The minds behind the argument — and the society it was written against.
On Liberty is not a narrative — it has no cast of characters in the usual sense. But it has an intellectual household: the author and his collaborator, the philosophical tradition he is working within, and the social force he is arguing against. These are the figures worth knowing before you read.
Educated by his father from the cradle in classical languages and political economy, Mill is by 1859 the most careful liberal mind in England. He writes On Liberty in middle age, after a long crisis and a long marriage of the intellect, and gives it the brevity of a man who has been thinking it for thirty years. The voice in the book is exact, measured, willing to concede every fair objection before pressing on.
Mill names her on the dedication page as joint author of all that is best in his writings, and of On Liberty in particular. They thought through the book together over many years; she died in 1858, and Mill published it the next year as a kind of monument. Whatever the precise division of pen and idea, he insists that the doctrine of the book is not his alone.
The founder of utilitarianism and the formative influence on Mill's upbringing. Bentham's greatest-happiness principle stands behind On Liberty as the deepest moral premise — Mill grounds his argument in utility, not in natural rights. But Mill's utility is broader than Bentham's, large enough to include the development of character and the long-term interests of a progressive being.
The French observer of American democracy whose Democracy in America gave Mill the phrase tyranny of the majority and the diagnosis behind it. Tocqueville saw that equality of condition could produce a softer, more pervasive coercion than any aristocratic regime had managed, because it operated through manners and opinion rather than through edict.
The book's real opponent is not a person but a climate — respectable, prosperous, evangelical, intensely conscious of its own decency, and convinced that a well-ordered society is one in which everyone behaves much like everyone else. It legislates dress, Sabbath, drink, sexual conduct, and family form, and exerts on private life a pressure no court ever ratifies.