On Liberty

The clearest defense ever written of the freedom to be wrong. Mill's harm principle holds that the only ground for using power against a person is to prevent harm to others, never merely to improve them or to silence them. Even false speech serves truth, he argued, by forcing truth to stay alive in argument rather than hardening into dead dogma. The case for letting people think and say what others hate is made here, once, for good.

The English philosopher raised as an experiment in reason who became the great defender of individual liberty against the crowd. On Liberty sets out the harm principle, that the only purpose for which power can rightly be used against a person is to prevent harm to others, and argues that even false speech serves truth by forcing it to stay alive in argument. Considerations on Representative Government is his clear-eyed account of how self-rule is meant to work, and how it fails.