Within On Liberty By John Stuart Mill

"Some men know the value of education by having it. I know its value by not having it." –Blessings of Liberty and Education (1894) In Frederick Douglass’ narrative he writes about his childhood memories while he was enslaved including memories from different owners and overseers.He talks about the multiple different plantations he had lived on. He includes his memories of the terrible treatment of his family and fellow slaves as well as memories of being in communications with them. In his narrative, he criticizes many aspects of slavery however he focuses on the inhumanity of slavery. By criticizing the inhumanity of slavery Douglass demonstrates that becoming literate enabled him to discover his self-pride which helped him become a

Introduction. The new boundaries and opportunities in the seventeenth century grew and challenged an idea of religious liberty. The lifestyle of the first colonists in the New England was heavily influenced by religion and church. Settlers considered that success of social life depends on the obedience to God’s will. The governor John Winthrop maintained and developed this idea. With a help of his Speech to the Massachusetts General Court in 1645, he summed up and explained an important idea of liberty. Winthrop did not only define a blessed way for a better life of the community but also clarified the role of citizens through the analogy of women’s position in the society. His concept of natural and moral liberty turned up to be suitable and clear for the settlers. With a help of well-built speech, Winthrop emphasized and explained correlation among society, authority, and God in the New World.

The older I grow the more everything begins to come together in relation to the type of person I am today, and how the choices my family and I have made have shaped and become the definition of this thing I call "life". I have a pretty good idea about who I am as a person, but after all the discussions we hold in class, I was starting to become curious about the kind of person I am in the eyes of our society. C. Wright Mills' philosophy will light the way for me in finding out how each of my social influences have effected me in either a positive or a negative way. In this assignment I will attempt to investigate the interconnections between my

Mill claims that his purpose in writing on liberty is to assert what he describes one very simple principle. The principle that ought to govern society and that principle has come to be known as the harm principle. The individuals own good either physical or moral is not a sufficient warrant for societal intervention. The individual cannot rightfully be compelled to do or not to do because it will be better for him to do so because it is better for him to do so because it will make him happier.

'Mill's account of personal liberty ensures the development of the individual and society' Assess the validity in this claim.

John Stuart Mill said, “The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind” (10). This quote shows that, as in any debate, there are two sides to an issue, and in order to form an opinion on something, a person must understand various sides of the

power to alter the exchange as it sees fit. If this function of the state is

Indeed, Mill asserted that the cultivation of one's individuality should be the goal of human existence. He wrote On Liberty as an argument against repressive laws which inhibit voluntary association and suppress original ideas and ways of thinking, in a bid to protect the freedom of the individual from stifling social conventions, oppressive legal controls and censorship. What is the value of individual liberty that calls for it to be defended so fervently by Mill?

John Stuart Mill, an English philosopher and a political economist, had an important part in forming liberal thought in the 19th century. Mill published his best-known work, _On Liberty,_ in 1859. This foundational book discusses the concept of liberty. It talks about the nature and the limits of the power performed by society over an individual. The book also deals with the freedom of people to engage in whatever they wish as long as it does not harm other persons.

Mill’s belief promotes that each individual’s opinion is important and therefore should be listened to by the government. The government would not be able to turn a blind eye to a minority; this is one of many influences on classical liberalism. In classical liberalism the government has limited say in the economy and ensures that everyone has the right to his or her freedom of opinion. An

Mill is extremely clear as to why the individual should be sovereign over his or her body and mind—to counter the effects of a possible "tyranny of the majority." Mill states, "It (the majority) practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself" (63).

One objection that Mill replied to was that there isn’t enough time to really weigh the options before needing to act. His response is that we effectively have the result of prior human knowledge from those lived before we did.(517) He’s clear in stating that this doesn’t make that true, but because it is the result of human reasoning and thought it can be improved upon.(517)

A primary objective of identifying common ground between Nietzsche and Mill’s ideas of freedom is to define freedom adequately so that it can be used as a basis for comparison. Each theorist’s opinion on what freedom is, however, appears to be fairly distinct. Mill might describe freedom as the absence of constraints to original, individual thought, whereas Nietzsche conceptualizes freedom as continual self-overcoming to evolve a more actualized self. Freedom for Nietzsche is overcoming wrong beliefs and creating one’s own values, whereas for Mill, freedom is having the leeway to discover one’s own values. In effect, Mill focuses on the structural protections or necessities that allow creativity to flourish, and Nietzsche wants to deconstruct those structures that impede that flourishing. Mill emphasizes optimizing the political and social realms, which in theory then provide a safe haven for Nietzsche’s intrapsychic or spiritual struggle. Thus, Mill 's definition could be described as political whereas Nietzsche 's could be understood as transformational. Both strive toward achieving the highest level of individual potential, and both want to support discovery of one’s most individualized beliefs. Given that each theorist has such distinct views on the definition itself, however, one needs to extrapolate the essence of what each would consider freedom to be. So for the purposes of describing how Mill and Nietzsche intersect, this approximation of a

In the first chapter, Mill remarks on society's need for a simple defined foundation for our morals which should be based on personal experiences. He

John Locke (1632-1704) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) are two important thinkers of liberty in modern political thought. They have revolutionized the idea of human freedom at their time and have influenced many political thinkers afterwards. Although their important book on human freedom, John Locke’s The Second Treatise of Government (1689) and John Mill’s On Liberty (1859), are separated 170 years, some scholars thinks that they are belonging to the same conceptual tradition, English Liberalism. In this essay, I will elaborate John Locke and John Stuart Mill view on human freedom and try to find the difference between their concept of human freedom despite their similar liberal tradition background.