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WorkJohn Stuart Mill

On Liberty

One principle, that society may coerce a person only to prevent harm to others, worked out by Mill with his wife and published three months after her death.

by John Stuart Mill181 passages held

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First published
(aged 53)
Original language
English

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Overview

On the steps of the Capitol in Rome, in January 1855, Mill decided that a short essay he had drafted the year before should become a book. He and Harriet Taylor Mill, his wife since 1851, went through it together again and again over the next three years; he later called it more directly their joint production than anything else published under his name. She died at Avignon on 3 November 1858, on the way to Montpellier. Mill printed the text in February 1859 with a dedication to her, and said he had changed nothing. On Liberty asserts one principle: society may use compulsion against an adult, whether through law or through the pressure of opinion, only to prevent harm to others, and the person's own good is not reason enough. The danger Mill has in view is the majority more than any king. In a democracy, he argues, custom and public disapproval can rule more closely than law does, and they bear hardest on anyone who lives or thinks differently. He defends free discussion on the ground that a silenced opinion may be true, and that a true opinion never challenged becomes a formula people repeat without understanding. He defends variety in ways of living on the ground that people find out what is good for them only by trying. From the principle he draws conclusions many of his contemporaries disliked: against the prohibition of alcohol, against laws enforcing Sunday observance, against interference with the Mormons. The book found readers at once, and the novelist Thomas Hardy recalled that undergraduates of the 1860s knew it almost by heart. It was also attacked. James Fitzjames Stephen, a lawyer coming home in 1872 from government service in India, wrote a series of newspaper articles during the voyage and published them in March 1873 as Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. His reply holds that compulsion, by law and by opinion alike, is what keeps a society together. Mill died two months later. Readers still argue over what counts as harm, and so over how much the principle permits. The Liberal Democrats, the British party descended from the Liberals with whom Mill sat in Parliament, hand a copy to each new party president as the symbol of the office.

Key concepts

What does Mill mean by the tyranny of the majority?

It is the power of the most numerous or most active part of a people over the rest. Mill widens the phrase beyond politics. Society can tyrannise without any law, through opinion and disapproval, and this social tyranny leaves fewer means of escape than political oppression, because it reaches into the details of life. Protection against the government is therefore not enough. A limit is also needed on what collective opinion may impose on a person.

What is self-regarding conduct?

Self-regarding conduct is the part of a person's behaviour that directly affects only himself, or affects others only with their free consent. Tastes, pursuits and one's plan of life belong to it. Mill holds that over this part the individual is sovereign. Others may advise him, argue with him or avoid his company. Once conduct breaks a definite duty to someone else it leaves this class: a soldier or policeman may be punished for being drunk on duty.

What counts as harm to others in On Liberty?

Harm, for Mill, is injury to those interests of other people that ought to be considered as rights. Dislike, offence at another person's way of life and the bad example he sets do not count. Nor does every loss: whoever wins a competitive examination or succeeds in an overcrowded profession gains by the disappointment of others, and society rightly allows it. The line falls where conduct violates what others are entitled to expect.

What is the assumption of infallibility?

To assume infallibility is to decide a question for other people without letting them hear what can be said on the other side. Mill separates this from feeling sure. A person may act on an opinion with full confidence, provided it has stood open to challenge; that standing invitation to refute it is the only ground anyone has for confidence. Whoever suppresses the contrary view treats his own certainty as if it were absolute certainty.

What does Mill mean by individuality?

Individuality is the development of a person's own character, tastes and plan of life through the use of his own faculties: observing, reasoning, judging and choosing for himself. Mill counts it among the chief ingredients of human happiness and the main source of social progress. He takes the thought from the German writer Wilhelm von Humboldt, for whom the end of man is the fullest development of his powers, which requires freedom and a variety of situations.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Where society's authority over a person ends

When is it legitimate to force an adult to do something, or to stop? Mill offers one rule for law and for public opinion alike, and the hard cases begin as soon as it is stated.

Power may rightly be used over a member of a civilised community against his will for one purpose only, to prevent harm to others. His own good is a reason for arguing with him and none for compelling him. Mill applies the rule to law and to social pressure, and exempts children and societies he calls barbarous. Then he tests it. A man about to step onto an unsafe bridge may be stopped, since he does not wish to fall. No one may sell himself into slavery, because freedom cannot include the freedom to give itself up. Prohibition of drink and laws for keeping the Sabbath fail the test.

  • harm principle
  • self-regarding conduct
  • paternalism
  • individual liberty
  • liberty
  • rights
  • political authority
  • autonomy
  • centralization

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Why even a false opinion must be heard

What is lost when an opinion is silenced, even one that is certainly wrong? Mill argues that the loss falls on those who never hear it as much as on the person silenced.

To silence an opinion, Mill says, is to assume one's own infallibility, and Marcus Aurelius, the best of rulers, persecuted Christianity in full confidence that he was right. If the silenced opinion is true, mankind loses a truth. If it is false, they lose the livelier sense of truth that comes from its collision with error, and a belief never contested becomes a dead dogma. Most often each side holds a part. He dismisses the comfort that truth always survives persecution as a pleasant falsehood. Words lose their immunity only when they instigate a harmful act, as when corn-dealers are denounced to an excited mob at a dealer's door.

  • freedom of expression
  • free speech
  • freedom of thought
  • truth
  • fallibilism
  • belief
  • censorship
  • persecution
  • religion
  • toleration
  • dissent
  • critical thinking
  • knowledge

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Individuality against the despotism of custom

Is it enough to be free from the law if everyone still lives as the neighbours expect? Mill treats the pressure to be like everybody else as the gravest danger of a democratic age.

Human nature, Mill writes, is not a machine to be built after a model but a tree that needs to grow on all sides. People find out what is good through different experiments of living, and whoever lets custom choose his plan of life leaves his own faculties unused. Against an ideal that cramps character like a Chinese lady's foot he sets strong desires under a strong will, a Pericles above a John Knox. Eccentricity is useful because custom is a despot, and a people that stops producing individuals stops improving, as he believes China did. The same concern makes him oppose schooling directed by the State.

  • individuality
  • social conformity
  • conformity
  • public opinion
  • self-development
  • social progress
  • education
  • authority

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Within this work

passages held
181
distinct concepts
277
by passages held, corpus-wide
#372

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “individual liberty” and “paternalism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 15 pairings. 91 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
individual libertypaternalism11
individualitysocial conformity9
individual libertypublic opinion7
individualitypublic opinion6
public opinionsocial conformity5
educationfree speech4
educationindividual liberty3
educationindividuality3
individual libertysocial conformity3
educationsocial conformity2
freedom of expressionindividual liberty2
freedom of expressionpublic opinion2
educationpaternalism1
educationpublic opinion1
free speechindividual liberty1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1843 A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive

    It was the first book of his own, and it made his name in 1843. Its claim that every belief must answer to experience is the ground on which the later books on morals and politics stand.

     EN
  2. 1844 Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy)

    Written at twenty-three and twenty-four, these five essays waited until the System of Logic had found him readers. Their argument on trade returns, four years later, in the Principles of Political Economy.

     EN
  3. 1848 Principles of Political Economy

    Seven editions carried this treatise from 1848 to 1871, revised as his view of socialism moved. It is read here in the text of the seventh, the last Mill revised himself.

     EN
  4. 1859 On Liberty you are here EN
  5. 1861 Considerations on Representative Government

    Written two years after On Liberty, it faces the same danger, a majority that overrides everyone else, and meets it with electoral machinery. It is his fullest statement on how a free people should be governed.

     EN
  6. 1861 Utilitarianism

    A defence of the ethics he inherited from Bentham and from his father, assembled from papers of the 1850s. Short as it is, it supplies the standard of right and wrong that his political books take for granted.

     EN
  7. 1862 The Contest in America

    Occasional journalism from Fraser's Magazine, written in haste before a journey to Greece. It shows Mill as a polemicist, arguing against the prevailing opinion of his own class.

     EN
  8. 1865 Auguste Comte and Positivism

    Two essays from the Westminster Review of 1865, written eight years after Comte's death. They close a relationship that began with admiring letters in 1841 and left its mark on the System of Logic.

     EN
  9. 1869 The Subjection of Women

    The most contested of his books in its day, published in 1869 after his one term in Parliament. It carries the reasoning of On Liberty into marriage and the household.

     EN
  10. 1879 Socialism

    Left unfinished at his death, these are the posthumous "Chapters on Socialism", first drafts for a book planned in 1869. They return to a question that the Principles of Political Economy had reopened from one edition to the next.

     EN
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