from introduction:

Perhaps no thinker of the nineteenth century has a stronger reputation as a defender of the liberal tradition than John Stuart Mill. Testimony to Mill’s long shadow, even today, is that he is among the few English-speaking intellectuals who is still routinely read at colleges and universities (primarily for his short book On Liberty, although excerpts of his Principles of Political Economy are typically read in increasingly-rare courses in the History of Economic thought.)1 But there is another, lesser-known, side to Mill. Mill (in concert with his wife and intellectual partner Harriet Taylor Mill) were thoroughgoing, crusading utopian thinkers. The Mills recognized the virtues of the regime of unfettered political and economic freedom which we call capitalism only to the extent that their preferred system  ideally-conceived, voluntary socialism  could not yet come into existence in the “very early state of society” in which they lived. Given time, society would “progress” naturally into the sunny uplands conceived by utopian thought. This Mill pops up, in odd places, in many parts of the Principles.