On Liberty.
Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863.
Sm. 8vo, 223pp. Original dark green cloth stamped in blind, backstrip lettered in gilt, invisible repairs to head and foot, a remarkably fine copy.
§ First American edition, a hugely influential book co-written with his wife who died before publication but is movingly honored for her part in the introduction. "To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings..." A key book of the later 19th-century. "According to John Stuart Mill's autobiography, On Liberty was first conceived as a short essay in 1854. As the ideas developed, the essay was expanded, rewritten and "sedulously" corrected jointly by the married couple. After suffering a mental breakdown and eventually meeting and subsequently marrying Harriet, Mill had changed many of his beliefs on moral life and women's rights. Mill states that On Liberty "was more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name."
The final draft was nearly complete when Harriet died suddenly in 1858" Cited in every book on modern Western philosophy; "While the first UK edition was printed by John W. Parker and Son in 1859, the 1863 Ticknor and Fields printing brought Mill's influential defense of individual liberty, autonomy, and utilitarian social theory to a wider American audience during the American Civil War." Item #127259
Price: $4,950.00