On Liberty is a strongly developed argument for our rights to free expression, association, speech, and non-interference. Mill places the sanctity of individual liberty over the will of the majority in his conception of justice. John Stuart Mill, as a child protege, was raised under the influence of Jeremy Bentham, of whom Mill’s father James Mill was a close friend and mutual subscriber to Utilitarianism. The younger, hypereducated Stuart Mill, was taught to believe in the formula of the greatest happiness to the greatest number when it came to political decision making, but his consistent focus on minimizing pain and perfecting society left him deeply depressed and despondent by the end of his teenage years. Mill’s route back into his own life, emulating Rousseau’s Romanticism, was through the poetry of William Wordsworth and a deepening preoccupation with the beauty of the present and relations with common men. Relieved from fixating on creating a utopia, Mill, post-depression, was still concerned with the creation of a just society, but one rooted in individual experience.

The ‘harm principle’ in On Liberty dictates that a state only has a right to intervene in private lives if one citizen is doing harm to another, not just for offense or indignity. No one has a right to coerce or censor another just for the opinions they hold. Mill had given up on an arithmetical kind of government, judging individuals to be the best judges of their own happiness and best left alone. There is a great humility to Mill’s thoughts on free speech, and these thoughts are primarily that although truth is tele modal (i.e. above popular support for any one opinion) if you believe you hold the truth, you should still tolerate contrary opinions. This is because to force acceptance of a ‘truth’ strips it of its justificatory power, and any such truth becomes a dogma for the majority, no matter how reasoned. Mill fundamentally believed in the possibility of a tiny minority, even of one, possessing greater justification than a massive majority who were misled. In the interest that truth is not suppressed, every single opinion should be heard. John Stuart Mill’s writing frames democracy at the individual level, and its veneration of personal liberty plays into such groups as the modern-day ACLU and the Liberal Democrat charter in the UK.