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Was John Stuart Mill a Socialist?

Mill “arguing that a just liberal society must experiment with different types of socialist organization to better the situation of the least well off… [H]e endorsed worker cooperatives as superior to capitalist-managed firms and insisted there was ‘nothing in principle in economic theory’ that spoke against experimenting with socialist principles and forms of organization.

“[H]e was one of the first major liberal and socialist writers to take seriously the problem of women’s equality and, in The Subjection of Women.

“But he was also trepidatious about the uneducated and unintelligent having too much of a say in politics, and supported British colonialism, viewing the non-European subjects of its empire with condescension.

“He seemed doggedly uninterested in analyzing the power dynamics of the bourgeois liberal state, its history, and the way imperial powers like the United Kingdom worked to spread capitalism at the barrel of a gun.”

The writer thinks that Mill's “idiosyncratic ideas, despite their limitations, had more in common with democratic socialism than pro-capitalist ideologies.” But from the writer his own assessment, Mill was more of a social democrat, not a democratic socialist.


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