John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill was a vigorous activist who began campaigning for accessible contraceptive methods when he was just seventeen, shocked into action after finding a recently killed newborn baby in a park. He would become, in time, the highest-ranked English thinker of the century, the author of On Liberty and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his opinionated age. Mill was always a headstrong individual: at the age of eight he devoured Demosthenes in the original Greek, his studies guided by the likes of Jeremy Bentham. As an adult he pursued a love affair with another man's wife; as a journalist he fired off an article a week on Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, and as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve the rights of free-speech and was bitterly opposed to slavery. To understand Mill, and his contribution not only to his own century but to ours, Reeves explores this figure's life and work in tandem. John Stuart Mill is a portrait of a man raised to promote happiness and whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and liberty for all.