On Liberty and the Subjection of Women

John Stuart Mill was a prodigious thinker who sharply challenged the beliefs of his age. In On Liberty, one of the sacred texts of liberalism, he argues that any democracy risks becoming a "tyranny of opinion" in which minority views are suppressed if they do not conform to those of the majority. The Subjection of Women , written shortly after the death of Mill's wife, Harriet, stresses the importance of sexual equality. Together they provide eloquent testimony to the hopes and anxieties of Victorian England, and offer a trenchant consideration of what it really means to be free.

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