On Liberty: New edition gives Harriet Taylor her due

An edition of On Liberty published this month is the first to name Harriet Taylor Mill as co-author alongside John Stuart Mill, reports the philosophy news site Daily Nous.

John Stuart Mill acknowledged Harriet Taylor's part in the writing of the work in his Autobiography:

With regard to the thoughts [expressed in the book], it is difficult to identify any particular part or element as being more hers than all the rest. The whole mode of thinking of which the book was the expression, was emphatically hers. But I also was so thoroughly imbued with it that the same thoughts naturally occurred to us both.

Yet On Liberty has only ever appeared with just the one name on its cover.

Daily Nous says there is objective evidence that On Liberty is the work of two hands:

In a 2022 article in Utilitas (on which part of the introduction to the new On Liberty is based), Schmidt-Petri, Schefczyk, and Osburg lay out one reason: "stylometric analyses" provide some strong (though not on their own decisive) evidence to “say with some degree of confidence that JSM did not write On Liberty all by himself and that HTM played a part in putting parts of the text into words.” 

And what are stylometric analyses? "Stylometry extracts the writing style of a person from his or her texts and then compares this 'stylome' to the stylome of texts the author of which is yet to be identified."

But you don't need stylometry to tell you that On Liberty is not typical of John Stuart Mill's writings. It sets out to "assert one very simple principle", whereas Mill is usually well aware of the complexity that attends weighty questions. 

So his book Considerations on Representative Government, while supporting parliamentary democracy, hedges the principle around with all sorts of checks and safeguards in an attempt to ensure that parliament will act in the national interest rather than in the interests of a simple majority of the electorate.

Daily Nous also mentions Misha Glenny's first outing as presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time, which dealt with On Liberty. 

Harriet Taylor's contribution is discussed there too and, having had occasion to read On Liberty again recently, I concur with the comment that, who every wrote it, the text could have done with a good edit before it was published.