How To Be A Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for its Survival

by Ian Dunt

And then Overton went one step further. He outlined where those rights ended: at the exact point at which someone else’s rights were infringed. You were free to do whatever you wanted, as long as you did not take away the freedom of others.

‘The liberty of the whole of humanity,’ he said, ‘did not justify shedding the blood of a single man.’

‘What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others,’

The solution they invented was called the harm principle. It was extremely simple. ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others,’