Book description
'Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is
sovereign.' To this 'one very simple principle' the whole of Mill's
essay On Liberty is dedicated. While many of his immediate
predecessors and contemporaries, from Adam Smith to Godwin and
Thoreau, had celebrated liberty, it was Mill who organized the idea
into a philosophy, and put it into the form in which it is generally
known today.
The editor of this essay, Gertrude Himmelfarb records responses to
Mill's books and comments on his fear of 'the tyranny of the
majority'. Dr Himmelfarb concludes that the same inconsistencies which
underlie On Liberty continue to complicate the moral and political
stance of liberals today.
John Stuart Mill was born in London in 1806. He became a leading
philosophical radical, active as a propagandist in their intellectual
and reforming pursuits. In 1826, he began to rethink his stance and
examine alternative positions offered by Coleridge and Carlyle. By the
1840's Mill could offer a mature reinterpretation of his philosophical position.
Gertrude Himmelfarb is Professor of History at the City University
of New York and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
