John Stuart Mill - Thought and Influence: The Saint of Rationalism

by Georgios Varouxakis, Paul Kelly (Editor)

More than two hundred years after his birth, and 150 years after the publication of his most famous essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill remains one of the towering intellectual figures of the Western tradition. This book combines an up-to-date assessment of the philosophical legacy of Mill’s arguments, his complex version of liberalism and his account of the relationship between character and ethical and political commitment. Bringing together key international and interdisciplinary scholars, including Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer, this book combines the latest insights of Mill scholarship with a long-term appraisal of the ways in which Mill’s work has been received and interpreted from the time of his death in 1873 to today.

The book offers compelling insights into Mill’s posthumous fate and reputation; his youthful political and intellectual activism; his views on the formation of character; the development of his thought on logic; his differences from his father and Bentham; his astonishingly prescient, environmentally sensitive and ‘green’ thought; his relation to virtue ethics; his conception of higher pleasures and its relation to his understanding of justice; his feminist thought and its place in contemporary debates and feminist discourses; his defence of free speech and its fundamental significance for his liberalism; and his continued contemporary relevance on a number of major issues.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Politics, Political Theory, Philosophy, History, English, Psychology, and also Cultural Studies, Empire studies, nationalism and ethnicity studies.

182 pages, Hardcover

First published February 18, 2010

About the author

I grew up and went to school in Crete, Greece. I studied History and Archaeology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Then I completed an “MA in Legal and Political Theory” at University College London (UCL) and a PhD in History at UCL. After eight years at Aston University, Birmingham, I joined Queen Mary in 2006. My work to date has concentrated on the nineteenth and twentieth-century history of political thought and intellectual history with a particular emphasis on international political thought, political thought on nationalism, patriotism and cosmopolitanism, empire, and the intellectual history of ideas of “Europe” and “the West”, as well as of attitudes towards the EEC/EU.

My fourth book monograph is The West: The History an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2025. My earlier books include Liberty Abroad: J.S. Mill on International Relations (Cambridge University Press – “Ideas in Context” series, 2013), Victorian Political Thought on France and the French (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), Mill on Nationality (Routledge, 2002), and Contemporary France: An Introduction to French Politics and Society. (Arnold, 2003, co-authored with David Howarth).

I am Co-Director of the "Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought" and Co-Director of the intercollegiate "MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History" (jointly offered by Queen Mary and UCL). I have been a Research Fellow at UCL, a Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University, a Senior Research Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, and a Visiting Fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna.