Gregory Conti, in his introduction to a new edition of John Stuart Mill’s Writings on Representative Government and Parliamentary Reform, writes, “Mill is best known as the embodiment of liberalism.” We may think that we know what this means, but do we? As Conti argues, “Thinkers of [Mill’s] stature need periodically to be reintroduced, lest familiarity breed, if not exactly contempt, then a complacency about our grasp of their meaning, which is sure to lead to misunderstanding.”

　　Conti’s new 550-page edition, with an 80-page introduction, does more than correct common misunderstandings. It presents a historical and contextualized Mill (1806–73), and helps us to reconsider not only the thinker, but the Victorian period and its political thought more broadly, providing a crucial chapter in the history of the classical period of liberalism.

　　Mill is famous for his writings on freedom of thought and speech, utilitarianism, empire, and feminism. His canonical essay On Liberty is taught to students around the world. But one area that has generated less interest is his writings on representative government. This subject is Conti’s expertise, as the writer of Parliament the Mirror of the Nation(2019) and the editor of A. V. Dicey’s Writings on Democracy and the Referendum(2023). Conti’s edition highlights Mill’s constitutional thought as it developed over several decades, and how he moved from orthodox Benthamite Radicalism to advancing his own, antagonistic theory of representative government, with plural voting.

　　A Political Life

　　In his introduction, Conti contends forcefully that reading On Liberty is not enough to understand Mill in the round. Conti’s Mill was a successor to Burke rather than a predecessor to Rawls. Far from being an armchair philosopher, Conti emphasizes that Mill was a deeply political and even partisan writer, who was a journalist and a critic before he became a philosopher. “Like Marx, Mill composed much of his finest work in the form of criticism, in what looks at first glance to be unobtrusive surveys of other thinkers,” writes Conti.

　　Mill began his public life as an heir to and youthful standard bearer of the utilitarianism of his father James Mill and their friend, Jeremy Bentham, the grand old man of political radicalism in the early decades of the nineteenth century. As a young champion of Benthamite Philosophical Radicalism, Mill made his bones as an opposer of hereditary privilege and the landed aristocracy. To the end of his life, he campaigned for the extension of the franchise in Britain. In this sense, he stayed true to his roots, even if he drifted away from Bentham’s and his father’s form of utilitarianism and developed a more qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, version of the philosophy.

　　A critical event in the younger Mill’s political life was the First Reform Act of 1832, which eliminated rotten boroughs and more systematically enfranchised middle-class voters. Mill called it a “pacific … revolution,” as it established the principle of organic change, and he himself served as a Member of Parliament between 1865 and 1868 when the Second Reform Act of 1867 was passed (though the 1867 Act, passed by a Conservative government, was more far-reaching than the 1866 Liberal bill that he had backed).

　　As soon as the First Reform Act was passed, Mill set to work to put a “liberal” or “radical”—terms he used interchangeably in what Conti calls Mill’s “middle period” —agenda into place. Since Mill at this point could not join the small but impressive cadre of Radical MPs in the House of Commons because of his employment in the East India Company, he supported a liberal reform program in the press. The Radical agenda included an end to monopolies and agricultural protection, lower taxes, free trade, improved education, and further constitutional reform such as the secret ballot. For them, the 1832 Reform Act was only the beginning.

　　Much of Mill’s political thought presents more a challenge to modern politics than an affirmation of them.

　　Since both Whigs and Tories were loyal to the aristocratic establishment, Mill argued in the 1830s that the Radicals had to be the leaders of enlightened, middle-class opinion. He did not support working-class champions of universal suffrage such as Chartists, even if their programs had much else in common. The middle classes, comprising industrialists, shopkeepers, and merchants, were the “natural Radicals,” according to Mill. They should work together with the moderate leaders of the working classes, who rejected Chartism. He was convinced that the Radical program would be particularly beneficial for workers, as free trade and an end to agricultural protection would lower food prices. But at this point, Mill thought that workers needed more time to develop politically and become intellectually mature to receive the vote. The issue was the lack of education rather than any innate mental deficiencies. Popular education had to precede democratization, he was convinced. Mill was not a revolutionary but a gradualist.

　　For Mill, the analysis of class did not mean crude economic determinism of the vulgar Marxist kind, or indeed Marx’s own more vulgar moments, but rather, as Conti puts it, sophisticated analysis of “how socioeconomic structure combined with ideas to shape political competition.”

　　As Mill had now moved away from the narrow Benthamism of his youth, Conti argues that it was in his “middle period” that Mill came to realize that practical truth, as he would later say in On Liberty, was a result of “the reconciling and combining of opposites.” He started to mine conservative thought for liberal purposes. He was particularly interested in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s advocacy of a “clerisy.” But whereas this had had a religious dimension for Coleridge, Mill reconceived it as a secular intelligentsia that would contravene the tyranny of public opinion.

　　Parliamentary Government vs. Democracy

　　The most famous work in the collection is Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government (1861). In this book, Mill argued for the enfranchisement of all classes of the public, notably women on the same terms as men. But there were some exclusions. His recommendations comprised a simple literacy and numeracy test. He also believed that those dependent on either private charity or public relief should be excluded from the vote. Famously in favor of a flat income tax, with only a small exception at the lower end (coupled with a more progressive inheritance tax), Mill also wanted to extend direct taxation to those on very low incomes so as to give them a sense of responsibility in voting for MPs taking the decisions about public funds. The long-term goal was a “widely expanded” suffrage, but the mature Mill remained a gradualist.

　　In Conti’s interpretation, the principle of antagonism emerged as the fulcrum of his mature political theory. Whereas he remained interested in an independent leisure class, inspired by Coleridge’s clerisy, he now believed that antagonism needed to be institutionalized in parliament, and in particular in the House of Commons, the more powerful chamber. As he lost his faith in the middle class, he shifted his focus to structured class contestation.

　　Despite his support for the extension of the vote, Mill was terrified about the prospect of unfettered democracy. For him, simple democracy was defective by giving the majority free rein to tyrannize over minorities, and failing to produce top-quality governmental talent. In On Liberty, inspired by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Mill cried out against the tendency of modern societies to stifle diversity and individuality, though Mill was, like Tocqueville, the other great nineteenth-century liberal, fearful of excessive individualism in modern societies, where people risked retreating from the public sphere. Like Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which Mill admired, the Considerations on Representative Government is to a great extent focused on how to guide and manage the march of democracy, and this is what makes it stand out for the modern reader. Mill’s favored solutions were proportional representation based on Thomas Hare’s single transferable vote scheme, and plural voting based on education rather than property.

　　Plural voting would ensure that the House of Commons would be properly representative. To prevent the working classes from swamping the lower house, giving more votes to the well-educated and skilled professionals would enable institutionalized disagreements between social groups, and ensure the airing of diverse opinions. In other words, Mill was as opposed to exclusive rule by the working class as rule by the aristocracy (or indeed the middle class).

　　In his mature writings, Mill changed his mind on one of the key ambitions of his youthful radicalism: the secret ballot. Through public voting, which continued to be the practice until the penultimate year of Mill’s life, many reformers believed that landowners and employers could exert pressure over their dependents and employees. But Mill became less worried about this form of social pressure and more concerned with the need for voters to be able to defend their choice publicly. Confidential voting, he now realized, suggested that the vote should be exercised for private rather than common good.

　　Mill was thus not a simple democrat. Though he was more radical than most of his countrymen, the late Mill subscribed to English exceptionalism, and he was consistently wedded to Victorian parliamentary government, which, as Conti has argued in his earlier research, should be seen as an alternative to, rather than an anticipation of, twentieth-century democratic politics. Mill did use “democracy,” but mainly, Conti shows, to bring in those wedded to the term and to shift its meaning from “one man, one vote” to unexclusiveness and respect for education. For Mill, representative government was also an antonym to bureaucratization, which plagued Continental Europe and Mill regarded as the enemy of freedom and progress. Conti concludes that much of Mill’s political thought presents more a challenge to modern politics than an affirmation of them.

　　It is a shame that Mill is famous for having said that the Conservative Party was “the stupidest party.” Rather than narrowly addressing his own tribe, Mill’s ambition was instead, as he put it in the preface to Considerations on Representative Government, to advance ideas that “might be adopted by either Liberal or Conservative without renouncing anything which he really feels to be valuable in his own creed.” Whatever we think of the execution, this ambition is worth remembering.