John Stuart Mill on Self-interest: Focusing on His Political Economy and the Principles

This chapter reconstructs and provides an overview of John Stuart Mill’s (1806–1873) ideas about self-interest, putting a special emphasis on what he called a political economy and on his Principles of Political Economy. Firstly, Mill explicitly threw light on the assumption of political economy. In his opinion, it presupposed that human beings always tried to obtain the greatest amount of wealth with as small a quantity of labor and abstinence as possible. Secondly, it was the desire for wealth rather than self-interest that Mill explicitly focused on when he defined political economy, although it was likely that Mill, in the Principles, mainly addressed people who endeavored to acquire wealth only for themselves. Thirdly, such selfish people did not reflect Mill’s ideal and the third and subsequent editions of the Principles regarded the association of laborers among themselves as one of the means of cultivating those people’s minds and provoking their public spirit in the future. Fourthly, in all the editions of the Principles, Mill, for the time being, endeavored to design political institutions which would reconcile the self-interested actions of individuals to the public benefit. This short-term and practical aspect of the Principles, though omitted in one of the abridged editions of it (i.e. Mill and Laughlin [1884] 1893), constituted Mill’s art of government founded on his political economy.