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Informationen zum Autor John Stuart Mill was a child of radicalism, born in 1806 into a rarefied realm of philosophic discourse. His father, who with Jeremy Bentham was a founding member of the utilitarian movement, was responsible for his son’s education and saw to it that he was trained in the classics at an extraordinarily early age. In 1823 Mill gave up a career in law to become a clerk at the East India Company, where his father worked. Like his father, he rose to the position of chief examiner, which he held until he retired from the company in 1858. While still in his teens, Mill began publishing articles and essays in various publications and became an editor of the London and Westminster Review , in 1835. In 1843 he published System of Logic , followed by Principles of Political Economy in 1848. Other important works include On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1863), The Subjection of Women (written 1861, published 1869), and Autobiography (published posthumously in 1873). Mill married Harriet Hardy Taylor in 1851, and her influence on his thinking and writing has been widely cited. The couple worked together on On Liberty , and the essay is dedicated to her memory–she died in 1858. After serving as a member of Parliament from 1865, to 1868, Mill retired to France and died at Avignon in 1873. It took scholars several decades before they fully examined John Stuart Mill’s unique and systematic contributions to ethical and logical traditions. For today’s students of economics, philosophy, and politics he remains a vibrant and preeminent figure. Klappentext Together! these two essays mark the philosophic cornerstone of democratic morality and represent a thought-provoking search for the true balance between the rights of the individual and the power of the state. Thoroughly schooled in the principles of the utilitarian movement founded by Jeremy Bentham! John Stuart Mill nevertheless brings his own unique intellectual energy to issues such individual freedom! equality! authority! happiness! justice! and virtue. "On Liberty is Mill's famous examination of the nature of individuality and its crucial role in any social system that expected to remain creative and vital. Utilitarian brilliantly expounds a pragmatic ethic based on one controversial proposition: actions are right only if they promote the common good and wrong if they do not. While much of Mill's thinking was eventually adopted by socialists! it is in today's democratic societies--with their troubling issues of crime! freedom of speech! and the boundaries of personal liberty--that his work resounds most powerfully. Chapter One Introduction THE SUBJECT of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, in general terms, but which profoundly influences the practical controversies of the age by its latent presence, and is likely soon to make itself recognized as the vital question of the future. It is so far from being new, that, in a certain sense, it has divided mankind, almost from the remotest ages; but in the stage of progress into which the more civilized portions of the species have now entered, it presents itself under new conditions, and requires a different and more fundamental treatment. The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England. But in old times this contest was between subjects, or some classes of subjects, and the Government. By liberty, was meant protection against the tyranny of the political rulers. The rule...
