On Liberty

⚖The case for it

Chapter 2 builds the free-speech case from the line readers quote most: “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.” Readers across the political map single that chapter out as the strongest thing here. The harm principle survives as an actual tool people say they still reach for, dividing conduct that touches others from conduct that does not. The chapter defending eccentricity reads freshly to anyone tired of algorithmic sameness, and Mill on women in 1859 startles readers, who credit Harriet Taylor by name. Several call the whole book “surprisingly relevant to the modern world,” under two hundred pages and, in one reader's words, “tightly logical, well written, and highly persuasive.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Short does not mean quick. Readers call it “complex and dense! It's goddamn repetitive!” and admit it “took a while to get into his 19th century writing style” before the syntax stops fighting them. The harm principle stretches: the line between causing harm and failing to help turns out to be ambiguous where it most needs not to be. Readers on the right say his compulsory schooling and his interventionist economics leave “cracks that statists drove a Mack truck through.” His passages excluding “barbarians” from the liberty principle, written while he worked for the East India Company, sit as a real fault line in the universalism.

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings