John Stuart Mill

The chapter begins with a short account of John Stuart Mill’s life. It then homes in on Mill’s theory of liberty, especially the long-standing dialectical tension between individual liberty and state authority. The concept of liberty includes mainly the notion of protection of the individual from tyranny of a ruler (a monarch or a group of people) who wields power by force, thereby reflecting an antagonistic situation. Mill argues against the tyranny of the majority over the individual and the minority. However, one is entitled to ask if Mill’s normative ethical theory of utilitarianism that views the greatest happiness of the greatest number and not just the happiness of a single person or of a few, would on occasion, be inconsistent with the preservation of individual liberty and rights.