On Liberty
Decide its fate
The record
Time
An eveningA season176 pages, about 4 hours: half the length of a typical book on the shelf.
Getting in
Walk right inSteep climbThe introductory chapter traces the old contest between liberty and authority, then states one principle to govern society’s power over the individual.
What it gives
Plot and actionIdeas to live byIn 10 reviews from critics and book blogs, none credit the plot and 9 credit the ideas or a change in how they live.
One of a kind
Others do thisNothing else doesOne blog cites Tocqueville on the tyranny of the majority, and another brings in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals on Christian morality.
The case for it
on the short book
“I do not know whether then or at any other time so short a book ever instantly produced so wide and so important an effect on contemporary thought as did Mill’s On Liberty in that day of intellectual and social fermentation (1859). It was like the effect of Emerson’s awakening address to the Phi-Beta-Kappa Society in New England in 1832.”
John Morley · Recollections, vol. 1, 1917 on chapter two
“Here begins the most famous chapter of free speech ever written”
a book blog on Mill on women
“The man was way ahead of his time: on women, for one thing”
a book blog on social tyranny
“arguing that ‘social tyranny’ over individuals could be worse than political oppression”
Andrew Norton · Policy, 2009
The case against
on the simple principle
“I do not believe that the state of our knowledge is such as to enable us to enunciate any ‘very simple principle as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control.’ We must proceed in a far more cautious way, and confine ourselves to such remarks as experience suggests about the advantages and disadvantages of compulsion and liberty respectively in particular cases.”
James Fitzjames Stephen · Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 1873 on the harm principle
“But it is difficult to say what ‘harm to others’ might be.”
Dan Hitchens · Varsity, 2009 on the tangents
“Mill takes a number of tangents which distract from the main thrust of the book”
a book blog on the despotism clause
“spots where I cringed, for example, the little clause that says it’s okay for despotism”
a book blog
