John Stuart Mill (Victorian Firebrand)

 

Richard Reeves' sparkling new biography can be read as an attempt to do justice to this eminent thinker, and it succeeds triumphantly. He reveals Mill as a man of action—a philosopher and radical MP who profoundly shaped Victorian society and whose thinking continues to illuminate our own. The product of an extraordinary and unique education, Mill would become in time the most significant English thinker of the nineteenth century, the author of the landmark essay On Liberty, and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his revolutionary, opinionated age. As a journalist he fired off weekly articles demanding Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve free-speech, and opposed slavery—and, in his private life, for two decades pursued a love affair with another man's wife. To understand Mill and his contribution to his time and ours, Richard Reeves explores his life and work in tandem. The result is both a riveting and authoritative biography of a man raised by his father to promote happiness, whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and liberty for all.