On Liberty and the Subjection of Women »

John Stuart Mill (1806—1873) was the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century.
Alan Ryan, the warden of New College, Oxford, is the editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Utilitarianism and Other Essays.

Two cornerstones of liberalism from the great social radical of English philosophy

John Stuart Mill was a prodigious thinker who sharply challenged the beliefs of his age. In On Liberty-one of the sacred texts of liberalism-he argues that any democracy risks becoming a "tyranny of opinion" in which minority views are suppressed if they do not conform to those of the majority. The Subjection of Women, written shortly after the death of Mill's wife, Harriet, stresses the importance of sexual equality. Together they provide eloquent testimony to the hopes and anxieties of Victorian England, and offer a trenchant consideration of what it really means to be free.