Blame for the putative failure of liberalism in late-nineteenth-century Japan and China has often been placed on an insufficient grasp of modernity among East Asian leaders or on their cultural commitments to traditional values. In Personal Liberty and Public Good, Douglas Howland refutes this view, turning to the central text of liberalism in that era: John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

Howland offers absorbing analyses of the translations of the book into Japanese and Chinese, which at times reveal astonishing emendations. As with their political leaders, Mill’s Japanese and Chinese translators feared individual liberty could undermine the public good and standards for public behaviour, and so introduced their own moral values – Christianity and Confucianism, respectively– into On Liberty, filtering its original meaning. Howland mirrors this mistrust of individual liberty in Asia with critiques of the work in England, which itself had trouble adopting liberalism.

Personal Liberty and Public Good is a compelling addition to the corpus of writing on the work of John Stuart Mill. It will be of great interest to historians of political thought, liberalism, and translation, as well as scholars of East Asian studies.

Introduction
1 On Liberty and Its Historical Conditions of Possibility
Translation in Theory
Translation Words and Lexical Fields
The Historical Conditions of Possibility
Individuality and Subjecthood
Elite Education and the Ruling Class
2 Mill and His English Critics
Self and Others
The Individual as Ground of Liberty
Negative and Positive Interpretations of Liberty
Society and Morality as Ground of Liberty
The Individual and the State
3 Nakamura Keiu and the Public Limits of Liberty
Village Society and Government
Christianity and the Personal Liberty of Conscience
Free Trade

4 Yan Fu and the Moral Prerequisites of Liberty
The Group and the Self
Models of Private and Public from Chinese Antiquity
Individuality as Moral Self-Cultivation
The Boundaries of Authority: Mutual Encouragement and Local Administration
5 Personal Liberty and Public Virtue
Mill's Encouragement of Virtue
Public Virtue and the Priority of Common Interests
The Japanese State and Its Subjects
The Reconstruction of the Chinese People
Conclusion
Notes
Bibiliography
Index

Douglas Howland is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.