On Liberty

What It Is

A short book, published in 1859 by the foremost public intellectual in Victorian Britain. John Stuart Mill had been taught Greek at three, worked for the East India Company for thirty-five years, sat in Parliament, and collapsed in his twenties under the weight of the education his father had designed for him.

He wrote it with Harriet Taylor, his wife and collaborator of twenty years, whom he named as joint author in everything but the title page. She died in 1858, before it appeared. He never revised a line of it afterwards.

Five chapters, about a hundred and thirty pages. Chapter 2, on freedom of thought and discussion, is the most quoted; it is also the best argument for free speech ever written in English. The rest applies the principle to individuality, to society's authority over the individual, and to the cases where the answer is genuinely difficult.

Why It Matters

One sentence in it has organised a century and a half of argument, and almost everyone who quotes it has quietly dropped the qualifications Mill attached to it. Every dispute about drugs, speech, pornography, seatbelts and social media is conducted, by both sides, in the terms Mill set.

The deeper claim is the one people forget. Mill was not chiefly worried about governments. He thought the characteristic danger of a democratic age was the pressure of opinion — a tyranny exercised without law, by disapproval, until people stop having views of their own and lose the capacity to want anything the crowd has not already approved. He described the mechanism with unpleasant accuracy, which is why the book keeps being rediscovered by every generation that thinks it has invented the problem.

His defence of free speech does not rest on a right. It rests on something far less flattering to the people making it, and he works it out at length. That argument is harder and more durable than the one usually made in his name.

He also wrote a paragraph excusing despotism over peoples he called barbarians, unfit as yet for liberty. Empire is in the book's bloodstream, and a serious reader does not skip past it.

Before You Read

Four or five hours. The Victorian sentences are long but orderly, and Mill never shows off.

Read chapter 2 twice. Read chapter 4, on the limits of society's authority, slowly, because it is there that the harm principle turns out to be far less tidy than it sounds on a placard. Chapter 5's worked examples are dated in their subject matter and are the part most commonly skimmed; the reasoning in them is not dated at all.

Which Edition to Read

• Oxford World's Classics, On Liberty and Other Essays, edited by John Gray — recommended. One cheap volume gives you On Liberty, Utilitarianism, Considerations on Representative Government and The Subjection of Women, which is most of the Mill you will ever need, and Gray's introduction places the essay inside the whole of his philosophy. The cost: Gray argues a particular reading of Mill, and the notes are light. View on Amazon →
• Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, edited by Stefan Collini (1989). On Liberty with The Subjection of Women and the Chapters on Socialism. Collini's introduction is the best short historical account there is: what Victorian conformity actually looked like, and precisely whom Mill was arguing with. The cost: less Mill for the money than Oxford.
• Hackett, edited by Elizabeth Rapaport. The plain reading text — small, cheap, sensibly introduced, and nothing standing between you and the argument. The cost: no companion essays, so you meet Mill alone.

Take Oxford for value, Cambridge for context, Hackett if you want only the book. Gertrude Himmelfarb's Penguin edition is worth knowing about chiefly for her contention that there are two Mills and this one is the lesser — a case she argues hard and does not, in the end, win.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the introduction afterwards. Several of them are arguing with Mill, and you should form your own view before they get to you.

Argue back as you go. The book was written to be resisted; Mill's whole case is that an opinion that has never been tested is worth nothing.

The commonest mistake is to arrive with the harm principle already in your pocket and read only for confirmation. Almost everyone claims Mill. He spends most of the book showing how hard his own principle is to apply, and he is far less use as an ally than as an examiner.