John Stuart Mill - On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

ON LIBERTY, UTILITARIANISM,

AND OTHER ESSAYS

JOHN STUART MILL (180673), philosopher, economist, and political thinker, was the most prominent figure of nineteenth-century English intellectual life and his work has continuing significance for contemporary debates about ethics, politics, and economics. His father, James Mill, a close associate of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, took responsibility for his eldest sons education, teaching him ancient Greek at the age of 3 and equipping him with a deep and an extremely broad knowledge of the physical and moral sciences of the day. In his late teens Mill became a passionate advocate and proselytizer for Benthams ideas, but his Autobiography, published after his death, confesses to a mental crisis in his early twenties that left him concerned to develop what he saw as a more complex, liberal, utilitarian philosophy. In the subsequent forty-five years he produced major works on logic and political economy, and numerous essays and studies of which the four collected in this volume are the most famous. He held senior office for many years at the East India Company, was owner and editor for a period of the London Review and then the London and Westminster Review, and, towards the end of his life, served as a Member of Parliament for the seat of Westminster. Mills relationship with Harriet Taylor, which began in 1830 and culminated in their marriage in 1851, two years after the death of her husband, was one of the most significant of his life, and she was acknowledged as a profound influence especially on his essays On Liberty and The Subjection of Women. The four essays in this collection demonstrate Mills appreciation of the diversity, plurality, and complexity of ways of life and their possibilities, and his concern to develop an open and progressive response to a changing world so as to promote human flourishing and, in its broadest sense, human happiness.

MARK PHILP holds a chair in History and Politics at the University of Warwick. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. His recent books include Political Conduct (2007) and Reforming Ideas in Britain (2013).

FREDERICK ROSEN is Professor Emeritus of the History of Political Thought at University College London, where he has taught for many years directing the Bentham Project. His recent books include Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill (2003) and Mill (2013).

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Editorial material Mark Philp and Frederick Rosen 2015

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On Liberty and Other Essays first published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1991 Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998, 2008

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Acknowledgements

THE editors wish to thank Judith Luna for her initiation, her careful steering of this project, and her exemplary patience, Dr Henrietta Ewart for her assistance in checking our notes, and Emily Brand, Rowena Anketell, and Peter Gibbs for their exemplary work respectively on the production, manuscript, and proofs. We ought also to thank the British Library, and especially its cafes, where a great deal of editorial debate took place, and Oriel Library for its extended loans of many volumes of Mills Works. The editors wish to acknowledge the important work of John M. Robson, the General Editor of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, and his team for numerous insights and references that have influenced this work and provided a somewhat daunting example. We have gone further than Robson in extending the supporting notes so as to clarify for the more general reader as fully as possible Mills references and allusions.

M.P., F.R.

JOHN STUART MILL (180673) is a central figure in the canon of Western philosophy and literature. His writing engaged with a wide variety of different strands of nineteenth-century thought: utilitarianism, romanticism, scientism, historicism, political economy, sociology, and so on. He came of age in a Britain recovering from the wars with Napoleonic France and with rising popular discontent against an exclusive and elitist political system and an emerging industrial system in which mens and womens lives appeared dramatically exposed to the uncertainties of trade and manufactures. His expectations of the Reform Bill of 1832 were not high, and were not exceeded. His experience on the streets of Revolutionary Paris in 1830 led him to hope for more dramatic reforms than were proposed in England. Above all, he saw himself as living in a period of transition from a highly unequal society to a more egalitarian order, with an end to distinction based on rank, through the extension of literacy, and the opening of prospects for individual development across the whole population. His thinking drew liberally from European thought as well as from English and Scottish Enlightenment traditions and contemporary debates and in his lifetime he carved himself a place as Britains foremost intellectual. His work straddled many of the boundaries that have defined his successors allegiances, such as that between liberalism and socialism. Consequently, while many have claimed him as an intellectual forebear, the full breadth of his thought and the subtlety of his convictions have been captured by very few.