ABSTRACT
According to a common view, if anyone is a liberal, it is surely John Stuart Mill. In Mill's thought, so this conventional account runs, we find in the clearest form all the elements that together make up the liberal outlook. We find in Mill, accordingly, an uncompromising individualism, an unqualified affirmation of the priority of individual liberty over other political goods and the settled conviction that the human lot may be indefinitely improved upon by the judicious exercise of critical reason. Further, the political positions that Mill himself adopted during his lifetime — his support for democratic institutions, for the nascent feminist movement and for individual freedom from a tyrannous public opinion — would seem unambiguously to qualify him as a paradigmatic liberal thinker. After all, given these credentials, if Mill is not a liberal, who is?
