On Liberty

Mill sets the limit: society may coerce a man only to prevent harm to others, and everything else — his opinions, his tastes, the way he chooses to live — is his own. He wrote it with his wife Harriet Taylor and published it in 1859, the year after her death, calling it as much hers as his. The chapter on why a silenced opinion is a loss even when it is wrong has never been answered better. A hundred plates of portraits, family gatherings and quiet domestic scenes by painters including George Frederic Watts and Jean-Étienne Liotard give a human face to Mill's argument for the private life.