In your plan: Week 36, Thu, 24 Jun 2027.
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Overview
On Liberty is John Stuart Mill's short essay on the limits of power that society may rightly exercise over the individual. It defends freedom of thought, speech and personal conduct, and it states the harm principle: coercion is justified only to prevent harm to others. Its argument that even false opinions have value, and that conformity is a danger as real as government tyranny, is the reason it is still read by lawyers, educators and managers who want better decisions from groups.
Context
Mill wrote in Victorian Britain, where the franchise was widening and he feared a new tyranny of the majority, exerted through opinion and custom as much as through law. He credited his wife Harriet Taylor Mill with deep influence on the essay, which appeared in 1859 shortly after her death. Mill also worked for the East India Company, which shapes one of the work's most criticised passages.
Read the full guide: chapter summaries, competing interpretations, key terms
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Curator's notes
- Why it matters
- Free speech, the harm principle, individuality against social conformity.
- Use in training and coaching
- Psychological safety: dissent improves decisions
- Connects to
- Locke; Wollstonecraft; Rawls
- What to read
- On Liberty ch. 2–3
- Text (date)
- Mill, On Liberty; The Subjection of Women (1859, 1869)
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