Principles of Political Economy

For half a century after its publication in 1848, this was the standard textbook of economics in the English-speaking world. Mill explains production, wages, rent, trade and money, but he also insists that while the laws of production are fixed by nature, the distribution of wealth depends on human laws and customs and can be changed.

The book discusses cooperatives, the condition of workers, and the possibility of a stationary state in which growth stops and people turn to improving their lives instead, an idea that has found new readers today. Read the shorter Communist Manifesto, published the same year, for a very different answer to the same problems.

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) received one of the most intense educations ever recorded: his father taught him Greek at three and Latin at eight, and by his teens he was writing on economics. At twenty he fell into a deep depression and found his way out through the poetry of Wordsworth, an experience that taught him the value of feeling alongside reason.

He worked for thirty-five years at the East India Company, wrote on logic, economics and politics, and shared his intellectual life with Harriet Taylor, whom he married in 1851. As a Member of Parliament he proposed votes for women in 1867. His On Liberty, Utilitarianism and The Subjection of Women are still at the centre of debate.