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Hayek on Mill

The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings

F. A. Hayek

Edited by Sandra J. Peart

Hayek on Mill

The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings

F. A. Hayek

Edited by Sandra J. Peart

Best known for reviving the tradition of classical liberalism, F. A. Hayek was also a prominent scholar of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. One of his greatest undertakings was a collection of Mill’s extensive correspondence with his longstanding friend and later companion and wife, Harriet Taylor-Mill. Hayek first published the Mill-Taylor correspondence in 1951, and his edition soon became required reading for any study of the nineteenth-century foundations of liberalism.

This latest addition to the University of Chicago Press’s Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series showcases the fascinating intersections between two of the most prominent thinkers from two successive centuries. Hayek situates Mill within the complex social and intellectual milieu of nineteenth-century Europe—as well as within twentieth-century debates on socialism and planning—and uncovers the influence of Taylor-Mill on Mill’s political economy. The volume features the Mill-Taylor correspondence and brings together for the first time Hayek’s related writings, which were widely credited with beginning a new era of Mill scholarship.

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Reviews

“Splendid from beginning to end, including Peart’s introduction, the letters, Hayek’s commentary, and assorted documents.”

Marginal Revolution

“John Stuart Mill may well be the most important liberal thinker of the nineteenth century. . . . Friedrich Hayek was the twentieth century’s greatest critic of socialism, and he won the Nobel Prize in economics. . . . Against this background, there is every reason to be intrigued by a new book with the title Hayek on Mill. . . . What would Hayek have to say about a great champion of liberty, in some ways his intellectual ancestor, who ended up embracing socialism? . . . [Hayek on Mill] largely consists of a book, first published in 1951, that grew out of an enormous, uncharacteristic, and somewhat obsessive undertaking by Hayek, which was to assemble what remains of the correspondence between Mill and his eventual wife, Harriet Taylor. . . . Does that romance have anything to do with liberalism and liberty? I think so. One of the lessons we can draw from Hayek’s work of excavation is that Mill’s distinctive form of liberalism, with its emphasis on individual freedom from the confining effect of social norms, had a great deal to do with his relationship with Taylor.”

Cass R. Sunstein | New York Review of Books

“The details of this indescribable relationship [between John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor] were first aired in a book published in 1951 by F. A. Hayek, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize in Economics. It has now been republished, along with ten occasional pieces (one previously unpublished) and some correspondence, as Hayek on Mill.”

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Editorial Foreword
Editor’s Acknowledgements
Editor’s Introduction

HAYEK ON MILL: THE MILL-TAYLOR FRIENDSHIP AND RELATED WRITINGS

Part I. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Symbols Used

Introduction

One                 Harriet Taylor and Her Circle (1830)
Two                 Acquaintance and Early Crises (1830–1833)
Three               On Marriage and Divorce (about 1832)
Four                 Friends and Gossip (1834–1842)
Five                 The Years of Friendship (1834–1847)
Six                   A Joint Production (1847–1849)
Seven              John Taylor’s Illness and Death (1849)
Eight               Marriage and Break with Mill’s Family (1851)
Nine                Illness (1851–1854)
Ten                  Italy and Sicily (1854–1855)
Eleven             Greece (1855)
Twelve            Last Years and Death of Mrs. Mill (1856–1858)
Appendix I      Poems by Harriet Taylor
Appendix II    An Early Essay by Harriet Taylor
Appendix III   Family Trees

Part II. Related Writings

Thirteen           John Stuart Mill at the Age of Twenty-Five
Fourteen          J. S. Mill’s Correspondence
Fifteen             The Dispersal of the Books and Papers of John Stuart Mill
Sixteen            J. S. Mill, Mrs. Taylor, and Socialism
Seventeen        Portraits of J. S. Mill
Eighteen          Preface to The Life of John Stuart Mill
Nineteen          Review of Mill and His Early Critics
Twenty            Review of John Mill’s Boyhood Visit to France
Twenty-One    Introduction to Considerations on Representative Government
Twenty-Two   Introduction to The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1812–1848
Twenty-Three Related Correspondence
Index of Names
Index of Subjects