The Cambridge Companion to Mill

“I should say that from about 1860‐65 or thereabouts he [Mill] ruled England in the region of thought as very few men ever did.” So said Henry Sidgwick, professor of moral philosophy in 1873. The latter part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth saw Mill’s influence eclipsed, but so profound and pervasive was that influence that his thought is part of the very fabric of our thinking today: utilitarianism, socialism, women’s rights, the moral sciences and sociology, empiricism, liberalism and political science, even libraries! In Alistair Black’s A New History of the English Public Library...