The Squashed edition of On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. Abridged from the original text to read in an hour or so. Rigorously educated by his father James Mill (the co-founder (with Jeremy Bentham) of Utilitarianism) John Stuart grew to suffer horrid depression over an upbringing which had forced classical literature, logic, political economy, history and mathematics down him before he was fourteen. He lived modestly as a clerk to the East India Company, but wrote profusely on political and philosophical matters. In Utilitarianism he states that actions are right if they bring about happiness and wrong if they bring the reverse. In On Liberty, written with his beloved wife, who died before its completion, he moved away from the Utilitarian notion that individual liberty was necessary for economic and governmental efficiency and advanced the classical defense of individual freedom as a value in itself. Squashed editions are precise abridgements - the original ideas, in their own words, the full beam of the book, the quotable quotes and all the famous lines, but neatly honed down to the length of a readable short story. "Like reading the bible without all the begats" - Prof. Jim Curtis