On Liberty

On Liberty is the essay of eighteen fifty-nine published under John Stuart Mill's name, which Mill said was more directly and literally a joint production with Harriet Taylor Mill than anything else bearing it. It applies a utilitarian ethics to the relation between authority and the individual. Mill argues that the old struggle against the tyranny of rulers has been joined, in self-governing societies, by a subtler danger, the tyranny of the majority, in which prevailing opinion and feeling coerce conduct with no law available to check them. Against this he proposes a single standard, that the only purpose for which power may rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will is to prevent harm to others, and that the person's own good, physical or moral, is no sufficient warrant. From it he derives three basic liberties, of thought and expression, of tastes and pursuits, and of association. The second chapter argues that no opinion should ever be suppressed, because a silenced opinion may be true, or may carry part of a truth the prevailing view lacks, and because even a wholly true opinion, if never contested, is held as a dead prejudice. The third argues the worth of individuality as the condition of creativity and of a life fully lived, and the last applies the principles to trade, to prevention of harm, to education and to other cases. Mill rests the standard on utility rather than on natural rights, and exempts from it children and what the essay calls barbarian nations.

Written from the wikipedia article on the book.

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