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EDITOR’S NOTE - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume IV - Essays on Economics and Society Part I [1824]

Edition used:

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume IV - Essays on Economics and Society Part I, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Lord Robbins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

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EDITOR’S NOTE

London: Parker, 1844. Not republished in JSM’s lifetime; a 2nd edition, presumably prepared by Helen Taylor, appeared in 1874 (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer), with a few alterations, which are discussed in the headnotes to the separate essays. Identified in JSM’s bibliography as “Essays on some unsettled Questions on Political Economy, in one vol. 8vo (four new, though written in 1830, the fifth a reprint, with some alterations, from the article in the London and Westminster Review for October 1836)” (MacMinn, 57). Copy in Somerville College.

In his Autobiography, commenting on the early morning discussions at Grote’s house in the 1820s, JSM says (84-5):

The theory of International Values which I afterwards published, emanated from these conversations, as did also the modified form of Ricardo’s theory of Profits, laid down in my Essay on Profits and Interest. . . . [These] were excogitated and worked out in about equal proportions by myself and Graham: and if our original project had been executed, my ‘Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy’ would have been brought out along with some papers of his, under our joint names. But when my exposition came to be written, I found that I had so much over-estimated my agreement with him, and he dissented so much from the most original of the two Essays, that on International Values, that I was obliged to consider the theory as now exclusively mine, and it came out as such when published many years later. (Cf. Earlier Letters, XII, 79.)

Later he comments (126-7) that the essays were written in 1830 and 1831 “almost as they now stand, except that in 1833 I partially rewrote the fifth Essay. They were written with no immediate purpose of publication; and when, some years later, I offered them to a publisher, he declined them. They were only printed in 1844, after the success of the ‘System of Logic.’ ” He offered them first to Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1833; in 1844 Tait encouraged him to publish them as a volume, but Parker, the publisher of the Logic, accepted them, to JSM’s surprise (Earlier Letters, XII, 178-9, XIII, 623-4; cf. ibid., XII, 231, XIII, 626, 630, 642.)