John Stuart Mill, Romantics’ Socrates, and the Public Role of the Intellectual

John Stuart Mill developed his theory of individuality and the public role of critical knowledge from his lifelong study of the Platonic dialogues and in particular the figure of Socrates, which he elected as both a model for moral life and a precursor of modern moral philosophy. It is no exaggeration to say that Mill contributed to the renaissance of Socratism in the age of Romanticism. Like Georg W.F. Hegel, he interpreted Socratic enquiry as the awakening of individual self-consciousness in history, and like Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher he situated Socrates’ originality in his use of critical analysis for defining the meaning of “general terms” in morals and politics. Mill’s attitude towards Socrates signalled, on the other hand, his distance from classical utilitarianism. Unlike Jeremy Bentham, who dismissed the Socratic method as an abstract moral disquisition that underrated “every man’s experience,” Mill asserted its concreteness, and unlike his father, who used the Socratic dialogue as merely a negative and polemical tool for winning arguments against the interlocutor, young Mill celebrated it also as a searching method for reaching reasonable convictions through dialogue with others.