He made the case that each and every individual should have the latitude and liberty to live his life as he chooses, in any way that he considers desirable and advantageous, as long as it does not bring harm to another individual’s equal right to do the same. His most famous articulation of the liberal outlook on these matters is in his Essay on Liberty (1859).

One of the voices for the liberal ideal of personal freedom and civil liberty in the 19 th century was the British economist and social philosopher, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Equal Rights It can easily happen that under the avalanche of accusations against market liberalism, it may be forgotten how many 19 th century liberal friends of freedom in Europe and the United States spoke out against the oppression of not only people in general, but against particular groups whose liberty was denied through such institutions as slavery.

J.One of the most heated and controversial issues today concerns the place of slavery in the history of the United States, and attitudes toward the institution of human bondage in the Western world in general.Īnother theme in modern political debate is the nature and role of classical liberalism as a force for human freedom and dignity or as a rationalization for capitalist oppression of not just wage-earning workers, but racial and ethnic groups in modern history. Ryan says that ‘it is almost entirely concerned with the legal disabilities of women in Victorian England’. Mill heads one chapter ‘Liberty and The Subjection of Women’, but the former work gets twenty-six pages and the latter only four. Philosophical books on Mill give the essay short measure. Kate Millett's chapter in Sexual Politics is the only sustained discussion of Mill in the feminist literature that I am aware of, but it is not from a philosophical viewpoint, and deals with Mill only in the service of an extended comparison with Ruskin. Feminist writers have tended to refer to it with respect but without any serious attempt to come to grips with Mill's actual arguments. It failed to inaugurate a respectable intellectual debate. When Mill's The Subjection of Women was published in 1869 it was ahead of its time in boldly championing feminism.

The subjugation of women 1869