TO BOTH HIS progressivist heirs and his conservative critics, John Stuart Mill is a secular saint, a priest of the triumphant modern moral order. Whether he is being celebrated or vilified, the 19th-century philosopher is portrayed as a paragon of rational enlightenment who, paradoxically, inspires ardent devotion to the sacred autonomy of the individual.
The real story of this Victorian character turns out to be more complicated, and Timothy Larsen's brief new biography challenges such caricatures without devolving into polemics. One of the early volumes in Oxford University Press's Spiritual Lives series, this compact “secular life” neatly realizes the goal of the series: to explore the religious lives of figures not known for their religiosity, unearthing the secret spiritualities of those we tend to value for their so-called “secular” accomplishments.
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