John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was the son of James Mill who, with his close friend and collaborator Jeremy Bentham, entirely controlled his education, with the more or less explicit intention of producing a brilliant successor as an exponent of utilitarianism. In this they succeeded, although he was to go far beyond them in some respects, and certainly produced a version of utilitarianism more sophisticated and more suited to British liberalism than that of his elders. Through a long career as a writer, though he also had much practical experience, including parliamentary, J.S. Mill worked on a variety of topics. His most famous works are the three essays, On Liberty (1859), Considerations on Representative Government (1861) and Utilitarianism (1863), though his purely philosophical work, especially the System of Logic, is also of continuing academic interest.
In Utilitarianism he tries to reduce the harshness and hedonism of Bentham’s approach, accepting, for example, what Bentham denied, that not all sources of pleasure were equally valid. (He rejected, for example, Bentham’s notion that it was better to be a pig satisfied than Socrates dissatisfied.) The essay On Liberty is probably the most read of all his works, arguing for a system of libertarianism in which the only justification allowable for government interference in anyone’s life was to prevent them from harming others, and never the claim that a government might know a person’s true interests better than the individual. Indeed his great fear, against which the whole essay is directed, was the tyranny of the majority, the fear of popular pressure against the non-conformist individual. His justification for such maximum individual liberty, however, is a brilliant thesis about human progress through the discovery of new truths only possible, according to Mill, in a society where no interference in personal belief, or the expression of belief, is tolerated. A beautiful stylist, with a wide-ranging scholarship, his major essays remain vital elements in curricula throughout departments of politics and philosophy, and much of the accepted values of Western society still conforms better to his vision than to that of almost any other thinker of his period.
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