The relationship between socialism and liberalism is magnetic—sometimes pulling close, at others repelling, in a force field that marks not just the histories of political thought and partisan conflict but the personal trajectories of key protagonists of each. Proximity has not always rendered the relationship less fraught. Yet attempts to transcend the differences have never ceased. Visions of ‘market socialism’ are as old as industrial capitalism itself, as if the ‘dis-embedding’ of markets were a simultaneous spur to imagining how they could be reintegrated, in the new world to which factory production and wage-dependent labour gave rise. This was the moment of the ‘crude conditions of capitalistic production’ and ‘the crude theories’ that went with them described by Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, when Owen took over New Lanark (1800), Saint-Simon published Lettres de Genève (1803) and Fourier’s Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales (1808) appeared, eventually launching phalanxes toward the plains of Iowa, intentional communities to Indiana and the Great Lakes.

More recently, a resurgence of the left on the lower flanks of the Democratic Party since 2015 has fired new interest in amalgams of liberalism and socialism. Different thinkers have been canvassed as possible guides, from Polanyi and Keynes to Rawls and Piketty, to say nothing of Marx. What these discussions have often lacked, however, are historical moorings—to help clarify not just the conditions that have drawn socialists and liberals together, but the fault lines along which such instances of cooperation have fallen apart. John Stuart Mill is at once foundational to this dichotomy, as author of On Liberty (1859), perhaps the most canonical text of classical liberalism, yet also most disruptive of it, having classed himself in his Autobiography ‘under the general designation of Socialist’, for whom the great social problem of the future was how to unite individual liberty of action with ‘common ownership in the raw materials of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour.’ Were Mill’s forays into socialist territory a short-lived aberration, perhaps under what Hayek, Mises and Lionel Robbins saw as the baleful influence of feminist theorist Harriet Taylor? Or does Mill’s trajectory reveal a larger pattern in the unstable relationship between liberalism and socialism, with shifting currents in each pulling towards the magnetic poles of the other—individual or collective, public or private, market or plan, reform or revolution?

With John Stuart Mill, Socialist, Helen McCabe aims to show that Mill was neither deluded nor inconsistent. She sets out to trace the development of his world outlook as ‘a coherent—and, as it transpires, socialist—whole’. In part this reflects her own process of discovery in the course of a project that began as an undergraduate thesis at Oxford. ‘When I first heard that Mill called himself a socialist, I was bewildered’, she writes, of a topic encouraged to doctoral-dissertation stage in 2010 by scholars of liberal and utopian thought including Michael Freeden, Alan Ryan and David Leopold. Mill after all figures as a giant of nineteenth-century liberalism on every modern-political theory course. Yet ‘Mill had no more serious differences with contemporary socialists than they had with one another’, McCabe insists. At the same time, her book has another, bolder ambition: not only to show that Mill was a socialist, but to argue that his ‘organic, peaceful, piecemeal, incremental’ strategy for achieving socialism is the one we need today. McCabe, who teaches political theory at Nottingham, proceeds thematically, setting out Mill’s criticisms of laissez-faire capitalism, his evaluation of the socialisms of his era and the core normative principles that guided his ideas of social reform, before sketching out the lineaments of his socialist utopia, as he himself failed to do. But she begins, unavoidably, with Mill’s hyper-intellectualized and politicized upbringing, under the shadow of aristocratic rule and working-class revolt in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

Mill’s father, James, was from a modest Scottish family, born in 1773 in a village near the northeast coast, halfway between Dundee and Aberdeen; the father was a shoemaker, the mother gentry fallen on hard times, who nevertheless insisted on his education. In 1802 James set off for London with the patronage of a Scottish mp, Sir John Stuart, in whose honour he would in 1806 name his first-born son. But the young family’s position on the fringes of the capital’s literary life remained precarious until James met the wealthy and well-connected Jeremy Bentham, twenty-five years his senior. Bentham adopted him as a publicist for utilitarianism and moved the Mill family into the house next door to his own in Queen Square Place, a smart street in Westminster, frequented too by the dashing David Ricardo, immensely rich financier, economist and radical mp. Here James Mill wrote his influential History of British India (1817), with its condemnation of ‘Hindoo deceit and perfidy’, as well as Elements of Political Economy (1821), Essays on Government (1823) and other works, while rising through the ranks of the East India Company and, in the course of their famous perambulatory lectures, educating his intellectually precocious son in the principles of political economy as per Smith, Ricardo, Bentham and Malthus. The young John Stuart Mill was thus raised as the prodigy of a prodigy, in a hothouse atmosphere that also welcomed Owenites, Saint-Simonians and French liberal thinkers under the capacious roof of utilitarianism, where theoretical economics and social philosophy were married to campaigns for free trade, constitutional reform and family planning. At the age of seventeen, he too was inducted into a life-long career in colonial policy at East India House.

McCabe rightly stresses the importance of French radical traditions for Mill’s later development. A teenage year in Paris and Montpellier in 1820 left a lasting enthusiasm for French liberal thought. As Mill recovered from what he would call the ‘crisis in my mental history’ that he underwent aged twenty, in the winter of 1826, he turned to thinkers who put greater emphasis on ‘fraternity’, ‘fellow feeling’, social harmony and cohesion than the utilitarians were accustomed to do, as also to more panoramic, historicizing accounts of social development. If this included the ‘speculative’ Toryism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, most importantly for McCabe it meant that Mill took to his heart the positivism of Saint-Simon and his progeny, above all Auguste Comte: their progressive view of history, shifting between ‘organic’ and ‘critical’ ages, allowed Mill to imagine political institutions, property relations and mores beyond the reforms envisioned by the Benthamites. McCabe argues that Mill’s youthful crisis opened the ‘space’ for his views to develop towards socialism, even if he wouldn’t define himself in those terms until the 1840s (indeed, his 1830s essays in The Examiner and the Westminster Review, or reports on French politics for the Morning Chronicle, express in pure form the bourgeois-radical views of Queen Square). Instead, another crisis intervened.

In 1830, the 24-year-old Mill met the 22-year-old Harriet Taylor—already the author of a book on William Caxton and the history of printing; married, with three children—when invited to a dinner party of like-thinking radicals at her house. ‘Pale she, and passionate and sad-looking’, noted Thomas Carlyle, a friend-enemy of Mill’s, whom he described as a ‘slender, rather tall and elegant youth’, enthusiastic yet lucid, modest and gifted with a remarkable precision of utterance. After avowals of love, painful partings and escapades in Paris, she came to an arrangement with her husband and moved with the children to Keston Heath, southeast of the capital, where Mill would visit at weekends. They married in 1851, after her husband’s death; but Taylor herself died in 1858. Mill credited her not only with playing a vital role in shaping and editing his mature works, Principles of Political Economy (1848) and On Liberty (1859), but with pushing him to ‘move forward more boldly’ in a political sense.

McCabe doesn’t dwell on the relationship, however, but moves swiftly on to her thematic chapters. Here it is the image of Mill as prototypical laissez-faire liberal that is most dramatically altered by her re-examination of his writing through a socialist lens. His Principles of Political Economy may have declared government non-interference in the economy the ‘general rule’, but he made ‘large exceptions’ to it—for primary education, factory acts, practical monopolies in water, gas, roads, railways, canals, as well as poor relief, scientific research, learned endowments and so on. Mill consistently criticized the existing capitalist order—‘a society founded on private property and individual competition’—on grounds of its inefficiency and waste, its inequality and injustice, its restrictions on freedom. Attempts to defend private property on grounds of justice must inevitably fail, he wrote; the distinction between rich and poor, so slightly connected with merit or demerit, was obviously unjust.