Intellectual flows and counterflows: the strange case of J. S. Mill
This essay re-examines the fact that J. S. Mill’s published work registers surprisingly few direct examples of influence from India, despite his lengthy East India Company career. Situating Mill’s contact with South Asia in the rich history of Anglo-Indian intellectual exchange that colonialism engendered, it argues that this missed opportunity to connect is striking because of the confluence of extraordinary motives and opportunity in Mill’s early life. During the 1830s, European intellectual influences and colonial imperatives combined to lead Mill to advocate a form of Einfühlung—sympathetic understanding of others—at the very moment when the visiting Indian reformer Rammohun Roy was being celebrated across Britain by many individuals close to Mill, such as Jeremy Bentham. Yet Mill never met Rammohun and he virtually ignored the celebrated Bengali in his correspondence and published work. This neglect, the chapter argues, is astounding: not only did Mill and Rammohun campaign alike for freedom of the press in the 1820s, but numerous people that Mill knew used Rammohun’s example to argue that social progress depends on such liberties, a view of progress that Mill shared at the time. The essay concludes that Mill’s rejection of this foundational idea of liberty in favour of the famously restrictive one espoused in On Liberty awaits proper investigation, as does the abandonment of Einfühlung in his later publications.