Harriet Taylor, under the signature of John Stuart Mill

“All my publications were as much the works of my wife as mine”says the British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) in Story of my life and my ideas. This declaration obviously testifies to his gratitude towards the one who was the great love of his existence, his companion of body and ideas. But the assertion also makes the work of historians very complicated. Who wrote what ? What ideas were forged by him, what others by Harriet Taylor (1807-1858)? Experts bicker trying to disentangle what should be attributed to one or the other, in particular in important titles that have marked the history of ideas and political life, such as Principles of political economy (1848), of freedom (1859), Of the subjugation of women (1869).

Blurring of borders

Distribution is all the more difficult since nothing dissociates their private life from their intellectual career, and they themselves have constantly accentuated the blurring of borders. And the relationship between these exceptional characters was very unique. He received the most fantastic education of his century, ancient Greek at 3, Plato, Latin and algebra at 8. Harriet Hardy, for her part, the daughter of a surgeon, was brought up in a Jane Austen-style universe, which she got busy leaving and criticizing, to finally maintain that it is fatal for women that the obsession with“to be married” constitutes “the subject of their existence”. On the contrary, she ardently maintains, they must be equal to men in everything: trades, functions, responsibilities.

Previously, at the age of 18, she married John Taylor, with whom she had three children in a few years. She then met John Stuart Mill, in 1831, and their complicity never ceased. Harriet separates from her first husband, without however divorcing her or making her new union public, so as not to humiliate the tolerant and respectful husband. Two years after Taylor’s death, in 1851, she officially became Mill’s wife. They then live a few years of happiness and incessant conversations. A lung disease takes away Harriet at 51, in Avignon, in their house near the cemetery. He will continue to live there, fifteen years, in the veneration of his memory.

irony of history

Harriet Taylor’s texts published under her name, published in the United States in 1998, deal with women’s rights, ethics, tolerance. Close to the socialist doctrines of her time, she is said to have been more radical, in politics and in economics, than her companion. It is indisputable, in any case, that she has profoundly contributed to the elaboration of a common work which remains intensely topical. In effect, as shown recently by a remarkable work by Camille Dejardinthe writings of John Stuart Mill bring together liberalism and utopia, social justice and individual freedoms in a single dynamic from which we now have much to learn.

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