ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the traditional interpretation of James Mill’s method of persuasion should be revised. A detailed survey of two sets of texts in public debates in the 1810s and the 1820s paint a rather different picture of Mill’s method of argumentation, as rational persuasion. The chapter briefly revisits Helen McCabe’s and Nadia Urbinati’s discussions of James Mill’s method of persuasion. What is most important, Mill’s rhetoric in the Edinburgh Review seemed to take up the ideal of social equality, which he suggested but left unexplored in The Philanthropist. William Thomas identifies a tension between Mill’s explicit reference to parliamentary reform as the primary end of the philosophic radicals and his silence over the means to achieve it—the tension between Mill’s radical theory and his practical concessions. Those who publish their views, believing them to be true, grounded on evidence, regardless of their correspondence to established views, Mill thought, are “public-spirited and brave”.
