New Perspectives on John Stuart Mill

Abstract

"Why another companion volume, given the existence of the excellent 1998 Cambridge Companion to Mill, edited by John Skorupski?” That is a reasonable question to ask, and in fact the editors begin their preface by asking it. In answering, they rightly focus on the large amount of high-quality Mill scholarship that has been published in the intervening years. But there is also another reason. Whereas Skorupski’s book consists of 14 chapters of, on average, 36 pages each, Macleod and Miller have collected 37 chapters of, on average, 16 pages. They can therefore present more focused investigations of many facets of Mill’s broad-ranging oeuvre, including topics on which he wrote relatively little, such as aesthetics, history, virtue, and the philosophy of language.