Penguin Classics edition. 8vo., 187pp. Pictorial wraps. Edited with an introduction by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Originally published by John W. Parker and Son, London, in 1859.
'Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.' A philosophical defence of individual liberty, partially based on Utilitarian doctrine. Mill argues that any democracy risks becoming a 'tyranny of opinion' in which minority views are suppressed if they do not conform to those of the majority. Habitually, a copy of the treatise is presented to the leader of the UK's Liberal Democrats as a symbol of office. The founding text of liberalism, which has come to be "viewed by posterity as the kernel of [Mill's] social philosophy". (ODNB).
[Cannon, Oxford Companion to British History 643; Printing and the Mind of Man 345; Dictionary of National Biography XIII 390–399]