Condition: Acceptable. Please see the images for more details.
Blurb:”EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB
'The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community; against his will, is to prevent harm to others ...
'Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.' To this one very simple principle' the whole of Mill's essay On Liberty is dedicated. While many of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, from Adam Smith to Godwin and Thoreau, had celebrated liberty, it was Mill who organized the idea into a philosophy, and put it into the form in which it is generally known today.
In her introduction the editor discusses Mill's precocious, utilitarian education and his reverence for the 'unrivalled wisdom' of his wife, hinting intriguingly at his unconscious motives. She records, too, responses to Mill's books and comments on his fear of'the tyranny of the majority'.
Dr Himmelfarb concludes that the same inconsistencies which underlie On Liberty continue to complicate the moral and political stance of liberals today.
The cover shows a portrait of John Stuart Mill by G. F. Watts, reproduced by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London”