ABSTRACT
Like Alexis de Tocqueville (see selection 2.8), whose work he admired, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) feared that the advent of democracy was bringing with it a stifling pressure to conform to the conventional or popular opinion. In Mill’s view, no one could live a fully human life unless he—or she, as he made clear in The Subjection of Women (1869)—was free to think and act for himself or herself. In the following excerpt from On Liberty (1859), Mill proposes “one very simple principle”—sometimes called “the Harm Principle”—for deciding just when society or government may rightfully regulate the individual’s conduct and when the individual should be free to do as he or she sees fit.
