ABSTRACT
John Stuart Mill was a reflection of his times—enigmatic and lost in an age of turmoil. His short book On Liberty is considered a classic in philosophy, "the single most eloquent, most significant, and most influential statement of human individuality". Like David Ricardo, Mill espoused personal liberty and vigorously defended Jean-Baptiste Say's law of markets, the foundation of classical macroeconomics, and he opposed irredeemable paper money. Mill was critical of revolutionary and fascist forms of socialism, but expressed considerable sympathy with utopian communitarianism, which operated with a high degree of individual liberty and without violence. Utopian thinking was paramount in the mind of many Frenchmen prior to and following the French Revolution of 1789. But the French were strongly divided between the laissez-faire school and the utopian socialists. When Joseph Smith established the Mormon Church in the 1830s, Protestant groups in the area, failing to heed the lessons of the Pilgrim Fathers, created utopian "common stock" societies.
