Mill John Stuart - On liberty ; and, the subjection of women

ON LIBERTY and THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN

JOHN STUART MILL was born in London in May 1806. His father, James Mill, was at that time a journalist but subsequently became an assistant to and propagandist for Jeremy Bentham, and eventually a senior civil servant in the East India Company; his mother, Harriet Burrow, was the daughter of a modestly well-off asylum keeper. Mill was highly intelligent and received an extraordinary education at the hands of his father: he learned Greek at the age of three and by his teens was a good logician and a fluent economist, as well as very widely read in classical literature and ancient and modern history. The purpose of this education was to train him to be the intellectual leader of Philosophical Radicalism, the movement for political and administrative reform organized around Jeremy Bentham and James Mill.

By the age of twenty he was all that his teachers hoped. But in 1826 he suffered a nervous collapse and found he no longer subscribed to the creed in which he was brought up. He then set out to re-educate himself by reading opponents of the creed in which he had been reared, such as Coleridge, Carlyle, the St Simonians, Comte and Tocqueville. In 1830, he fell in love with Harriet Taylor, a married woman with small children; their chaste but anguished relationship was a further element in his re-education. All the while, however, he wrote for the Radicals journal, The London and Westminster Review, and defended the Radicals political programme.

In the 1840s Mill established the basis of advanced thought in Britain with A System of Logic (1843) and Principles of Political Economy (1848); between 1859 and 1865 he wrote, but did not always publish, the works for which he remains famous. These include On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1861), Considerations on Representative Government (1861) and The Subjection of Women (published in 1869), as well as Three Essays on Religion, Chapters on Socialism and much of his Autobiography, all of which appeared posthumously.

Mill worked for the East India Company from 1823 to 1858 and retired when the Company was dissolved in the wake of the Indian Mutiny. He served as Member of Parliament for the Westminster constituency, arguing for the rights of women, the rights of the Irish and the rights of trade unionists. He married Harriet Taylor in 1851, and after her death in 1858 he spent six months of every year at Avignon to be near her grave. He died there in 1873 and is buried in the same grave.

ALAN RYAN is the Warden of New College, Oxford, and before that was Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He is the author of The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill and J. S. Mill and the editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Utilitarianism and Other Essays. He has written extensively on liberal political theory, both in a historical and contemporary context.

JOHN STUART MILL

On Liberty and
The Subjection of Women

Edited by ALAN RYAN

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On Liberty first published 1859, The Subjection of Women 1869

Published in Penguin Classics 2006

Editorial material Alan Ryan, 2006

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ISBN: 9781101488232

Contents

Chronology