Macaulay on James Mill's Essay on Government

A good swingeing review fulfills the need for righteous indignation against that family of whited sepulchers the Mills, daddy James and son John Stuart. Mill père was the larger more slow moving target of young Thomas Babington Macaulay’s essay in the Edinburgh Review of 1829. The occasion for this birching was the publication of On Government. Whereas the book itself is worthless, the review is priceless and a model of sustained mockery and reductio.

But we do not see that, by reasoning a priori on such subjects as these, it is possible to advance one single step. We know that every man has some desires which he can gratify only by hurting his neighbours, and some which he can gratify only by pleasing them. Mr. Mill has chosen to look only at one-half of human nature, and to reason on the motives which impel men to oppress and despoil others, as if they were the only motives by which men could possibly be influenced. We have already shown that, by taking the other half of the human character, and reasoning on it as if it were the whole, we can bring out a result diametrically opposite to that at which Mr. Mill has arrived. We can, by such a process, easily prove that any form of government is good, or that all government is superfluous.

James did not reply which John Stuart thought a mistake and sought retrospective payback in the publication year of Macaulay’s volumes 3 & 4 History of England(1855). He referred to him as:

an intellectual dwarf—rounded off and stunted, full grown broad and short, without a germ of principle of further growth in his whole being.

That’s not nice. It causes harm unguided by principle and it’s hurtful and gives rise to mirth and a hope of a delightful literary feud. What Macaulay found objectionable and self contradictory in the Essay on Government was the universal emphasis on plunder being the chief desire and aim of all classes of society. That’s obvious nonsense of course but understandable when one remembers that Mill presided over India House the head office of the East India Company. With them the white man’s burden was all the swag they could carry. In later days the imperialist Macaulay worried that American democracy would enable the poor to plunder the rich and very likely bring the defense of property through a strong military government.

In his final paragraph on the Benthamite sect:

But, on the whole, they might have chosen worse. They may as well be Utilitarians as jockeys or dandies. And, though quibbling about self-interest and motives, and objects of desire, and the greatest happiness of the greatest number, is but a poor employment for a grown man, it certainly hurts the health less than hard drinking and the fortune less than high play; it is not much more laughable than phrenology, and is immeasurably more humane than cock-fighting.

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Macaulay on Mill