For Liberty

The author defends a libertarian conception of a free society, one in which negative rights - rights not to be interfered with in peaceful pursuits - are identified and protected.

In the dark days of World War II, merchant mariners made heroic contributions to the eventual Allied victory and suffered tremendous casualties in so doing. Among these were the engineers who toiled deep in the bowels of the ship and suffered appalling casualties. After the war, engineering personnel were unlikely to talk about their experiences, let alone write them down. These modest and self-effacing men were more comfortable in a world of turbines and pistons, so they seldom brought their stories forward. Liberty’s War sets out to explore the experiences of one such engineer, Herman Melton, from his time as a cadet at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy through his experiences at sea as a third assistant engineer. Melton’s story is representative of the thousands of Merchant Marine engineers who served on board Liberty ships during the war. Like many young Americans, he sought to do his part, and in 1942 he obtained an appointment to the newly created U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York. After graduating from the academy in 1944, he shipped out to the Pacific Theatre, surviving the sinking of his Liberty ship, the SS Antoine Saugrain, and its top-secret cargo.

In this work, Mill reflects on the struggle between liberty and authority and defends the view that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” He questions attempts to limit freedom of conscience and religion, freedom to pursue one’s own interests, and freedom to unite, and he defends a liberal political and social order in which there is considerable room for personal development and freedom of association. This new Broadview Edition demonstrates the ways in which Mill’s intellectual landscape differed markedly from our own, while also drawing attention to the reasons why the work remains relevant and essential reading in the present day. Appendices include antecedents to Mill’s work, critical discussions by his contemporaries, and related writings by Mill. Please note: Broadview offers two separate editions of On Liberty. The Kahn edition is particularly relevant to readers who are interested in how the work is situated in the history of political philosophy, whereas the Alexander edition is recommended to those most interested in the work’s Victorian literary and social contexts.

Excerpt from A Race for Liberty: Or, My Capture, Imprisonment, and Escape Whatever tends to teach a lesson of usefulness, and keep alive a spirit of patriotism and laudable ambition, has its mission, and should be encouraged. The dark days of the Great Rebellion have passed away; and light is spreading throughout our favored land. Now that peace has been resorted to our lately distracted country, we should calmly survey the past, with unprejudiced minds, and profit by its teachings. The late war filled the land with blood and tears unprecedented 'in the annals of history. Households were broken up, ' and thousands of dear ones were swept into the whirlpool of destruction, leaving thousands more to mourn their untimely loss. Great God! what sufferings the people endured! May the terrible scourge of civil war never again devastate our beloved country. The following pages have not been written through any spirit of revenge or acrimony, for wrongs endured by the author while a prisoner in the hands of the rebels, nor from any political stand-point, save that of a broad National basis - an unswerving devotion to the Union, and the flag of his country. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

There have been many different historical-intellectual accounts of the shaping and development of concepts of liberty in pre-Enlightenment Europe. This volume is unique for addressing the subject of liberty principally as it is discussed in the writings of women philosophers, and as it is theorized with respect to women and their lives, during this period. The volume covers ethical, political, metaphysical, and religious notions of liberty, with some chapters discussing women's ideas about the metaphysics of free will, and others examining the topic of women's freedom (or lack thereof) in their moral and personal lives as well as in the public socio-political domain. In some cases, these topics are situated in relation to the emergence of the concept of autonomy in the late eighteenth century, and in others, with respect to recent feminist theorizing about relational autonomy and internalized oppression. Many of the chapters draw upon a wide range of genres, including polemical texts, poetry, plays, and other forms of fiction, as well as standard philosophical treatises. Taken as a whole, this volume shows how crucial it is to recover the too-long forgotten views of female and women-friendly male philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the process of recovering these voices, our understanding of philosophy in the early modern period is not only expanded, but also significantly enhanced, toward a more accurate and gender-inclusive history of our discipline.