On This Day

23 June 1836

Death of James Mill, classical economist and confidante of David Ricardo and Jeremy Bentham

Mill was a key philosopher in the field of liberal thought and was the father of John Stuart Mill. Amongst other things, he considered the notion that a value of a thing was exclusively dependent of the value of the labour put into it and that land’s unearned increment is the level of tax that should be set on it. Mill became a significant influence on Whigs and Liberals in the early 19th century and was particularly important in framing the debate on the expansion of the franchise in the run up to the 1832 Reform Act.