#readwise # John Stuart Mill  ## Metadata - Author: [[plato.stanford.edu]] - Full Title: John Stuart Mill - URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/mill/ ## Highlights - John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was the most influential English language philosopher of the nineteenth century. He was a naturalist, a utilitarian, and a liberal, whose work explores the consequences of a thoroughgoing empiricist outlook. In doing so, he sought to combine the best of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking with newly emerging currents of nineteenth-century Romantic and historical philosophy. **His most important works include System of Logic (1843), [[On Liberty]] (1859), Utilitarianism (1861) and An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865).** - **The transformation of society from aristocratic to increasingly democratic forms of organization brought with it opportunities**, then. **But it also presented dangers. It meant rule by a social mass which was more powerful, uniform, and omnipresent than the sovereigns** of previous eras. The dominance of the majority, Mill held, **presented new threats of tyranny over the individual—freedom was no less at risk from a newly empowered many**, than from an absolute monarch. **The restrictions over freedom that concerned Mill included**, to be sure, **legislatively enacted restrictions of liberty—but they also took in broader “compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion” ([[On Liberty]], XVIII: 223)**. Informal mechanisms of social pressure and expectation could, in mass democratic societies, be all-controlling. **Mill worried that the exercise of such powers would lead to stifling conformism in thought, character and action.**