On Liberty & Utilitarianism

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) is the most important of Britain’s nineteenth-century philosophers. His writings and activities were many and varied. The works reprinted in this volume were first published during a particularly prolific ten-year span, from 1859 to 1869. On Liberty (1859), Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Utilitarianism (1863), and The Subjection of Women (1869) are four of his most famous works; they are central pillars on which Mill’s high reputation rests. Also included for the light they shed on Mill and his times are two of his lesser-known works – ‘The Contest in America’ (1862), written in the context of the American Civil War; and his erudite but accessible Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St Andrews (1867).