Liberty Fund is pleased to make available in paperback eight of the original thirty-three cloth volumes of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill that were first published by the University of Toronto Press that remain most relevant to liberty and responsibility in the twenty-first century. Born in London in 1806 and educated at the knee of his father, the Scottish philosopher James Mill, John Stuart Mill became one of the nineteenth century’s most influential writers on economics and social philosophy. Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society includes Mill’s response to Benthamite utilitarianism and his development of his own independent moral position. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was an economist, philosopher, Member of Parliament, and one of the most significant English classical liberals of the nineteenth century. Mill spent most of his working life with the East India Company, which he joined at age sixteen and worked for for thirty-eight years. He is also the author of On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1861), and The Subjection of Women (1869).

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill took thirty years to complete and is acknowledged as the definitive edition of J.S. Mill and as one of the finest works editions ever completed. Mill's contributions to philosophy, economics, and history, and in the roles of scholar, politician and journalist can hardly be overstated and this edition remains the only reliable version of the full range of Mill's writings. Each volume contains extensive notes, a new introduction and an index. Many of the volumes have been unavailable for some time, but the Works are now again available, both as a complete set and as individual volumes.

The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, published in two volumes in 1963, were well received by critics and scholars alike. The publication of these four volumes of later letters completes this edition of Mill's personal correspondence. These volumes contain over 1,800 letters, most never before published, and some sixty earlier letters that have come to light since the publication of the first two volumes of correspondence. The letters have been assembled from widely dispersed collections in the libraries of fifty-eight institutions and of some thirty private collections in Britain and in other countries of the Commonwealth, Europe, and North America. In addition, many personal letters of which no originals survived have been located in contemporary periodicals or biographies of Mill's correspondence.

Of John Stuart Mill's major commitments, none was more passionately pursued than equality; it marks his writings throughout his life, and serves as a uniting force in his comments on many subjects, especially lawand education. This volume presents, in scholarly form for the first time, writings that reveal his goals and methods in diverse circumstances. They begin with his precocious essay on the law of libel and include his influential Subjection of Women, his major essays on slavery, his Inaugural Address at St Andrews (a surprisingly succinct summary of his thought), and his contributionsin the struggle to being Governor Eyre of Jamaica to trial. A variety of shorter essays is also such personal documents as his declaration just before amrriage renouncing all legal rights over his wife, and his and Harriett Taylor's companion pieces on marriage, newly edited from manuscript. Also included is Mill's evidence before parliamentary committees on education (1866) and the Contagious Diseases Acts (1870). The appendices include ancillary texts (such as Harriett Taylor's "Emancipation of Women") and a bibliographic index listing all works and persons mentioned or quoted in the essays. An analytic index gives easy access to the full range of Mill's ideas in these important essays.

This volume contains more than 300 letters by John Stuart Mill that have been discovered since the publication of "Earlier Letters" in 1962 and "Later Letters" in 1972. The collection covers a vast rangle of topics, and includes three groups of letters of special interest: a series of notes to Henry Cole, friend and ally of Mill, dealing among other things with the disposition of the "London and Westminster Review"; the full versions of letters to Theodor Gomperz, Mill's leading German disciple and translator, which had been thought destroyed; and, most exceptionally, recently found internal correspondence in the Examiner's Office of the East India Company, which sheds new light on Mill's career. The introduction to the volume, by Marion Filipiuk, places the letters in context, gives detail about the three special groups, and outlines the history of the collection. The letters are presented in full scholarly form, with notes giving information about the texts and their provenance, and also historical and bibliographic information. An appendix provides the first published check-list of letters to Mill, with their locations. Other appendices give variant readings from the Gomperz leters, a finding list of form letters signed by Mill in the India Office Library and Records, an index of correspondents represented in this volume, an index of persons and works cited in the letters, and an analytical index.