John Stuart Mill: A Liberal Looks at Utopian Socialism in the Years of Revolution 1848-9 (1) (Essays‪)‬

MARX AND ENGELS'S DENUNCIATION of what they termed 'utopian socialism' is relatively well-known. Less attention has been paid to an analysis of the same phenomenon made by John Stuart Mill. Given that Mill was preparing his Principles of Political Economy in the same year (1847) that Marx was drafting the Communist Manifesto, it is just possible that they were simultaneously sitting at their desks in different parts of London writing on Utopian Socialism. However, whereas in the Manifesto Marx, in a brief coverage (ch.3.3), treated Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen as effectively identical, Mill gave a fuller and more differentiated account, as, of course, did Engels years later in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. It is a widely held view, indeed a normal view, that takes John Stuart Mill as the foremost liberal of his time. (2) To avoid confusion I shall here indicate that by liberalism I understand a politics associated with the middle classes that was rationalist, anti-aristocratic in the cause of equal opportunities, and in favour of freedom, representative political institutions, and a market economy. The current North American identification of liberalism with an expanded and paternalist state sector is not here intended.