On Liberty

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Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. The whole of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is dedicated to this simple principle. While many of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, from Adam Smith to Godwin and Thoreau, had celebrated liberty, it was Mill who organized the idea into a philosophy and put it into the form in which it is known today. In this text, Mill argues that liberty must play a central role in social policy, necessitating a redrawing of the line between the authority wielded by the state and the independence of the individual.