Long 19th c. · 1806–1873
Who influenced John Stuart Mill?
Influences and legacy
Refined utility with liberty: your freedom ends only where harm begins.
John Stuart Mill was influenced by Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Auguste Comte, Alexis de Tocqueville and Harriet Taylor Mill, and went on to influence Henry Sidgwick, Bertrand Russell and John Rawls. That is 8 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: London Stereoscopic Company, Public domain See the whole map
Who was John Stuart Mill?
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls John Stuart Mill the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the 19th century. In On Liberty (1859) he defended the freedom of the individual against unlimited state and social control and set out the harm principle. He followed Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism and also worked on the method of science.
As a Liberal MP he was the second member of Parliament, after Henry Hunt, to call for votes for women, and he co-wrote The Subjection of Women (1869). He supported proportional representation, labour organisations and farm cooperatives, and at times came close to socialism.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced John Stuart Mill?
5 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- Jeremy Bentham 1748–1832
- Mary Wollstonecraft 1759–1797
- Auguste Comte 1798–1857
- Alexis de Tocqueville 1805–1859
- Harriet Taylor Mill 1807–1858
Who did John Stuart Mill influence?
3 thinkers on this map draw directly on John Stuart Mill.
- Henry Sidgwick 1838–1900
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
- John Rawls 1921–2002
The line of teachers behind John Stuart Mill
The longest documented line of influence ending at John Stuart Mill runs 19 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
Two steps away from John Stuart Mill
Indirect influences
- Through Auguste Comte: Montesquieu, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
- Through Jeremy Bentham: David Hume
- Through Mary Wollstonecraft: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The second generation
- Through Bertrand Russell: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, W. V. O. Quine, P. F. Strawson
- Through Henry Sidgwick: Derek Parfit
- Through John Rawls: Robert Nozick
Contemporaries of John Stuart Mill
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of John Stuart Mill, with no direct line between them.
- Max Stirner 1806–1856
- Ivan Kireyevsky 1806–1856
- Ludwig Feuerbach 1804–1872
- Aleksey Khomyakov 1804–1860
- Charles Darwin 1809–1882
- Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1809–1865
- Gustav Fechner 1801–1887
John Stuart Mill by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 5
- Direct followers
- 3 — #39 of 279 on this map
- Thinkers upstream
- 74
- Thinkers downstream
- 23
- Wikipedia languages
- 94 — #12 of 47 among 19th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Epic
Questions about John Stuart Mill
- Who influenced John Stuart Mill?
- Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Auguste Comte, Alexis de Tocqueville and Harriet Taylor Mill.
- Who did John Stuart Mill influence?
- Henry Sidgwick, Bertrand Russell and John Rawls.
- When did John Stuart Mill live?
- 1806–1873. The map files John Stuart Mill under the long 19th century.
- How rare is the John Stuart Mill card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on John Stuart Mill in 94 languages, which makes it an Epic card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 19th-century philosophers
- Karl Marx 1818–1883
- Charles Darwin 1809–1882
- Leo Tolstoy 1828–1910
- Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821–1881
- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900
- Georg W. F. Hegel 1770–1831
- Friedrich Engels 1820–1895
- Søren Kierkegaard 1813–1855