Stolen! Theft in the Archive: exhibition launch & lecture

Join the editors of a groundbreaking new edition of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty to hear about the scholarship behind the first edition of the work to publish Harriet Taylor Mill as a co-author.

For generations, On Liberty has been associated primarily with John Stuart Mill. This new edition re-examines the evidence for Harriet Taylor Mill’s contribution to the work and brings her role as a co-author to the forefront. The editors will discuss the research and editorial decisions behind the new edition, and what recognising Taylor Mill’s contribution changes about how we understand one of the most influential works in the history of liberal political thought.

Co-hosted by LSE Library and LSE Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method.

Following the talk*, join us for the launch reception for , an exhibition featuring items from the archives of Harriet Taylor Mill.

The exhibition brings together an international team of curators to explore theft in its many forms: wealth taken by others, ideas obscured by the published record, and robbed legacies. It examines how theft shapes what we remember and what we forget.
*If you are unable to make the talk, please join us for the reception celebrating the exhibition.

Jo Ellen Jacobs is Professor Emerita from Millikin University. She currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.

Helen McCabe is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of John Stuart Mill, Socialist (2021) and a Cambridge Element on Harriet Taylor Mill (2023).

Michael Schefczyk is a professor of philosophy at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

Christoph Schmidt-Petri is senior lecturer in practical philosophy at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and holds a PhD from LSE

is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at LSE, where he has taught for over twenty-five years and served as Head of Department from 2018 to 2021. In The Structural Evolution of Morality (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Evolutionary Game Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2023), he used computer simulations of game theory to examine how moral rules and social conventions emerge from the repeated interactions of individuals. His most recent book, The Open Society as an Enemy (LSE Press, 2024), examined the ways free societies have come to undermine the very liberties they were built to protect, a question related to arguments Mill and Taylor Mill were making in On Liberty. He is also the author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on evolutionary game theory, which has been read more than 100,000 times.

This event is cohosted with the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method , founded by Karl Popper in 1946 and is renowned for a type of philosophy that is both continuous with the sciences and socially relevant.

Event venue & nearby stays

LSE Library, 10 Portugal Street, London, United Kingdom

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