How Did John Stuart Mill Contribute To History

1419 Words6 Pages

The topic I was given to research was John Stuart Mill. When I looked at this name I had no idea who he was or how he was involved in history at all. In all of my history classes throughout high school his name was never one that came up for any type of discussion. This made me curious and set my mind to work to uncover John Stuart Mill and learn who he was and what it was that he did in his field and time period. I wanted to know what he contributed to history. John Stuart Mill was born, to James Mill and Harriet Barrow, in Pentonville, London on May 20, 1806 and died May 8, 1873. John was the oldest son in his family. John’s father, James Mill, was a philosopher and economist. His father, who was a strict disciplinarian, educated John at home following the rigorous expectations of the Bethamite. According to Simkim, of Spartacus-Educational.com, The New World Encyclopedia states, that by the age of three, John was being taught the Greek alphabet and long lists of Greek words along with their English equivalents. By the age of eight, according to Anschutz, John was learning Latin, geometry of Euclid and algebra and was also beginning to teach the younger children of his family. John had studied the works of Aristotle, Plato, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Hobbes, David …show more content…

John Mill’s was famous for his formulation “greatest happiness principle”. It means that one should act so as to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. One of the greatest contributions that Mill made to this was his fight for the qualitative separation of pleasures. Mill felt that intellectual and moral pleasures were superior to physical forms of pleasure. In this work he even separated happiness and contentment believing that the happiness is of higher value than the contentment. Mill’s was smart enough to turn this battle into a humanitarian