Although right in one respect, Barry’s and Ryan’s reassessments are rather wide of the mark in another. It is true that there is, methodologically speaking, a family resemblance between Mill’s axiomatic deductive reasoning in Government and, say, Anthony Downs’s An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957). But it is important to note that Mill, unlike Downs and other ostensible successors of the rational choice school, was never content to interpret interests as wants, desires or “revealed preferences.” On the contrary, Mill was concerned with distinguishing between sinister and non-sinister interests, supplying causal explanations of their origins and development, rendering judgments about them, and attempting to alter the conditions that shape (or more often misshape) men’s and women’s characters. Hence his abiding interest in law, education, punishment, penology, psychology, and other avenues of “character-formation.” Mill’s aims were not only explanatory but critical, educative, and, by his lights, emancipatory. The point of almost everything he wrote—from his massive “critical, or judging” History of British India to the shortest essay—was, to borrow a phrase from Marx, not merely to understand the world but to change it. Not for Mill the vaunted “value-neutrality” of modern social and political science.