Mill, John Stuart (1806–73)

Abstract

Mill was a thinker of extraordinary range: the outstanding philosopher of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the country's leading economist, a formidable social critic, and a polemicist on behalf of radical causes ranging from workers’ cooperatives to putting women on a footing of complete legal equality with men as to voting rights, property rights, marriage, education, and vocational opportunities. His enduring legacy is his defense of individual liberty against both political oppression and the tyranny of opinion. The fear that democracy might degenerate into the tyranny of the majority was not a novelty; the fear that the tyranny might be the dead weight of public opinion, the more irresistible for being silent, nonviolent, but omnipresent, was more nearly so.