
' Over himself over his own body & mind the individual is sovereign' To this 'one very simple principle' the whole of Mill's essay On Liberty is dedicated While many of his immediate predecessors & contemporaries from Adam Smith to Godwin & Thoreau had celebrated liberty it was Mill who organized the idea into a philosophy & put it into the form in which it is generally known today The editor of this essay Gertrude Himmelfarb records responses to Mill's books & comments on his fear of 'the tyranny of the majority' Dr Himmelfarb concludes that the same inconsistencies which underlie On Liberty continue to complicate the moral & political stance of liberals today