Capaldi believes that many of the disagreements over the interpretation of Mill's work can be traced to the fact that J.S. Mill wrote philosophy, economics and political theory. This is problematic since most people are only familiar with one part of his corpus. Capaldi thinks that if you were to read all of Mill's writings, as he has, that you would realize that there is a unifying aim. In all of his work, J.S. Mill tried to promote the idea of autonomy. This concept resulted from Mill melding together the Enlightenment utilitarianism of James Mill, his father, and Jeremy Bentham with the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Shelley. For Mill, autonomy was the individual and the common good.

A major intellectual turning point for Mill occurred during his crisis in his twenties. This crisis was in large part caused by Mill's desire for independence, intellectually and otherwise, from his father. He escaped this crisis by breaking free from the Philosophic Radicals and embracing Romanticism. Capaldi wants to make it clear that J.S. Mill was his own man. Some writers have alleged that Mill was completely under the influence of his father. It is also said that after James Mill's death, Harriet Taylor, Mill's long time companion and eventual wife, took over this role. While Capaldi does not dispute that they both were significant influences on Mill at different parts of his life, he does not think that that either Harriet Taylor or James Mill controlled him.

As befits a biography, the structure of this book is chronological with a couple of interludes devoted to closer examination of specific essays that Capaldi considers important to understanding Mill's development as a thinker. He starts off by discussing James Mill and in particular his educational method. He shows how J.S. Mill's education prepared him to join his father as one of the Philosophic Radicals, while neglecting things such as art and poetry. Despite his increasing interest in Romanticism, Mill was reluctant to break publicly with the views espoused by his father. It was only after James' death in 1836, that John Stuart asserted publicly his synthesis of Enlightenment and Romantic ideals.

Harriet Taylor's influence on Mill is clear. Mill's emphasis on the importance of autonomy was in large part informed by his discussions with Harriet, according to Capaldi. Mill's defense of the rights of women can be traced in part to Harriet as well. However, as with James Mill, influence does not mean domination and control as some have asserted. For one thing, Mill was not as optimistic about the potential of socialism as Harriet was.

Capaldi's focus on autonomy as a unifying rubric has powerful explanatory power. In particular, it allows Capaldi to convincingly explain Mill's acceptance of socialism as being consistent with the rest of his thought. In doing so, Capaldi argues against the thesis put forth most notably by Friedrich Hayek and Gertrude Himmelfarb that Harriet Taylor was the cause for Mill's changing attitudes towards socialism. Mill was interested in whatever would promote autonomy. He thought that certain socialist ideas had potential for doing so. It is important to note what Mill meant by referring to socialism. He never approved of the sort of centralized state socialism that the term evokes today. He believed that the institution of private property needed to be preserved. The kind of socialist ideas that Mill found acceptable were worker cooperatives and worker owned factories. These would allow more people to become entrepreneurs and thus increase their autonomy. Thus the sort of socialism that Mill endorsed was not at all incompatible with his consistent advocacy of free markets.

The subtitle of this book, A Biography, is a bit disingenuous. Capaldi has not written a biography of John Stuart Mill as much as he has written an intellectual history of him. Nearly the entire book is devoted to detailing the content and developments in Mill's ideas. The subject is Mill the philosopher, not Mill the man. Even the parts of the book that are ostensibly unrelated to Mill's theories, such as his relationship with Harriet Taylor, are analyzed in the context of how they influenced Mill's work. This is not to say that Capaldi has not done an outstanding job of laying out Mill's development as a thinker since he has, but simply to point out the limitations of this book. Capaldi quotes Fitzjames Stephens as saying that someone "who knew Mill only though his writings knew but half of him, and that not the best half" (363). My main regret is that Capaldi never lets us meet that half.

Ben Scanlon, The University of Chicago

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