The liberalism that the Mills championed is what we enjoy today as we walk down the street and greet a great variety of social types. Individual autonomy and freedom of choice would be the rocks upon which we built flourishing nations.

You wouldn’t have to agree with my mode of life, and I wouldn’t have to agree with yours, but we would give each other the space to live our fullest life. The state has no right to impinge on a citizen’s individual freedom of choice, provided that the person isn’t harming anyone else.Ī society organized along these lines, the Mills hoped, would produce a rich variety of creative and daring individuals. Individuals, the Mills argued, have the right to be the architect of their own life, to choose whom to marry, where to live, what to believe, what to say. It is one of the founding documents of our liberal world order. The book was, he said, “more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name, for there was not a sentence of it that was not several times gone through by us together.” The book’s “whole mode of thinking,” he continued, “was emphatically hers.” He subsequently wrote that she had been more than his muse she had been his co-author. Later that same month, he sent a manuscript to his publisher, which opened with a lavish dedication to Harriet. He was despondent over the loss of his marriage: “For seven and a half years that blessing was mine. Mill sat alone with her body in their room for a day.

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