Mill on liberty: A defence

Abstract

My aim in this study is to show by textual analysis and the reconstruction of Mill’s argument that On Liberty is not the folly that over a century of unsympathetic critics and interpreters have represented it as being, but rather the most important passage in a train of argument about liberty, utility and rights which Mill sustained over a number of his most weighty moral and political writings. Far from being the monument to Mill’s inconsistency that his critics have caricatured, On Liberty is consistent almost to a fault, both in its own terms and in terms of a patter of reasoning developed in Mill’s other writings in which a utilitarian theory of conduct is applied to many questions in moral and political life.