With the exception of Marx, no 19th Century philospher saw farther than JS Mill. While Mill lacked Marx's style, he also lacked Marx's explosive mix of revolutionary fanatacism and Hegelian mysticism, which makes Mill somewhat less interesting but more grounded in reality. Mill was a pioneer of women's rights, including the right to vote, over 50 years before the fact; he also advocated in favor of freedom of speech and assembly, government regulation, and limited redistribution of income. While the later is still controversial, in Mill's Victorian England a sizable middle-class was sandwiched between an immensely wealthy aristocracy and a large class of industrial workers, including child labor, whose condition was little better than slaves. One can argue over the amount of regulation or redistribution that is desirable, but the complete elimination of both would no doubt result in a situation similar to that of Mill's time. Certainly, Mill's focus on distribution has proven wiser than Marx's focus on socializing production, which led not to Communist paradise but to totalitarianism and the colossal waste of both human and natural resources. Mill is not the greatest political philospher: Hobbes does a better job describing the political dynamics of agrarian states/monarchy, and Locke/Adam Smith that of mercantile states/oligrachy. Mill still deserves credit, together with the great-but-deluded Karl Marx, as the first major philosopher to study the emerging industrial state and its corollary, mass democracy.

Unlike some of the great philosophers (i.e. especially Kant), Mill is actually a good writer. His writings in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and The Subjection of Women should be of interest to anyone studying moral philosophy or political theory. Even if you ultimately disagree with him, he usually manages to provide cogent arguments in support of his views. Mill was a supporter of greater franchise rights, freedom of expression, feminism, and birth control, among other things. Supposedly, he was able to read some Greek as early as the age of 3. Legend has it that his dad was the intellectual version of the Little League Dad and pressured young JSM a bit too much, as JSM did have a little nervous breakdown at one point in his life. But unlike Nietzsche, he did recover.