The Making of J. S. Mill'sCollected Works, and Its Aftermath

Abstract

AbstractIn 1973, a conference was held in Toronto to mark the bicentenary of James Mill's birth and the centenary of John Stuart Mill's death. By that time, Toronto had emerged as the centre of Mill studies. Between 1963 and 1973, the University of Toronto Press had published, in a scholarly edition, eleven volumes of Mill'sCollected works. A further twenty-two volumes would appear in the eighteen years that followed. Only two of the nine presenters at the 1973 conference were members of a Philosophy Department. Philosophers had a modest part in the production of Mill'sCollected works. Yet, philosophers came to dominate Mill studies in the decades after the Mill edition wrapped up in 1991. Philosophers contributed ten of the fourteen essays featured inThe Cambridge companion to Mill(1998), edited by John Skorupski. Philosophers constituted twenty-six of the thirty-seven contributors toA companion to Mill(2017), published by Wiley Blackwell and edited by Christopher Macleod and Dale E. Miller. This communication explains the relative unimportance of philosophers in the creation of theCollected works, and comments on the forces shaping the subsequent pre-eminence of philosophers in Mill studies.