John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British Member of Parliament (MP) for City and Westminster from 1865 to 1868, representing the UK Liberal Party. Mill was a supporter of utilitarianism and suffrage for women, being the first British MP to advocate universal suffrage.
Biography[]
John Stuart Mill was born in the Pentonville area of London, England in 1806, the son of a Scottish historian. He was given a rigorous upbringing, and his father educated him with the help of thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham. At the age of three, Mill was taught Greek, and he had read Aesop's Fables, Anabasis, and all of Herodotus' works by the time he was eight. He was ineligible to study at Oxford or Cambridge due to his disagreements with the Church of England, and he decided to work for the British East India Company alongside his father. In 1843, he revealed his five principles of inductive reasoning in A System of Logic, and he also wrote On Liberty in 1859 and became an advocate for classical liberalism. Mill became a major proponent of utilitarianism, and he became a Member of Parliament in 1865 as a member of the UK Liberal Party. He also justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control, making him one of the nineteenth century's greatest philosophers.