When he was in his 20s, John met Harriet Taylor and quickly fell in love with her. Mill began his professional life as an administrator for the British East India Company from 1823 until 1858. Fortunately, John found happiness in reading poetry and was able to overcome his depression.

Mill’s childhood was so unusual that as an adult he had a minor breakdown and began questioning whether any of his education was useful because it didn’t prepare him for a successful social life. To that end, James took firm control of John’s education-Mill was secluded from other children his age (other than his siblings) and began learning classical languages when he was three years old before moving onto useful subjects such as arithmetic, science, philosophy, and politics. James Mill was passionate about the ethical theory of utilitarianism and raised John to be the next leader of the movement. © 2016 Wordsworth Editions (Ebook): 9781848706217John Stuart Mill was the oldest of James and Harriet Mill’s nine children. Living as we do in a world where those boundaries continue to be tested and contested, Mill’s timeless writings are of no less value to us today than they were to those who read them when they were first published. Mill contributed to several contemporary debates, including ones about where to draw the proper boundaries between the ‘liberty of the individual’ on one hand and the ‘security of the state’ on the other.

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). 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. The works reprinted in this volume were first published during a particularly prolific ten-year span, from 1859 to 1869. His writings and activities were many and varied. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) is the most important of Britain’s nineteenth-century philosophers.

On liberty utilitarianism