John Stuart Mill and \"Majority\"

John Stuart Mill and "Majority" Rule

John Stuart Mill's usage of the concept of "tyranny of the majority" comes, of course, from Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman who examined the Great Experiment in America firsthand in the 19th century. For de Tocqueville, the "tyranny of the majority" was one of the harmful consequences of democracy -- it was, in other words, the institutionalization of "mob rule." Yet, for John Stuart Mill it meant something quite different. This paper will analyze what John Stuart Mill meant by "tyranny of the majority" and show how his ideas are applicable to today's global society.

As Mill stated, "Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression" (13). In other words, "tyranny of the majority" takes place when the majority undergoes a kind of social perversion. As Herman Melville would attempt to illustrate with Billy Budd, the Rights of Man only function correctly so long as man practices virtue and lives uprightly. But as soon as man begins on a course of downward trajectory (morally, politically, economically, socially) then tyranny is sure to set in.

Mill, therefore, advocates protection "against the tendency of society to impose…its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them…and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own" (13-4). But how? Mill prefers to see a kind of utopian city wherein all men, if not perfectly virtuous in and of themselves, at least have set up a system whereby the "system of governance" will not allow their fallen natures to corrupt the whole scheme. In his own way, Mill espouses totalitarianism -- even though he has just denounced it in the guise of "tyranny of the majority." Yet, what if totalitarianism is directed by a minority rather than a majority -- as it so obviously is today, both domestically and abroad -- in short, globally? Mill states that "there is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism" (14).

Unfortunately, we have had no more success at finding that limit than Mill did, for what we see all around us today is that very same "political despotism" of which Mill speaks with trepidation. Mill writes that it is the "majority" who makes "the ways of mankind" (102-3), but his notion of "majority rule" appears to be based on the assumption that political despotism has not been enshrined. Majority rule would, in Mill's unadulterated view, affect the world democracies by forming the ways of the people within those democracies -- guiding them toward "harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole" (103). Again, the vision is extremely Romantic, for it does not take into account the disharmony found in the very heart of man, as someone like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would say (after experiencing the horrors of societal collapse in Soviet Russia).