A Companion to Mill, First Edition. Edited by Christopher Macleod and Dale E. Miller. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 79 There is universal consensus that John Stuart Mill’s philosophy contains an important “radical” dimension, but it is controversial what this means. Scholars agree that Mill’s radicalism stems from his early exposure to the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and of his father, James Mill (1773–1836), even though John Mill would go on to modify and shape the tradition in his own way. But, if radicalism is a species, it is not clear what its genus is. Is “radicalism” more than a polemical term in the struggle for political hegemony? If so, should it be taken to refer to a movement, a reform campaign, or a philosophical doctrine? If the notion is to refer to a doctrine within what we now call Political Philosophy or Political Theory, we would need to be able to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for its application. But do its core features relate to principles, or methods, or both? Do they have systematic unity? Mill describes his work as standing in a tradition of “philosophic radicalism” that prominently includes Bentham and James Mill, specifically their legal and political thought. The political circumstances in which this tradition arose have been closely exam- ined, and the formation of Mill’s thought, and of his own account of it, painstakingly reconstructed (Thomas 1979; Rosen 2011). The conceptual features of this tradition have met with less attention. In particular, its relation to two related narratives has not been resolved. A largely parallel narrative is the history of utilitarianism, but it is not clear whether utilitarianism is one of philosophic radicalism’s defining features. A third narra- tive is radical democracy, since the formation of philosophic radicalism occurred within the struggle for democratic reform in early nineteenth‐century England. When Bentham joined the political debate about parliamentary reform in 1817, he argued that the radical position could be articulated in a simple slogan that “knit together into one whole” its four elements of “secresy, universality, equality, and annuality of suffrage” (Bentham 1843: iii.558). 1 But the status of democracy in the thought of the philosophic radicals is problematic. If we can trace the outline of philosophic radicalism as a doctrine, what will we find the relation to be between philosophy, utility, and democracy? My argument will 6 The Roots of Mill’s Radicalism PETER NIESEN 0002768815.INDD 79 6/13/2016 10:21:31 AM