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Kindle Notes & Highlights
In the text, Mill attempts to establish standards for the relationship between authority and liberty.
According to Mill’s Autobiography, the book was first intended to be a short essay, but as the ideas developed, it was expanded, rewritten and sedulously corrected by Mill and his wife, Harriet Taylor. After suffering a mental breakdown, Mill had met fortuitously met Harriet, who changed many of his beliefs on moral life and women’s rights. Mill later stated that On Liberty “was more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name.”
her death was to publish it and to “consecrate it to her memory.”
“struggle between authority and liberty”, describing the tyranny of government, which he believes should be controlled by the liberty of the citizens.
In Mill’s view, tyranny of the majority is worse than tyranny of government, as it is not limited to a political function.
By liberty, was meant protection against the tyranny of the political rulers.
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
Governments can not be constructed by premeditated design. They “are not made, but grow.”
a great part of all power consists in will.
One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.
They who can succeed in creating a general persuasion that a certain form of government, or social fact of any kind, deserves to be preferred, have made nearly the most important step which can possibly be taken toward ranging the powers of society on its side.
First published in 1869, Mill developed this important essay jointly with his wife Harriet Taylor Mill.
it is also noted that some of the arguments are similar to his wife’s essay The Enfranchisement of Women, which was published in 1851.
Mill was convinced that the moral and intellectual advancement of humankind would result in greater happiness for everybody.
He therefore argues that people should be able to vote to defend their own rights and to learn to stand on their own feet, morally and intellectually.
This argument is applied to both men and women. Mill
The archetype of the ideal woman as mother, wife and homemaker was a stubborn concept of nineteenth century society.
If a person is charged with a murder, it rests with those who accuse him to give proof of his guilt, not with himself to prove his innocence.
Again, in practical matters, the burthen of proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction or prohibition; either any limitation of the general freedom of human action, or any disqualification or disparity of privilege affecting one person or kind of persons, as compared with others.
The à priori presumption is in favour of freedom and impartiality.
It is equally unavailing for me to say that those who deny to women any freedom or privilege rightly allowed to men, having the double presumption against them that they are opposing freedom and recommending partiality, must be held to the strictest proof of their case, and unless their success be such as to exclude all doubt, the judgment ought to go against them.
And even if I could do all this, and leave the opposite party with a host of unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted one on their side, I should be thought to have done little; for a cause supported on the one hand by universal usage, and on the other by so great a preponderance of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction which an appeal to reason has power to produce in any intellects but those of a high class.
