John Stuart Mill
English philosopher and political economist (1806–1873), born in London, son of the utilitarian James Mill, who from infancy imposed on him an extraordinarily demanding and precocious intellectual education —Greek at three, Latin at eight— designed to make him the perfect successor to Benthamite utilitarianism; at twenty he suffered a severe depressive crisis, which he recounted candidly in his Autobiography, and which led him to temper for the rest of his life the rigid utilitarianism inherited from his father with the poetry, emotion and thought of Coleridge and the Romantics. In Utilitarianism (1861) he reformulated the greatest-happiness principle by introducing a qualitative distinction between higher and lower pleasures —'it is better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied'— moving Bentham's simple hedonistic doctrine toward a more refined utilitarianism. On Liberty (1859), his most widely read work, formulates the 'harm principle': society may legitimately restrict individual liberty only to prevent harm to others, never out of paternalism or to enforce majority morality, and it passionately defends freedom of expression, even of erroneous opinions, as a condition for collective intellectual progress. The Subjection of Women (1869), written under the deep influence of his companion and later wife Harriet Taylor, is one of the earliest and most forceful philosophical arguments for full legal and social equality between the sexes. Also the author of the influential Principles of Political Economy (1848) and A System of Logic (1843), he served as a Member of the British Parliament, where he championed women's suffrage and, as the only MP of his time to vote against it, the abolition of the death penalty, becoming during his lifetime the most influential public intellectual of Victorian England.
12 works
- A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
- Auguste Comte and Positivism
- Autobiography
- Considerations on Representative Government
- Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy
- On Liberty
- Principles of Political Economy
- Socialism
- Speech In Favor of Capital Punishment
- The Contest in America
- The Subjection of Women
- Utilitarianism
Themes addressed
Quotes
“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
On Liberty
“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”
Utilitarianism
“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction.”
On Liberty
“The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.”
On Liberty
“Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.”
On Liberty
“He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.”
On Liberty