Led by John Stuart Mill
About this course
The Set Texts paper asks first-year students to read foundational works closely. This module takes Mill's On Liberty (1859), the essay he and Harriet Taylor produced together and that he expected to outlast his other writings, and reads it with its author.
Mill's question is the limit of legitimate power over the individual — not the power of tyrants, which representative government was meant to tame, but the subtler and more pervasive tyranny of the majority, exercised through opinion and custom as much as through law. Against it he sets a single principle: society may coerce a person against their will only to prevent harm to others; their own good is never a sufficient warrant. From this follow the famous defence of free thought and discussion, the case for individuality and "experiments in living," and a careful account of where one person's liberty ends and another's claims begin.
The student leaves able to state and apply the harm principle, reconstruct each strand of the free-speech argument, explain why Mill prizes individuality, and handle the boundary cases that test the principle — while assessing the essay critically, including its notorious exclusion of "backward states of society." They read the text directly and connect it to Mill's wider utilitarianism.
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Led by John Stuart Mill
The question
When, if ever, may society rightfully compel an individual to act against their own will? Mill's answer is a single principle — only to prevent harm to others — and *On Liberty* is the working-out of everything that follows from it: why neither a person's own good nor others' disapproval can justify coercion; why even false and offensive opinions must be free, since silencing them assumes our own infallibility and lets received truths rot into dead dogma; why the free development of individuality is a chief element of human well-being rather than a nuisance to be tolerated; and where, in the difficult cases, the line between self-regarding and other-regarding conduct actually falls. The module reads the essay as the unified argument it is, and tests its boundary against the cases that strain it.