Autobiography and Literary Essays

Liberty Fund is pleased to make available in paperback eight of the original thirty-three cloth volumes of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill that were first published by the University of Toronto Press that remain most relevant to liberty and responsibility in the twenty-first century. Born in London in 1806 and educated at the knee of his father, the Scottish philosopher James Mill, John Stuart Mill became one of the nineteenth century’s most influential writers on economics and social philosophy.

Mill’s Autobiography tells of his extraordinary education under the direct tutelage of his father, and under the indirect influence of some of England’s most renowned political economic thinkers, such as Jeremy Bentham. At the tender age of three, Mill was reading Greek, and by eight years of age he was well-versed in English history, classical western philosophy, and arithmetic.

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was an economist, philosopher, Member of Parliament, and one of the most significant English classical liberals of the nineteenth century. Mill spent most of his working life with the East India Company, which he joined at age sixteen and worked for for thirty-eight years. He is also the author of On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1861), and The Subjection of Women (1869).