Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the nineteenth century, social scientists such as John Stuart Mill struggled with the problem of the individual in society: how to achieve the “improvement of mankind” ( Robson 1968 ) when society consists of free and responsible individuals. As he speculated about how behavior is conditioned by culture, habit, and institutions, and new habits form in the context of institutional change, Mill stepped into the burgeoning field of “speculative politics” or what we know of today as sociology. Social scientists, who now sometimes neglect questions relating to the acquisition of tastes or “character,” may fail to appreciate how much of Mill's writing was designed to deal with problems of human development and interaction in the context of social change. Examples in what follows include the Irish land question, emancipation, the laboring poor, and women's rights. Mill was also, of course, at the forefront of explicating methodological principles for social science. He followed the method of Auguste Comte to the extent that he urged practitioners to adopt the positive approach for the investigation of social and political phenomena ( Mill 1969 /1865). Economic analysis treats “man's nature as modified by the social state” ( Mill 1967 /1836: 321). Since the treatment of man in a social state runs into the problem of multiple causation, Mill urged that the study of different types of ... log in or subscribe to read full text