ABSTRACT
There are two kinds of successes in intellectual history—that of the thinker whose originality revives each time we read him, and that of the thinker whose influence spreads imperceptibly over the generations, so that his originality has become part of the intellectual air we breathe. John Stuart Mill belongs with the second kind of thinker. No figure in the history of Western liberal thought can match his impact and achievement, yet none has been more taken-for-granted as a good grey liberal, a slightly stuffy eminent Victorian, a man who had the right sentiments on the right occasions, a writer who seems to have written in classical quotations because we have warmed ourselves for generations on his glowing sentences and their luminousness has made them cosily familiar.
