Friedrich August von Hayek: Review of Bibliography of the Published Writings of John Stuart Mill (August 1945)

Hayek’s bibliographical review evaluates Ney MacMinn, J. R. Hainds, and James McNab McCrimmon’s edition of Mill’s manuscript hand-list. Its central distinction is between faithfully reproducing a historical document and producing a usable bibliography. Hayek welcomes the edition’s contribution to Mill scholarship but argues that editorial fidelity has preserved defects that a comprehensive research tool should remedy.

The review begins by questioning the manuscript’s authority. Only its first page is in Mill’s hand; misspelled familiar names cast doubt on Helen Taylor’s authorship of the remainder. Hayek infers that an inferior amanuensis transcribed notes supplied by Mill. This matters because the editors reproduce the notebook’s errors, omissions, and disordered chronology even while supplying corrected bibliographical descriptions and brief accounts of each item.

They have not, however, added any of the missing items (and after 1865 Mill's letters and speeches which appeared in print are systematically omitted), or assisted the user in establishing the true chronological order in the very numerous instances where items are entered out of place, or provided the much needed index to titles, proper names, subjects and periodicals.

Hayek’s objection concerns practical scholarly access: readers need completeness, chronological orientation, and means of locating material, not simply a reliable transcription. Posthumous publications and editions receive inadequate treatment, and major omissions remain relegated to prefatory notes.

The middle of the review supplies concrete repairs. Drawing on earlier notes and surviving copies, Hayek identifies publication details and separate reprints of writings on currency, church property, protection against assault, civil-service reform, and voting by ballot. He acknowledges wartime obstacles to verification while correcting residual misspellings. His footnote adds further posthumous material. These interventions enact the bibliographical supplementation he finds lacking in the edition.

Hayek also distinguishes accurate description from an adequate account of intellectual significance. Although he generally praises the contents summaries, one omission exposes their limits:

Mill's celebrated review of W. T. Thornton's On Labour, e.g., is discussed without any mention of the fact that it contains the sensational retraction of the wage-fund theory.

A bibliography of Mill should help readers recognize changes in his thinking, not merely identify what he published. This criterion connects Hayek’s criticism to his final, strongly favorable assessment:

The contribution of the publication consists mainly in making this wealth of material on the intellectual development of Mill for the first time accessible, and every future student of Mill will be indebted to the editors for the pains they have taken in making available the only source from which many of those minor writings of Mill could ever have been identified.

With more than 700 entries, largely short and anonymous press contributions, the edition opens otherwise elusive evidence of Mill’s intellectual development. Hayek thus values it as an indispensable foundation while showing where further bibliographical work must begin.