Relativizing the Homo Œconomicus: J. S. Mill on the Basic Assumptions of Political Economy

This paper deals with a debate about the universality of the “desire for wealth” in John Stuart Mill’s thought. The debate occurred in the literature in the 1980s, between four famous Millian commentators. This article constitutes an attempt to solve the debate by providing a rationale for the disagreement between both sets of scholars. In particular, we show that the divergence between them comes from the fact that they ground their respective arguments using different textual corpora, while neglecting that Mill gradually changed his mind in his writings subsequent to the 1836 essay “On the Definition of Political Economy”. First, in accordance with the development of his ethology, Mill deprived maximizing behavior of its universal validity; then, Mill focused more and more on “competition” as economics’ basic hypothesis in order to stress its historical relevance; and finally Mill strengthened the relativity of the behavioral hypothesis with the introduction of the concept of “custom”.