This is the Table Of
Contents (TOC) of this html-edition of Mill's On Liberty.
This follows the edition
in Harvard Classics of 1909, that has been put on line in 1993 with the
following comment that I quote in full:
"About the online edition.
This was scanned from the 1909
edition and mechanically checked against a commercial copy of the text
from CDROM. Differences were corrected against the paper edition. The
text itself is thus a highly accurate rendition. The footnotes were
entered manually.
This text is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN,
released September 1993.
Prepared by <dell@wiretap.spies.com>.
Further enhanced and converted into HTML by Jon Roland of the
Constitution Society."
In the above I added the
link to the Constitution Society.
Also, I converted the
edition to the format of my site, and divided it into its five chapters
as five separate files.
The text I used is
otherwise unchanged, while the paper text I presuppose is H.B. Acton's
1972-edition of "On Liberty". This paper edition I used for my notes,
but I did not compare it carefully with the html-version I use. The full
reference is:
John Stuart Mill:
Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative
Government Edited by H.B. Acton (ISBN 0 460 11482 4).
This is in Everyman's
Library, with selections from additional texts by Mill, and seems a good
buy if you are interested in Mill at all.
The texts that follow have
many links, and come all with a group of usually four arrows at the beginning
and the end of each text, that look thus:
These have in general the following effect when clicked:
- previous file
- Table of Contents
- Notes or Text associated with the file
- next file
Every file of Mill's text
links to a file with my notes, the links to which are between square
brackets, as in "[1]". In order to allow the reader to
read my notes independently, they all start with a quotation in blue of
the passage they annotate, and that generally ends with the link to the
note in Mill's text.
In contrast, Mill's own
notes are indicated by a "M" and are made superscript, like so[M1].
Because the passages I
annotate are repeated in my Notes, it is possible to read the Notes
without reading the Text that is annotated. However, each file of
Notes has at its beginning a link to the Text it annotates, and likewise
that Text has at its beginning a link to my Notes to it, and as
explained each Note also has a link to the Text and the place is is
quoted from
Those who download my
edition of Mill's "On Liberty" and my notes should realize that the
links to and from the notes are retained only if they are placed in
directory-structures of the following form:
"/Liberty/"
- that includes Mill's textfiles and the TOC
"/Liberty/Notes/" - that includes my
textfiles of notes
How this directory and its
subdirectory are otherwise attached to a filesystem on the computer you
use is irrelevant, but the above is required for having the many links
work when reading off line.
Also, it may be remarked
that the reading of my Notes may be preferable for many to the
reading of Mill's text, because my Notes very likely contain all or most
of the best bits of Mill's text in quotation, while Mill's text, both in
the html I found and the paper version I use, is very sparse with
interlineation, and the original text contains many long sentences and
arguments crammed in very long uninterlined paragraphs.
Finally, here are three
interesting related links that may supply quite a lot of background to
Mill's "On Liberty":
-
The
Victorian Web: This is an interesting and extensive set of pages
about the age of Victoria. It contains a lot of material (approximating
30.000 files) that seems to be mostly well done.
-
Mill
pages in the Victorian Web: Quite a lot of information about Mill
and many links to material and persons related to Mill.
-
Chin Liew Ten on
Mill On Liberty: The full text of a 1980 book by a Singaporian
professor on philosophy, who says in the opening paragraph of his book:
"Whenever liberalism is attacked today, John Stuart Mill's name will
almost certainly be mentioned. Often indeed the conservative and
radical critics of liberalism have seen in Mill's essay On Liberty
[On Liberty in Utilitarism, Liberty, Representative Government
(Everyman edn). All subsequent references
to On Liberty and Utilitarism are to this edition] the
embodiment of all the liberal errors and vices they wish to expose.
(...) Like Mill's critics, I too regard this essay as the most eloquent
expression of the liberal theory of the open society. But unlike them I
am generally sympathetic to his values and I have tried to expound his
case for liberty as clearly and fully as I can. The foundations Mill
provides for his liberal theory have some faults, but a careful study of
the essay will reveal that these are often quite different from those
which conservative and radical critics of his have been inclined to
stress."
I may at a later date
refer to some of the above material in my Notes.
Maarten Maartensz
April 28, 2006.
(Last edited:
17 Nov 2009.)