On Liberty ─ With Related Documents

This new edition of On Liberty is the first to combine John Stuart Mill's influential work with a set of relevant primary sources by Mill and his contemporaries. Alan Kahan's introduction provides students with crucial background on nineteenth-century British politics and society; intriguing biographical details about Mill's early life, intellectual career, and marriage; and thought-provoking discussion of the core issues of autonomy and freedom that On Liberty addresses. The related primary documents -- including an excerpt from Mill's famous proto-feminist treatise On the Subjection of Women -- offer useful insights into the philosopher's intellectual outlook as well as a fascinating view into On Liberty's rather stormy reception. Excerpts from Mill's diary and autobiography, contemporary reviews of On Liberty, and appreciations of Mill by his colleagues all deepen students' understanding of this remarkable work and its equally remarkable author. Headnotes and gloss notes to the documents, a selected bibliography, a chronology of Mill's life, and a set of questions for consideration offer additional pedagogical support.

ALAN S. KAHAN (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is the author of Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, and of Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Political Culture of Limited Suffrage. He has translated de Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the Revolution, and co-edited The Tocqueville Reader. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Rice University, and Florida International University, and has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He is currently working on a book about intellectuals and capitalism.