John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill was educated at home by his father, a friend of Bentham, to be the perfect utilitarian, learned Greek at three, and broke down at twenty; the Autobiography tells how poetry restored him. He worked for the East India Company for thirty-five years and sat one term in Parliament. On Liberty defends the individual against the majority, Utilitarianism restates the greatest-happiness principle with room for higher pleasures, and The Subjection of Women, written with Harriet Taylor, argues for full equality. He remains the clearest voice of nineteenth-century liberalism.