Volume 52, Number 5 · March 24, 2005
Freedom Fighter
By Alan Ryan
John Stuart Mill
by Nicholas Capaldi
Cambridge University Press,436 pp., $40.00
May 20, 2006, is the bicentenary of the birth of John Stuart Mill, so Nicholas Capaldi's biography arrives at an appropriate moment. It is the first biographical account of Mill for some thirty years. There have been recent studies of Mill's philosophy, of which the best by some margin is John Skorupski's[1] ; and several studies of Mill's politics, from Joseph Hamburger's hostile John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control[2] to the much friendlier portrait of Mill and other liberals in Stefan Collini's Public Moralists.[3] Attempts to integrate life and thought have been thinner on the ground. John Robson, whose thirty-volume edition of Mill's Collected Works[4]> is beyond all praise, might have produced the definitive biography to supplement his account of Mill's career as a social reformer in The Improvement of Mankind,[5] but he died before it could happen.
Review, 4979 words
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