Marchi, N. B., ‘The success of Mill's Principles’, History of Political Economy, 6 (1974), pp. 119–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 138, 150.

3 See e.g. John Elliott Cairnes, ‘His work in political economy’, in John Stuart Mill: his life and works (Boston, MA, 1873), pp. 65–73, at p. 70; John Elliott Cairnes, ‘Co-operation in the slate quarries of north Wales’, Macmillan's Magazine, 11 (Jan. 1865), pp. 181–90; Henry Fawcett, Manual of political economy (Cambridge and London, 1863), pp. 276–93; William Thomas Thornton, On labour (London, 1869), pp. 341–439; Alfred Marshall, ‘The future of the working classes’, in A. C. Pigou, ed., Memorials of Alfred Marshall (London, 1925), pp. 101–18.

4 Price, L. L., ‘Profit-sharing and cooperative production’, Economic Journal, 2 (Sept. 1892), pp. 442–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 444–5.

5 Beatrice Webb, My apprenticeship (Cambridge, 1979), p. 363.

6 Eugenio Biagini, Liberty, retrenchment, and reform (Cambridge, 1992), p. 143.

7 Recent discussions involving interpretation of the ‘Probable futurity’ include Richard Ashcraft, ‘John Stuart Mill and the theoretical foundations of democratic socialism’, in Eldon J. Eisenach, ed., Mill and the moral character of liberalism (University Park, PA, 1998), pp. 169–89; Bruce Baum, ‘J. S. Mill and liberal socialism’, in Nadia Urbinati and Alex Zakaras, eds., J. S. Mill's political thought (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 98–123; Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 201–24; Claeys, Gregory, ‘Justice, independence, and industrial democracy: the development of John Stuart Mill's views on socialism’, Journal of Politics, 49 (1987), pp. 122–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gregory Claeys, Mill and paternalism (Cambridge, 2013), ch. 2; Samuel Hollander, The economics of John Stuart Mill (2 vols., Oxford, 1985), ii, ch. 10; Oskar Kurer, John Stuart Mill: the politics of progress (London, 1991), ch. 2; Kurer, Oskar, ‘J. S. Mill and utopian socialism’, Economic Record, 68 (1992), pp. 222–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Medearis, John, ‘Labor, democracy, utility and Mill's critique of private property’, American Journal of Political Science, 49 (2005), pp. 135–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Dale E., ‘Mill's “socialism”’, Politics, Philosophy and Economics, 2 (2003), pp. 213–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill (London, 2007), ch. 9; Riley, Jonathan, ‘J. S. Mill's liberal utilitarian assessment of capitalism versus socialism’, Utilitas, 8 (1996), pp. 39–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frederick Rosen, Mill (Oxford, 2013), pp. 151–79; Sarvasy, Wendy, ‘A reconsideration of the development and structure of John Stuart Mill's socialism’, Western Political Quarterly, 38 (1985), pp. 312–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stafford, William, ‘How can a paradigmatic liberal call himself a socialist? The case of John Stuart Mill’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 3 (1998), pp. 325–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; C. L. Ten, ‘Democracy, socialism, and the working classes’, in John Skorupski, ed., The Cambridge companion to Mill (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 372–95; Donald Winch, Wealth and life (Cambridge, 2009), ch. 2.

8 This concern is overt in Baum, ‘J. S. Mill and liberal socialism’; Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, pp. 201–24; Claeys, ‘Justice, independence, and industrial democracy; Claeys, Mill and paternalism, ch. 2; Miller, ‘Mill's “socialism”’; Sarvasy, ‘A reconsideration of the development and structure of John Stuart Mill's socialism’; Stafford, ‘How can a paradigmatic liberal call himself a socialist?’.

9 The summary discussion in Claeys, Mill and paternalism, pp. 166–72, provides a useful level of nuance on Mill's ideals that helps to further the transcendence of discussion of ‘capitalism’ versus ‘socialism’ as regards Mill. In effectively stressing Mill's normative coherence, however, the difference of profit-sharing from co-operative production is potentially underplayed (specifically at pp. 154–5 and 167–8), and broader tensions seen when examining Mill's context and predictive force are obscured.

10 Mill, CW, i, pp. 171–3.

11 Ibid., iv, p. 369.

12 Though this was a strong reason Mill took to Carlyle, and vice versa. Ibid., xii, pp. 85–6.

13 Which Mill strongly supported. See ibid., xiii, p. 414.

14 John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, The correspondence of John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, ed. Oscar A. Haac, trans. Oscar A. Haac (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), p. 109.

15 Mill, CW, xviii, pp. 119–36.

16 See Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (6 vols., Paris, 1830–42), vi, pp. 571–6.

17 Mill, CW, x, p. 341. The jarring of this statement with ‘textbook’ Victorian individualism has been taken up in Stefan Collini, Public moralists (Oxford, 1993), p. 71.

18 See e.g. Thomas Carlyle, The works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. Henry Duff Traill (30 vols., London, 1896–9), x, pp. 209, 270–6.

19 Mill, CW, i, p. 241.

20 See John Ruskin, The complete works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols., London, 1903–12), xvii, pp. 31–3, xxix, pp. 146–8. Ruskin's relationship with Mill has been well described in Winch, Wealth and life, ch. 3.

21 On relations between Comte and the Saint-Simonians, see Pickering, Mary, ‘Auguste Comte and the Saint-Simonians’, Journal of French Historical Studies, 18 (1993), pp. 211–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 See Keith Michael Baker, ‘Closing the French Revolution: Saint-Simon and Comte’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., The transformation of political culture, 1789–1848 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 323–39.

23 Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte (3 vols., Cambridge, 1993–2009), i, pp. 92–9, 109–12.

24 Comte, Cours, iv, pp. 264–77.

25 See Auguste Comte, Early political writings, ed. H. S. Jones, trans. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 204–11.

26 See especially Mill, CW, iii, pp. 942–4.

27 See Arthur Helps, The claims of labour (London, 1844), pp. 33–4.

28 Mill, CW, iv, p. 375.

29 A general connection between the message of this review, its opposition to Carlyle, and the ‘Probable futurity’ has been established in Winch, Wealth and life, ch. 2, especially p. 50. As Winch notes here, this 1845 argument helps to show the limited usefulness of any argument as to Harriet Taylor's later responsibility for the intellectual content of the ‘Probable futurity’, despite her suggestion as to its inclusion in the Principles.

30 See Bruce L. Kinzer, England's disgrace? (Toronto, 2001), ch. 2.

31 Mill and Comte, Correspondence, pp. 382–4.

32 As suggested by Adelaide Weinberg, The influence of Auguste Comte on the economics of John Stuart Mill (London, 1982), pp. 373–83.

33 Comte, Early political writings, p. 223; Carlyle, Works, xxviii, pp. 271–2.

34 The kind of reading offered in e.g. Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, pp. 203–4; Rosen, Mill, pp. 171–4.

35 One should note that the first (1843) edition of Mill's Logic remained agnostic about Comte's predictions. The second (1846) edition was overtly critical. Mill, CW, viii, p. 925.

36 Mill, CW, x, p. 325.

37 Ibid., x, p. 325, xviii, pp. 50–2.

38 Ibid., iii, pp. 761–4.

39 As stressed in e.g. Miller, ‘Mill's “socialism”’, pp. 221–3, Reeves, Mill, p. 224.

40 Mill, CW, iii, pp. 766–7.

41 Ibid., ii, pp. 137–40.

42 Ibid., iv, p. 382.

43 Ibid., p. 385.

44 Ibid., iii, p. 1013.

45 Ibid., v, pp. 411–12, 417–18.

46 Ibid., i, p. 238.

47 See e.g. Carlyle, Works, x, pp. 207–8.

48 Some examinations of Mill's co-operation treat it without any acknowledgement of such chronology, including Baum, ‘J. S. Mill and liberal socialism’; Miller, ‘Mill's “socialism”’; Riley, ‘J. S. Mill's liberal utilitarian assessment of capitalism versus socialism’.

49 A point that tempers the suggested normative impact of events in 1848 in France in Claeys, Mill and paternalism, pp. 140–3; Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, pp. 220–2. The impact of 1848, the influence of Harriet Taylor, and Mill's study of socialist authors at this time, can all be plausibly invoked as aiding the changing descriptions of Owenism, Fourierism, and Saint-Simonianism in chapters 1 and 2 of book 2 of the Principles. Yet the basis on which Mill made co-operative production more plausible was distinct, as outlined above.

50 Mill, CW, iii, p. 776.

51 Ibid., iii, p. 793, xiv, pp. 94–6, xv, pp. 545–6.

52 Ibid., xxviii, p. 7.

53 Ibid., iii, p. 769.

54 Ibid., pp. 792–3.

55 Ibid., v, p. 743.

56 See Claeys, Mill and paternalism, pp. 154–5, where it is claimed that there is ‘no evidence’ that Mill retreated from an idea that profit-sharing ‘would be supplanted’ by ‘collective ownership of capital’; Rosen, Mill. The changes have been noted as of some significance, though without context, in Kurer, ‘J. S. Mill and utopian socialism’; Hollander, Economics of John Stuart Mill, ii, pp. 816–18.

57 See Rosen, Mill, p. 178; Baum, ‘J. S. Mill and liberal socialism’, pp. 111–13.

58 Mill, CW, iv, p. 793.

59 Ibid., iii, p. 783.

60 George Jacob Holyoake, The history of co-operation (London, 1908), p. 446.

61 Mill, CW, xv, pp. 966–7.

62 Ibid., p. 903.

63 See ibid., p. 904. The importance Mill accorded the change is evident in CW, xiv, pp. 94–5.

64 See John Malcolm Ludlow and Lloyd Jones, The progress of the working class (London, 1867), p. 52.

65 In addition, the fairly rapid failure of the Briggs scheme and others by the 1870s would in turn be widely discouraging to liberal observers, and tended to make discussion of profit-sharing itself (like co-operative production) more of a question of workers’ morality than the efficiency provided by incentivization. See in particular Sedley Taylor, Profit-sharing between capital and labour: six essays (London, 1884), preface.

66 Ibid., 859.

67 Fawcett, Manual of political economy, pp. 284–93.

68 Thornton, William, ‘Strikes and industrial co-operation’, Westminster Review, 25 (Apr. 1864), pp. 349–83Google Scholar, 368–9, 379–80.

69 George Jacob Holyoake, John Stuart Mill as some of the working classes knew him (London, 1873), p. 3.

70 Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke (Oxford, 1983), p. 301; see also Charles Kingsley, Novels, letters, and poems of Charles Kingsley, ed. Frances Kingsley (14 vols., London and New York, NY, 1899), ii, pp. 75–6.

71 Frederick Denison Maurice, Reasons for co-operation (London, 1851), p. 22.

72 John Malcolm Ludlow, Christian socialism and its opponents (London, 1851), pp. 62–3.

73 Mill, CW, xiv, p. 157. Though the project did not come to fruition, it led to certain edits including a harder line on workers who resisted proportionate pay.

74 William Rathbone Greg, Essays on political and social science (2 vols., London, 1853), i, pp. 382–6, 435–6, 451, 483.

75 Mary B. Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 120–2; Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell (London, 1999), p. 300.

76 See e.g. Greg, Essays, i, p. 481.

77 Ibid., p. 460.

78 Ibid., pp. 377–86

79 Ibid., p. 433.

80 John Ramsay McCulloch, A treatise on the circumstances which determine the rate of wages (2nd edn, London, 1854), pp. 72–4.

81 John Lalor, Money and morals (London, 1852), preface, p. 205. The Christian political economy of Chalmers is best treated in Boyd Hilton, Age of atonement (Oxford, 1986).

82 Lalor, Money and morals, pp. 199–205.

83 Charles Morrison, Essay on the relations between labour and capital (London, 1854), pp. vii–viii, 111–47.

84 Ibid., pp. 133–5.

85 See Mark C. Curthoys, Governments, labour, and the law in mid-Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2004), pp. 51–2; Mark Curthoys, ‘“Secret organisation of trades”: Harriet Martineau and “free labour” in Victorian Britain’, in Ella Dzelzainis and Cora Kaplan, eds., Harriet Martineau: authorship, society, and empire (Manchester, 2010), pp. 133–50, at pp. 140–6.

86 Lawrence Goldman, Science, reform, and politics in Victorian Britain: the social science association, 1857–1886 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 210–13.

87 See ‘Report’, in Trades’ societies and strikes (London, 1860), pp. v–xxi, at pp. xvii–xxi.

88 Fawcett, Henry, ‘Strikes: their tendencies and remedies’, Westminster Review, 18 (July 1860), pp. 1–23Google Scholar, at p. 23.

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90 Ibid., v, pp. 666–7.

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92 See Frederic Harrison, Order and progress (London, 1875), pp. 31–43.

93 Ibid., pp. 491–503.

94 Beesly, Edward Spencer, ‘The social future of the working class’, Fortnightly Review, 5 (Mar. 1869), pp. 344–63Google Scholar, at pp. 350–1.

95 Ibid., pp. 349–50, 354.

96 Royden Harrison, ‘Professor Beesly and the working-class movement’, in Asa Briggs and John Saville, eds., Essays in labour history (London, 1960), pp. 205–41, at p. 210.

97 Anon., ‘The future of the working-classes’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 27 (Mar. 1869), pp. 343–4Google Scholar.

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99 J. E. Cairnes, Some leading principles of political economy newly expounded (New York, NY, 1874), pp. 283–91.

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101 John Kells Ingram, A history of political economy (Edinburgh and New York, NY, 1888), p. 227.

102 Marshall, ‘The future of the working classes’, pp. 113–14.

103 Ibid., p. 101.

104 Alfred Marshall, The correspondence of Alfred Marshall, ed. John K. Whitaker (3 vols., Cambridge, 1996), i, p. 30.

105 Thomas Brassey, Work and wages (London, 1872), p. 260; Brassey, Thomas, ‘Co-operative production’, Contemporary Review, 24 (July 1874), pp. 212–33Google Scholar, at pp. 213–14, 228.

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107 Alfred Marshall and Mary Paley Marshall, The economics of industry (London, 1879), p. 221.

108 Ibid., p. 116.

109 Ibid., pp. 117–18.

110 Francis Amasa Walker, The wages question (New York, NY, 1876), pp. 252–85, at pp. 272–3, 277.

111 Marshall, Alfred, ‘The theory of business profits’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1 (July 1887), pp. 477–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112 Alfred Marshall, ‘Co-operation’, in Pigou, ed., Memorials, pp. 227–55.

113 Alfred Marshall, Principles of economics (London, 1890), pp. 37–8.

114 Cf. ibid., pp. 366–8, and Alfred Marshall, Principles (2nd edn, London, 1891), p. 363; Marshall, Principles (1st edn), pp. 629–31, and Marshall, Principles (2nd edn), pp. 634–6.

115 Philip N. Backstrom, Christian socialism and co-operation in Victorian England (London, 1974), pp. 187–201.

116 Price, ‘Profit-sharing and cooperative production’, p. 455.