- Length
- 192 pagesGray, On Liberty and Other Essays, Oxford World's Classics, 1998
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
On Liberty
A hundred and fifty pages that set the terms of every subsequent argument about what may be forbidden. Mill's principle is easy to state and hard to apply, and the chapter on free speech is the strongest case anyone has made for letting people say things you are certain are false.
- Date
- 1859
- Author
- John Stuart Mill
- Region
- England
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 70 years
The most cited statement of the liberal position in the English-speaking world, and the text every argument about free speech and paternalism is still conducted around.
What the book says
A short book defending one principle: the only purpose for which power can rightly be exercised over anyone against their will is to prevent harm to others, and their own good is not a sufficient warrant. Mill is clear that this excludes a great deal - not only law but the pressure of opinion, which he thinks the more dangerous because it reaches into places law cannot. The second chapter, on freedom of thought and discussion, is the longest and the most quoted, and it makes an unusual case: silencing an opinion robs the human race, because if the opinion is right we lose the chance to exchange error for truth, and if it is wrong we lose the clearer perception of truth that collision with error produces. A belief held without ever having been contested becomes a dead formula. The third chapter argues for individuality and experiments in living, on the ground that a person who follows custom because it is custom exercises no faculties at all. The fourth marks the limit of society's authority over the individual and the fifth applies the principle to trade, education, marriage and the family.
What it argues
That the sphere of a person's conduct which concerns only themselves is not society's business, and that the boundary matters more as societies become more democratic rather than less. Mill's argument is not that liberty is a right but that a society which suppresses eccentricity loses the mechanism by which it improves: truth emerges from contest, better ways of living emerge from people trying them, and both require room that custom will not leave. The free-speech case is the sharpest version. Even a wholly false opinion has a function, because a truth that never meets opposition is held as a prejudice rather than understood, and its holders eventually cannot say why it is true. The corollary is that silencing is wrong even when the silencers happen to be right, which is where the argument goes further than most defences of tolerance.
What it answered
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 1789Jeremy Bentham
Bentham's utilitarianism, from inside, and the pressure of Victorian respectability from outside. Mill is answering a society in which the effective censor was not the state but opinion - and he had felt it, having lived for twenty years in an irregular relationship with a married woman before marrying her. He is also answering, through Tocqueville, the discovery that democratic societies produce a new form of conformity: where power lies with the majority, majority opinion becomes the thing that cannot be contradicted.
What answered it
Stephen, immediately, arguing that the harm principle cannot be applied because almost nothing anyone does affects nobody else; Devlin, a century later, arguing that a society is entitled to enforce the morality that holds it together, against Hart, who answered him from Mill's position. The modern literature on paternalism, on offence, on hate speech and on the limits of toleration is all conducted in Mill's terms, whether or not his conclusions are accepted.
How it argues
By stating a principle and then testing it against cases, in prose of exceptional clarity. Mill's method throughout is to grant the opponent's strongest version first - he states the case for silencing an opinion, or for interfering with a person for their own good, as well as its defenders would - and then to show what it costs. The book is short, unornamented and almost entirely free of technical vocabulary, which is why it has been read continuously by people with no training in philosophy.
The moment
Mid-Victorian Britain, at the height of its confidence. Mill had been raised in a famous experiment - Greek at three, no holidays, no religion - had a breakdown at twenty, and spent thirty-five years as an official of the East India Company while writing on logic, economics and politics. On Liberty appeared the year the Company was wound up after the 1857 rebellion, and Mill's own long employment by it bears directly on the book's most damaging passage.
How it travelled
Into law and into common speech. The harm principle passed into the vocabulary of legislators, judges and campaigners, and the Wolfenden report and the reforms that followed it in Britain were argued largely on Mill's ground. The book has never been out of print, is translated everywhere, and is one of the very few works of political philosophy that non-philosophers quote accurately.
The strongest objection
That Mill exempts most of the world from his own principle, in a sentence he cannot have written carelessly. Having stated that liberty applies to human beings in the maturity of their faculties, he adds that the doctrine has no application to societies he calls backward, where despotism is a legitimate mode of government provided the end is their improvement - which is precisely the argument used to justify the empire his employer administered. The passage is not incidental: it shows that the harm principle is doing its work inside a theory of progress that decides in advance who counts as capable of self-government. Defenders point out that Mill was a critic of much colonial practice; that does not repair the argument, and no reading of On Liberty that ignores this passage is honest.
Why read it
Because it takes an afternoon, is written with total clarity, and contains the best case ever made for a position most people think they already hold until they see what it costs. The second chapter is the one to read if you read one; the fourth is where the difficulties start and is more interesting than its reputation.
- First printed
- 1859
- First in English
- 1859
- Digitised
- Yes
Written over several years with Harriet Taylor and finished after her death; the Autobiography describes the composition and the collaboration. Utilitarianism of 1863 and The Subjection of Women of 1869 complete the position.
Written in English. All editions are public domain.
Where it stands
Live and central. Every argument about speech regulation, drug policy, assisted dying, seatbelts or content moderation is a dispute about where Mill's line falls, and the fact that the disputants agree on the framework while disagreeing about the application is the measure of the book's success.
The passage
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, chapter I. Public domain, and Mill's own words.
Contested
How much of the book is Harriet Taylor's is unresolved and probably unresolvable; Mill's own attribution has been read as generous exaggeration and as accurate. Whether the harm principle is consistent with utilitarianism, or whether Mill has smuggled in a right, is the standing philosophical dispute. How the self-regarding sphere is to be identified, given that almost every action affects somebody, has never been settled. And the passage on so-called backward societies is a live subject in current scholarship rather than a footnote, with disagreement about whether it can be excised without damage to the rest.