Analysis Of Mill's On Liberty

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Mill was a philosopher, and was a member of the philosophical radicals, which was a group of utilitarian philosophers. His father and Bentham taught him to be the perfect utilitarian such as developing his opinions also ideas. He felt that his "habit of analysis" had destroyed his capacity for emotion. When he was going through a rough time he would get very paranoid. Once that time was over Mill entered a new era, and started to create his book On Liberty.
One of the main arguments that Mill expressed in On Liberty deals with his liberty principle. This apparently, is "one very simple principle" which defines "the nature and limits of the power which can legitimately be exercised by society over the individual". According to Mill, liberty is what defines the legitimacy of a society - "any society that fails to honor the liberty of the individual is illegitimate. Its use of power cannot be justified if it trespasses on the rightful sphere of individuality".
The liberty principle has many subsections, which allow it to work; to just leave people free to do as they please does not make a society legitimate. In fact, this would horrify Mill, because he is particularly worried about the tyranny of the majority, and in this society an irrational majority could easily exact a tyranny upon the rational minority, as there would be no safeguards or restraints. The liberty principle is put into place to stop this happening. Mill is interested in the restrictions that law is allowed to place on people, but he is also interested in the moral and social pressure that can be exerted by society upon individuals. He doesn't want people to blindly follow custom.

One of the sections of the LP is the harm principle (HP)....

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... Although the LP in theory is an important part of Mill's argument, he also tries to ground the idea of liberty in an historical context. Mill sees history not just as past events, but part of an overall scheme of events that lead to an ultimate goal. The present is just a phase of this overall scheme. This is similar to Marx's approach, and could be said to be a teleological view of history. Just as Marx claims that history is characterized by the dialectic of class struggle, Mill claims that history is dominated by the struggle between liberty and authority. Mill's dialectical approach states that there has been several stages in history and in each stage liberty and authority - two opposing ideas - have struggled with each other and allowed society to progress. Liberty has had a different meaning in every stage as it has encountered different counterforces.

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