Forbidden to play with other children, reading Greek at three and Latin at eight, John Stuart Mill was raised by his father James Mill and Jeremy Bentham as a purpose-built successor for utilitarianism. This episode follows the boy designed to be a logic machine through his paralyzing depressive crisis at 20, his recovery through Wordsworth’s poetry, and his rethinking of utilitarianism to distinguish higher pleasures from lower ones.

We confront the contradiction of his 35 years at the British East India Company and his paternalistic justification of empire, then turn to his 21-year intellectual partnership with Harriet Taylor, the legal document renouncing his rights as a husband under coverture, The Subjection of Women, and his advocacy for women’s suffrage in Parliament. We close with On Liberty (1859), the harm principle, the tyranny of the majority, and his later shift toward worker cooperatives, profit sharing, and inheritance taxes.

• Bentham’s felicific calculus and why Mill found a life of pure calculation hollow
• Better a dissatisfied human than a satisfied animal, with a doom-scrolling analogy
• Why social ostracism can be worse than a bad law
• The distinction between the laws of production and the laws of distribution
• His burial beside Harriet in Avignon and the copy of On Liberty passed to Liberal Democrat leaders