Social and Political Writings.

Mill's social and political writings, in addition to occasional articles, consist of the short treatise Considerations on Representative Government (1806), Thoughts on parliamentary Reform (1859), the essays On Liberty (1859) and On the Subjection of Women (1869), Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1831, 1844) and The Principles of Political Economy (1848). The method appropriate to these topics had been already discussed in the chapters on the Logic of the Moral Sciences included in his Logic. He sought a via media between the purely empirical method and the deductive method. The latter, as employed by his father, was modeled on the reasonings of geometry, which is not a science of causation. The method of politics, if it is to be deductive, must belong to a different type, and will (he holds) be the same as that used in mathematical physics. Dynamics is a deductive science because the law of the composition of forces holds; similarly, politics is a deductive science because the causes with which it deals follow this law: the effects of these causes, when conjoined, are the same as the sum of the effects which the same causes produce when acting separatelya striking and unproved assumption. Like his predecessors, Mill postulated certain forces as determining human conduct; especially self-interest and mental association. From their working, he deducted political and social consequences. He did not diverge from the principles agreed upon by those with whom he was associated. Perhaps he did not add very much to them, but he saw their limitations more clearly than others did; the hypothetical nature of economic theory, and the danger that democratic government might prove antagonistic to the causes of individual freedom and of the common welfare. To guard against theses dangers, he proposed certain modifications of the representative system. But his contemporaries, and even his successors, of the same way of thinking in general, for long looked upon the dangers as imaginary, and his proposals for their removal were ignored. The essay On Liberty defends of the thesis "that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection;" but, as an argument, it meets everywhere with the difficulty of determining the precise point at which the distinction between self-regarding and social (even directly social) activity is to be drawn.