John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 7 May 1873) was an English philosopher, political economist, and politician. He was a paradigmatic philosopher of liberalism and has been described as "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century" by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He conceived of liberty as justifying the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state and social control, and formulated the Harm principle. He also advocated proportional representation, the emancipation of women, and the development of labour organisations and farm cooperatives, and has been classified as both a classical liberal and social liberal.

The Columbia Encyclopedia describes Mill as occasionally coming "close to socialism, a theory repugnant to his predecessors". He was a proponent of the utilitarianism of his predecessor Jeremy Bentham, and contributed to the investigation of scientific methodology.

A member of the Liberal Party and co-author of the early feminist work The Subjection of Women (1869), Mill was also the second Member of Parliament to call for women's suffrage after Henry Hunt in 1832. The contentions of his essay On Liberty (1859) remain highly influential: and a copy of the work is passed to the president of the Liberal Democrats (the successor party to Mill's own) as a symbol of office.