John Stuart Mill: The Collection: On Liberty, Socialism, Utilitarianism, Three Essays on Religion The Subjection Of Women.

by John Stuart Mill

This volume of John Stuart Mill’s collection, contains five of his most important works. Mill was an English philosopher, political economist, feminist, and civil servant, who became one of the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism; and contributed widely to social theory, political theory and political economy. He has been called "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century." Mill's conception of liberty (from his most famous book, On Liberty) justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. In “Three Essays on Religion” the author offers his most sustained analysis of religious belief. Though not prepared to abandon the idea of an overall design in nature, Mill nonetheless argues that its violence and capriciousness mitigate against moral ends in nature's workings. Moreover, any designer of such a world as we experience cannot be all powerful and all good, for nature is "too clumsily made and capriciously governed." Socialism is an early attempt of visualizing a way of putting the Marxist theory into practice. Mill realizes that distributing the wealth onto the proletariat will lead to a state of routine work, where there is neither motivation nor anxiety, not realizing, however, that routine will devoid performance of excellence. In Utilitarianism, Mill's major contribution is his argument for the qualitative separation of pleasures, in response to Jeremy Bentham's formulation of the "greatest-happiness principle", which holds that one must always act so as to produce the greatest aggregate happiness among all sentient beings, within reason. The Subjection of Women is a passionate defense of the rights of women from the point of view of a man that truly believes in equality.

448 pages, Paperback

Published February 23, 2020

About the author

John Stuart Mill, English philosopher, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. He was an exponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham's.