On Liberty

Reviews / Votes

"With Harriet Taylor's name at last joined to that of her beloved husband John Stuart Mill as the co-author of this timeless book, we get to see On Liberty even more clearly as the complex and nuanced text it has always been. The greatest plea for individual intellectual freedom ever penned, with its insistence that no idea should be left unexamined nor any protest left unheard, it is also implicitly a document of progressive reform: the political emancipation of women is as much a natural consequence of Mill and Taylor's view of liberty as is the need for unimpeded discussion of all political questions. The right to open debate leads inevitably to the possibility of undreamt-of reform. Set free from too narrow a 'libertarian' or 'utilitarian' understanding, we can once again embrace On Liberty as one of the greatest heralds of the open society we possess, and as a foundational two-headed document of the matchless moral adventure of liberal democracy."
-Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker critic-at-large and author of A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (Basic Books, 2019) "This is the best edition for teaching On Liberty-students will be well-served by seeing pertinent passages from other writings of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill. Moreover, any scholar writing about On Liberty would be well-advised to consult this edition in order to interpret that essay in light of other relevant writings. I have never previously encountered a work of Mill scholarship that showed such a thorough acquaintance with such a vast amount of original source material. The editors of this volume have done a tremendous service to future students and scholars of this classic essay."
-Ben Eggleston, Professor of Philosophy, The University of Kansas