'it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well developed human beings'

Mill's four essays, 'On Liberty', 'Utilitarianism', 'Considerations on Representative Government', and 'The Subjection of Women' examine the most central issues that face liberal democratic regimes - whether in the nineteenth century or the twenty-first. They have formed the basis for many of the political institutions of the West since the late nineteenth century, tackling as they do the appropriate grounds for protecting individual liberty, the basic principles of ethics, the benefits and the costs of representative institutions, and the central importance of gender equality in society.

These essays are central to the liberal tradition, but their interpretation and how we should understand their connection with each other are both contentious. In their introduction Mark Philp and Frederick Rosen set the essays in the context of Mill's other works, and argue that his conviction in the importance of the development of human character in its full diversity provides the core to his liberalism and to any defensible account of the value of liberalism to the modern world.

ABOUT THE SERIES:
For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Discussed and debated from time immemorial, the concept of personal liberty went without codification until the 1859 publication of On Liberty. John Stuart Mill's complete and resolute dedication to the cause of freedom inspired this treatise, an enduring work through which the concept remains well known and studied.
The British economist, philosopher, and ethical theorist's argument does not focus on the so-called Liberty of the Will...but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. Mill asks and answers provocative questions relating to the boundaries of social authority and individual sovereignty. In powerful and persuasive prose, he declares that there is one very simple principle regarding the use of coercion in society -- one may only coerce others either to defend oneself or to defend others from harm.
The new edition offers students of political science and philosophy, in an inexpensive volume, one of the most influential studies on the nature of individual liberty and its role in a democratic society.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was a British philosopher, political economist, civil servant, and Member of Parliament. An influential liberal thinker of the 19th century, he taught utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by his godfather, Jeremy Bentham.

On Liberty is a philosophical essay by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Published in 1859, it applies Mill's ethical system of utilitarianism to society and state. Mill emphasizes the importance of individuality, which he considers prerequisite to the higher pleasures - the summum bonum of utilitarianism. Among the standards proposed are Mill's three basic liberties of individuals, his three legitimate objections to government intervention, and his two maxims regarding the relationship of the individual to society.

On Liberty was a greatly influential and well-received work. Mill suggests standards for the relationship between authority and liberty, and asserts that democratic ideals may result in the tyranny of the majority. The ideas presented in On Liberty have remained the basis of much political thought. A copy of On Liberty is passed to the president of the British Liberal Democrats as a symbol of office. It has remained in print since its initial publication.

This case laminate collector's edition includes a Victorian inspired dust-jacket.

Including three of his most famous and important essays, Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Essay on Bentham, along with formative selections from Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, this volume provides a uniquely perspicuous view of Mill's ethical and political thought.

• Contains Mill's most famous and influential works, Utilitarianism and On Liberty as well as his important Essay on Bentham.
  
• Uses the 1871 edition of Utilitarianism, the last to be published in Mill's lifetime.
  
• Includes selections from Bentham and John Austin, the two thinkers who most influenced Mill.
  
• Introduction written by Mary Warnock, a highly respected figure in 20th-century ethics in her own right.
  
• Provides an extensive, up-to-date bibliography with the best scholarship on Mill, Bentham and Utilitarianism.

John Stuart Mill was born on 20th May 1806. He was a delicate child, and the extraordinary education designed by his father was not calculated to develop and improve his physical powers. I never was a boy, he says; never played cricket. His exercise was taken in the form of walks with his father, during which the elder Mill lectured his son and examined him on his work. It is idle to speculate on the possible results of a different treatment. Mill remained delicate throughout his life, but was endowed with that intense mental energy which is so often combined with physical weakness. His youth was sacrificed to an idea; he was designed by his father to carry on his work; the individuality of the boy was unimportant. A visit to the south of France at the age of fourteen, in company with the family of General Sir Samuel Bentham, was not without its influence. It was a glimpse of another atmosphere, though the studious habits of his home life were maintained. Moreover, he derived from it his interest in foreign politics, which remained one of his characteristics to the end of his life. In 1823 he was appointed junior clerk in the Examiners' Office at the India House.

Liberty Fund is pleased to make available in paperback eight of the original thirty-three cloth volumes of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill that were first published by the University of Toronto Press that remain most relevant to liberty and responsibility in the twenty-first century. Born in London in 1806 and educated at the knee of his father, the Scottish philosopher James Mill, John Stuart Mill became one of the nineteenth century's most influential writers on economics and social philosophy.

Mill's Autobiography tells of his extraordinary education under the direct tutelage of his father, and under the indirect influence of some of England's most renowned political economic thinkers, such as Jeremy Bentham. At the tender age of three, Mill was reading Greek, and by eight years of age he was well-versed in English history, classical western philosophy, and arithmetic.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was an economist, philosopher, Member of Parliament, and one of the most significant English classical liberals of the nineteenth century. Mill spent most of his working life with the East India Company, which he joined at age sixteen and worked for for thirty-eight years. He is also the author of On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1861), and The Subjection of Women (1869).

Two cornerstones of liberalism from the great social radical of English philosophy

John Stuart Mill was a prodigious thinker who sharply challenged the beliefs of his age. In On Liberty, one of the sacred texts of liberalism, he argues that any democracy risks becoming a tyranny of opinion in which minority views are suppressed if they do not conform to those of the majority. The Subjection of Women, written shortly after the death of Mill's wife, Harriet, stresses the importance of sexual equality. Together they provide eloquent testimony to the hopes and anxieties of Victorian England, and offer a trenchant consideration of what it really means to be free.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

One of the most important nineteenth-century schools of thought, Utilitarianism propounds the view that the value or rightness of an action rests in how well it promotes the welfare of those affected by it, aiming for 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was the movement's founder, as much a social reformer as a philosopher. His greatest interpreter, John Stuart Mill (1806-73), set out to humanize Bentham's pragmatic Utilitarianism by balancing the claims of reason and the imagination, individuality and social well-being in essays such as 'Bentham', 'Coleridge' and, above all, Utilitarianism. The works by Bentham and Mill collected in this volume show the creation and development of a system of ethics that has had an enduring influence on moral philosophy and legislative policy.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The standard economics textbook for more than a generation, John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848) was really as much a synthesis of his predecessors' ideas as it was an original economic treatise. Heavily influenced by the work of David Ricardo, and also taking ideas from Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, Mill systematically demonstrated how important economic concepts could be applied to real-world situations. In his emphasis on realism, Mill thus took economics out of the realm of the abstract and placed it squarely within the context of society.For instance, he made a convincing case that wages, rent, and profit are not necessarily the expression of immutable laws that are independent of society. Rather, they are in actuality the results of social institutions and as such can be changed if the members of a society move to break traditional institutional habits. Reflecting his utilitarian social philosophy, Mill suggested that social improvements are always possible. He thus proposed modifying a purely laissez faire system, advocating trade protectionism and regulation of employees' work hours for the benefit of domestic industries and workers' well-being. In such features he displayed a leaning toward socialism.In summing up his objective for this massive work, Mill said later in his Autobiography (1873) that he wished to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour. For anyone with an interest in the history of economics or the history of ideas, this landmark work of classical economics makes for stimulating and in many respects still very relevant reading.

On Liberty is a philosophical work by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, originally intended as a short essay. The work, published in 1859, applies Mill's ethical system of utilitarianism to society and the state.Mill attempts to establish standards for the relationship between authority and liberty. He emphasizes the importance of individuality, which he conceived as a prerequisite to the higher pleasures-the summum bonum of utilitarianism. Furthermore, Mill criticizes the errors of past attempts to defend individuality where, for example, democratic ideals resulted in the tyranny of the majority. Among the standards established in this work are Mill's three basic liberties of individuals, his three legitimate objections to government intervention, and his two maxims regarding the relationship of the individual to society. On Liberty was a greatly influential and well received work, although it did not go without criticism. Some attacked it for its apparent discontinuity with Utilitarianism, while others criticized its vagueness. The ideas presented in On Liberty have remained the basis of much liberal political thought. It has remained in print continuously since its initial publication. To this day, a copy of On Liberty is passed to the president of the British Liberal Democrats as a symbol of office. A copy of the same book is also presented to and then held by the president of the Liberal Party as a symbol of office. Mill's marriage to his wife Harriet Taylor Mill greatly influenced the concepts in On Liberty, which was largely finished prior to her death, and published shortly after she died.............. John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 - 8 May 1873) was a British philosopher, political economist and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory and political economy. Dubbed the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century, Mill's conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control. Mill was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by his predecessor Jeremy Bentham. He contributed to the investigation of scientific methodology, though his knowledge of the topic was based on the writings of others, notably William Whewell, John Herschel and Auguste Comte, and research carried out for Mill by Alexander Bain. Mill engaged in written debate with Whewell. 8] A member of the Liberal Party, he was also the first Member of Parliament to call for women's suffrage. Works: A System of Logic Main article: A System of Logic Mill joined the debate over scientific method which followed on from John Herschel's 1830 publication of A Preliminary Discourse on the study of Natural Philosophy, which incorporated inductive reasoning from the known to the unknown, discovering general laws in specific facts and verifying these laws empirically. William Whewell expanded on this in his 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time followed in 1840 by The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon their History, presenting induction as the mind superimposing concepts on facts. Laws were self-evident truths, which could be known without need for empirical verification.....

This volume unites, for the first time, Books IV and V of Mill's great treatise on political economy with his fragmentary Chapters on Socialism. It shows him applying his classical economic theory to policy questions of lasting concern: the desirability of sustained growth of national wealth and population, the merits of capitalism versus socialism, and the suitable scope of government intervention in the competitive market economy. His answers to those questions have profound relevance today, and they serve to illustrate the enduring power and imagination of his distinctive liberal utilitarian philosophy. The lucid introduction and explanatory notes clarify Mill's philosophy in relation to his economic theory, and make full use of the most recent scholarship.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The writings of John Stuart Mill have become the cornerstone of political liberalism. Collected in this volume are John Stuart Mill's Four seminal and most widely read works: On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, Utilitarianism and Socialism.

Mill's conception of liberty (from his most famous book, On Liberty) justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control.

The Subjection of Women is a passionate defense of the rights of women from the point of view of a man that truly believes in equality.

In Utilitarianism, Mill's major contribution is his argument for the qualitative separation of pleasures, in response to Jeremy Bentham's formulation of utilitarianism: the greatest-happiness principle, which holds that one must always act so as to produce the greatest aggregate happiness among all sentient beings, within reason.

Socialism is an early attempt of visualizing a way of putting the Marxist theory into practice. Mill realizes that distributing the wealth onto the proletariat will lead to a state of routine work, where there is neither motivation nor anxiety, not realizing, however, that routine will devoid performance of excellence.

John Stuart Mill has been called the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century.

John Stuart Mill is one of the few indisputably classic authors in the history of political thought. On Liberty, first published in 1851, has become celebrated as the most powerful defense of the freedom of the individual and it is now widely regarded as the most important theoretical foundation for Liberalism as a political creed. Similarly, his The Subjection of Women, a powerful indictment of the political, social, and economic position of women, has become one of the cardinal documents of modern feminism. This edition brings together these two classic texts, plus Mill's posthumous Chapters on Socialism, his somewhat neglected examination of the strengths and weaknesses of various forms of Socialism. The Editor's substantial Introduction places these three works in the context both of Mill's life and of nineteenth-century intellectual and political history, and assesses their continuing relevance.

'Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.' -John Stuart Mill On Liberty presented one of the most eloquent defenses of individual freedom in nineteenth-century social and political philosophy and is today perhaps the most widely-read liberal argument in support of the value of liberty. Mill's passionate advocacy of spontaneity, individuality, and diversity, along with his contempt for compulsory uniformity and the despotism of popular opinion, has attracted both admiration and condemnation. On Liberty was a greatly influential and well-received work. The ideas presented in On Liberty have remained the basis of much political thought.

'Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.' -John Stuart Mill On Liberty presented one of the most eloquent defenses of individual freedom in nineteenth-century social and political philosophy and is today perhaps the most widely-read liberal argument in support of the value of liberty. Mill's passionate advocacy of spontaneity, individuality, and diversity, along with his contempt for compulsory uniformity and the despotism of popular opinion, has attracted both admiration and condemnation. On Liberty was a greatly influential and well-received work. The ideas presented in On Liberty have remained the basis of much political thought.

Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill is a scminal work in ethical philosophy that explores the principles of utilitarianism-a consequentialist ethical theory that assesses actions based on their ability to maximize overall happiness or pleasure. Published in 1861, Utilitarianism builds upon the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, but Mill adds nuances to the theory, emphasizing the qualitative aspects of pleasure and introducing the concept of higher and lower pleasures. In this foundational text, Mill argues that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness and wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. Mill's eloquent defence of utilitarianism addresses objections, refines the theory, and underscores the importance of individual rights within the framework of utility. Utilitarianism remains a cornerstone in moral philosophy, offering insights into the ethical calculus that continues to shape debates on morality and public policy. With clarity and rigour, Mill's work remains a fundamental reference for those interested in the foundations of ethical reasoning.

The writings of John Stuart Mill have become the cornerstone of political liberalism. Collected for the first time in this volume are Mill's three seminal and most widely read works: On Liberty, The Subjection of Women, and Utilitarianism. A brilliant defense of individual rights versus the power of the state, On Liberty is essential reading for anyone interested in political thought and theory. As Bertrand Russell reflected, On Liberty remains a classic . . . the present world would be better than it is, if Mill's] principles were more respected.

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes newly commissioned endnotes and commentary by Dale E. Miller, and an index.