John Stuart Mill published On Liberty in 1859, crediting its conception to a collaboration with Harriet Taylor, who died before the book was finished. The essay's central concern is the relationship between individual freedom and social authority, specifically, the question of how much authority a society can legitimately exercise over individuals in the regulation of their behavior. Mill proposes what he calls the harm principle: "the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection." Actions that affect only the individual, what Mill calls "self-regarding" conduct, are outside legitimate social interference.
The argument for freedom of thought and expression in Chapters Two and Three is the most powerful section of the text and the least dependent on the harm principle's exact formulation. Mill argues that even an opinion known to be false should not be suppressed, because the process of confronting error keeps true beliefs alive and prevents them from becoming dead dogma. An opinion never tested against opposing argument, however correct, is held as prejudice rather than as genuine knowledge. The specific threat Mill identifies, social conformity, the pressure of "public opinion," the tyranny of the majority that Mill considered the distinctive danger of democratic societies, belongs to his historical moment but names a pressure that democratic societies continue to produce in different forms.
On Liberty is the foundational text of classical liberalism, and every subsequent liberal political theory is an argument with it or a development from it. The harm principle generates endless disputes at its edges, what constitutes harm, what is genuinely self-regarding, how to handle cases where the self-affecting and other-affecting are inseparable, and Mill's formulation is too compressed to resolve those disputes definitively. What the text provides is the clearest statement of the liberal commitment to individual freedom as a value irreducible to social utility, and the argument for why that commitment serves social utility rather than simply opposing it.
Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations entirely as private notes, he never intended anyone else to read them.
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