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James Mill (1773-1836), the father of John Stuart, has not been served well by editors of his writings, so I made my own anthology of 28 essays and articles written in the 1820s and 1830s. ((See this anthology<\/a> of The Political Writings of James Mill: Essays and Reviews on Politics and Society, 1815-1836<\/em>.)) They include a dozen articles he wrote for the 1824 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica,<\/em> most notably those of \u201ccaste,\u201d \u201cGovernment,\u201dand \u201cLiberty of the Press,\u201d and 14 articles for the important \u201creview\u201d periodicals The Westminster Review<\/em> and The London Review<\/em> which were very important organs for the dissemination of liberal reform ideas.<\/p>\n Like most of the radicals and liberals of his day he had a theory of class to explain who exploited the hard working and industrious ordinary people of Britain. He and the other Benthamites talked about \u201cthe ruling few\u201d who had their own \u201csinister interests\u201d which they were pursuing, and \u201cthe subject many\u201d who paid the taxes. Interestingly he also used a couple French terms to describe the relationship between these two groups (probably because the French classical liberals were more advanced than their English counterparts in their thinking about class), such as: \u201csociety is divided into two classes, Ceux qui pillent, et Ceux qui sont pill\u00e9s<\/em> (those who pillage and those who are pillaged). Ten years after this was written Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Bastiat developed his own radical theory of \u201cla spoliation\u201d (plunder\u201d where society was divided into two antagonistic classes \u201cla classe spoliatrice\u201d (the plundering class) and \u201cles classes spoli\u00e9es\u201d (the plundered classes).<\/p>\n For a snippet of Jeremey Bentham\u2019s and James Mill\u2019s thinking about class see this short essay<\/a>. ((A brief essay on Mill and Bentham on class – See this short essay<\/a>.))<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" James Mill (1773-1836), the father of John Stuart, has not been served well by editors of his writings, so I made my own anthology of 28 essays and articles written in the 1820s and 1830s. ((See this anthology of The Political Writings of James Mill: Essays and Reviews on Politics and Society, 1815-1836.)) They include … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}