Searching for an Idiom <i>for</i> Peace: James Mill on War and Peace

This article focuses on James Mill’s views on war and peace. On the one hand, much of the existing scholarship emphasizes Jeremy Bentham’s influence. Typically, this involves a contrast between Mill’s early and mature views. The ‘mature Mill’, under the spell of Bentham, was consistently pro peace in preaching the master’s ‘gospel’. On the other hand, contextually nuanced studies of Mill’s writings on the Napoleonic wars highlight his Scottish Enlightenment heritage and, consequently, the common ground between Mill and other Edinburgh-educated writers, known for criticizing Benthamic radicalism. Mill’s advocacy for peace is thus situated within the discourses on ‘Balance of Power’ and ‘Law of Nature and Nations’ rather than utilitarianism. Trying to solve the puzzle of Mill’s intellectual tools in unearthing the causes of inter-state conflict reveals a consistent undercurrent: a political economy of war and peace. The analysis of Mill on conflict accounts for the common error in taking his emphasis on the miseries of war as merely an example of the propagation of Bentham’s ideas and reaffirms the connection to the Scottish Enlightenment. In the process of disentangling the various threads of Mill’s intellectual make-up, the consistency and independent merit of his argument for democratic peace comes to the fore.