Sublime

Mill’s writings can be read as a strenuous attempt to reconcile individual rights with the utilitarian philosophy he inherited from his father and adopted from Bentham. His book On Liberty (1859) is the classic defense of individual freedom in the English-speaking world. Its central principle is that people should be free to do whatever they want,

J. Stuart Mill se pose avant tout en défenseur de la liberté individuelle face au groupe dominant attelé à la seule tâche d’imposer ses croyances et ses coutumes. Dans La Liberté, il écrit : « La seule liberté qui mérite ce nom est celle de chercher notre bien propre à notre propre façon, aussi longtemps que nous n’essayons pas de priver les autres

John Stuart Mill, looking back from the end of his life on his youthful sufferings, impossible to draw a line that separates analysis on the one side from feeling on the other and to conclude that only the first side is relevant to thinking.

The aim, therefore, of patriots, was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty.

John Stuart Mill wrote in the 1840s: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”