Synopses & Reviews
A biography of John Stuart Mill, the most influential British philosopher of the 19th century.
Review
"Capaldi has succeeded nicely in bringing together Mill's life and Mill's ideas - his theories and his values - , illuminating both. This study is recommended for anyone with an interest in the man and his thought." Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews"Mill scholars and students of 19th-century thought and English Romanticism will find this biography engrossing." The New York Sun
Review
"A very welcome new intellectual life of Mill, which gives full weight not just to his philosophical and technical writing but also to his status as a public intellectual. The highly readable biography is particularly illuminating about Mill's status within nineteenth-century theories of the place of the creative artist and the imagination, and it gives extended and thoughtful treatment to his intellectual and personal relationship with Harriet Taylor." Kate Flint, Studies in English Literature"...solidly grounded, briskly argued...a considerable achievement. Nicholas Capaldi is a deft commentator. John Stuart Mill is a good and persuasive book." Alan Ryan"As a work of biography, it succeeds in forcefully presenting Mill as a theorist concerned above all with defending liberal culture in general, and highlights the absolute centrality of individual autonomy to that defense." Metapsychology Online"Capaldi has succeeded nicely in bringing together Mill's life and Mill's ideas - his theories and his values - , illuminating both. This study is recommended for anyone with an interest in the man and his thought." Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews"Mill scholars and students of 19th-century thought and English Romanticism will find this biography engrossing." The New York Sun"It is solidly grounded, briskly argued, and agreeably free from the sound of grinding axes." New York Review of Books"Capaldi's intellectual biography passes, with flying colors, the important test for the success of a biography: after reading it, I have both a sense of having learned a great deal and a desire to learn more about the part of history that both influenced and was influenced by John Stuart Mill."
P.A. Woodward, The Review of Metaphysics
Table of Contents
1. Childhood and early education: the great experiment (1806-1820); 2. Company man and youthful propaganda (1821-1826); 3. Crisis (1826-1830); 4. The discovery of romance and romanticism (1830-1840); 5. The transitional essays; 6. Intellectual success (1840-1845); 7. Worldly success (1846-1850); 8. Private years (1850-1859); 9. The memorial essays: utilitarianism, representative government, on liberty; 10. Public intellectual (1859-1869); 11. Last years (1869-1873).