I've been enjoying – spread over a couple of weeks as it's a longish book – this 2007 biography of John Stuart Mill by Richard Reeves (who now runs the think tank Demos, on whose advisory council I sit). Long ago at university I read Mill's major works, and haven't revisited them since. But of course to any economist utilitarianism has a comfortable familiarity. That has been reinforced, perhaps, by the adoption of the Benthamite benchmark of the greatest happiness of the greatest number by 'happiness' economists such as Richard Layard.

However, the enthusiasm of the happiness crowd for telling me how I ought to behave had begun to turn me off the paternalism and philistinism which are the result of experts deciding what will make the masses happy. The same tendency is evident in behavioural economics too – those who do the 'nudging' know better than those who are to be 'nudged' into behaving better. So it was refreshing to be reminded by this very readable biography of Mill's concern for liberty above all, and his rejection of the raw Benthamite creed in which he was brought up. On Liberty and The Subjection of Women are two of the classic liberal (in the English sense) polemics of all time.

There were inevitably tensions, contradictions, within Mill's thinking. He combined this passion for individual self-determination with an elitist disdain for how the masses would actually choose to lead their lives. The contradiction could be overcome by education, he suggested – as Reeves puts it, Mill believed “a liberal society requires not only a liberal set of rules and laws but also a liberal culture”. But nevertheless Mill blew constantly hot and cold about mass democracy.

Looking at some of the preferences of the masses today, though, which liberal elitist amongst us is free of such contradictions? Mill doesn't seem to have been a likeable person but was certainly an admirable one. His instincts on feminism, on slavery, on the importance of everyday contact with people of other nations were spot on. And in these times of the erosion of civil liberties, his passion for liberty is an inspiration.