The rare first edition of James Mill’s final book, written in response to earlier critiques of his ‘Essay on Government’ by Thomas Macaulay and Sir James Mackintosh, with particular reference to Mackintosh’s famous Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy that had been included in the 1830 seventh edition of the Encylopaedia Britannica.
‘In his reply Mill reiterates and defends the arguments advanced in his Essay on Government: all men—including rulers and representatives—are moved mainly if not exclusively by considerations of self-interest, and therefore the only security for good government is to be found in making the interests of representatives identical with those of their constituents. But, unlike the cool, detached, and ostensibly deductive Essay on Government, Mill’s reply contains a good deal of vitriol. He writes like a schoolmaster who, having lost all patience with a slow-witted pupil, is content to ridicule him before his cleverer classmates. The sight is not a pretty one, and shows James Mill at his polemical worst. Whether, or to what extent, such a splenetic rejoinder could suffice as a refutation is surely questionable’ (Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy).
John Stuart Mill would later write about his father’s work in his Autobiography, reflecting that: “His ‘Fragment on Mackintosh’ which he wrote and published about this time, although I greatly admired some parts of it, I read as a whole with more pain than pleasure; yet on reading it again, long after, I found little in the opinions it contains, but what I think in the main just; and I can even sympathise in his disgust at the verbiage of Mackintosh though his asperity towards it went beyond not only what was judicious, but beyond what was even fair.”
From the library of the Scottish idealist philosopher W. R. Sorley (1855-1935), professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge University, with his ownership inscription to the front free endpaper and a few occasional pencilled marginal annotations in his hand.
