John Stuart & James Mill : un modèle d’éducation utilitariste dépourvu d’affects

The education of the economist John Stuart Mill is undoubtedly one of the most unusual experiences orchestrated by a tutor or father in human history. Conceived and planned by his father, James Mill, and his most faithful friend, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Mill's education was designed to make him an active defender of utilitarian philosophy. The life of John Stuart Mill, however, is a remarkable illustration of how the transmission of an educational form - but also the distancing from it - builds as much as it modifies a scientific approach at the same time as it changes the trajectory of a life. In this article, we seek, through and beyond the testimony given by the author in his Memoirs, the traces of the drastic constraints of the education he receives as well as those of its transformation following the existential crisis he experiences at the end of his adolescence. In particular, we show how the recovery of his sensibility influenced John Stuart Mill's scientific thinking - and in particular the scope of utilitarianism (which he retained while amending it) - as well as the course of his affective life (his meeting with Harriet Taylor).