Virtue and Necessity: The Bonds of Marriage and the Political Economy of J. S. Mill and F. W. Newman

For his first review of someone else’s economic treatise following the publication of his own Principles of Political Economy in 1848, John Stuart Mill chose to examine Francis Newman’s Lectures on Political Economy (1851). One might expect that Mill’s review would be sympathetic. Both Mill and Newman were zealous reformers, much berated for pursuing endless “crotchets.” They were both great advocates of the two campaigns that, for Mill, eventually emerged as pre-eminent: land reform and the emancipation of women. It would be reasonable to assume that the political economy of each helped determine the scope and focus of his respective involvement in social reform, and there would be much commonality. Newman, moreover, had only the year before outraged orthodox opinion by his highly critical analysis of the New Testament in Phases of Faith . While Mill downplayed his own secularism, he would likely have felt more than a spark of kinship with someone who had managed to scandalize even liberal Unitarians.