John Stuart Mill, socialiste

Abstract

The second, 1849 edition of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy contained the judgement that Fourierism presented ‘in every respect the least open to objection, of the forms of Socialism’ a verdict that can seem peculiar to those who recall the eccentricities of Charles Fourier’s system. In her fine new book Helen McCabe argues that ‘[b]y the mid-1840s, Mill viewed himself as a socialist’, but notes that ‘[h]e did not endorse any particular contemporary form of socialism: he was not a Marxist, or an Owenite, or even a Fourierist or Saint-Simonian’ (4). If we nevertheless ask why Mill in 1849 did align himself more closely with the Fourierists than with any of the other extant varieties of socialism we may find that John Stuart Mill, Socialist is not especially illuminating, and this for two reasons. First, the book is organised thematically, and one of the characteristic disadvantages of thematic organisation is that it can occlude chronology, a difficulty that risks becoming acute in the case of Mill, whose later writings such as the 1873 Autobiography or the posthumously published ‘Chapters on Socialism’ can be used to cast a retrospective light on much earlier decades. Second, to think about Fourierism after 1848 is plausibly to take seriously the idea that socialism in the first half of the nineteenth century is a distinctively French body of ideas, yet McCabe’s book makes it harder to get to grips with the Frenchness of early socialism, not only through its keenness to document Mill’s early engagement with the Owenites and his later interest in the co-operative movement in Britain, but also because McCabe’s own more extended treatment of Fourierism and its French context does not in fact appear within the book’s pages at all, but rather in a separate article she has published in Global Intellectual History.