This book gives prominence for the first time to Mill's abiding concern with Malthusianism and its impact on his arguments respecting liberty.

Introduction: Mill, liberty, and paternalism: context, intention and interpretation; 1. Intervention, progress and the state - domestic and foreign; 2. Mill, socialism and collective autonomy; 3. Rethinking On Liberty: superstition, expediency, and family values; Conclusion: the aims of liberty and paternalism: equal association and radical meritocracy.

Gregory Claeys is Professor of the History of Political Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. His previous publications include Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850-1920 (Cambridge, 2010) and Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989). He also edited The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2011) with Gareth Stedman Jones, and The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (Cambridge, 2010).