ABSTRACT
Mill was a cautious and uncertain pessimist, with an extraordinarily acute sense of the dangers of first principles and grand theories. He was always likely to retreat into a disenchanted pragmatism and, more often than not, was to be found shaking his head in a mixture of disbelief and disillusion. Partly this was a question of personal morale. The hopes he derived from the English romantics and the French positivists, after the resolution of his nervous breakdown in 1826, proved to be flimsy and insubstantial when confronted with the press of illiterate and intemperate proletarians upon the institutions of national politics. The growth of the English working class as a consciously separate political force filled him with fear; he was convinced that their grubby materialism would finally issue into a despotism. His observation of the aristocracy and middle classes confirmed the worst of his forebodings. It was also partly a question of intention. Mill designed his political theory with few terminal points; he was more interested in conducting a continuous holding operation than in arriving at a particular destination. In this way, each extreme could be resisted as it appeared, and each bitter controversy could be gently encouraged to fade into comfortable agreement. This was the whole point of Mill’s eclecticism and his most enduring commitment as a political thinker. Consensus was indeed his basic value.
