Liberty, Mills Approaches the Issue of Governmental

¶ … Liberty, Mills approaches the issue of governmental and societal tyranny. He approaches three basic areas in which liberty in important, in addition to discussing the problem of tyranny which can abridge those liberties. In this work Mill provides a historical look at the ways in which tyranny has been played out, and details its evolution from a tyranny of the despot to a tyranny of the majority. Tyranny arises, he suggests, whenever there is an abridgment of the rights of individuals to make free expression and action, so long as they do not do harm to others. This tyranny has it source in the desire of the majority to see their own inclinations and believes replicated in the world around them, and subsequently in the power which they invest in social structures and governmental authorities. Mills presents a complicated picture of the future of tyranny -- on the one hand despotic tyranny from above has been decreased as democracy becomes more common, yet on the other hand majority tyranny from below has increased as the people realize their power. Despite the possibly popular face of tyranny today, Mills argues that it remains a particularly harmful social phenomena because it depresses the opportunity for socio-cultural evolution.

The basic problem of tyranny has always been with humankind, and may in fact be the foundation of our society. Mills suggests that tyranny may be the only way to cement primitive "barbarian" cultures, and that where civilization is so lacking that it is as if all the people are like children in development it may be necessary to so restrict their freedoms so as to let the society survive. However, this is not the case, he adds, with any society where his book might be read or understood. As mankind left the primitive stage, it remained true that tyranny was necessary for the protection of the people. In this early form of tyranny, there was a single ruler (or ruling force) to which people turned for protection but from whom they in turn sought to protect themselves. "To prevent the weaker members of the community from being preyed on by innumerable vultures, it was needful that there should be an animal of prey stronger than the rest, commissioned to keep them down. But as the king of the vultures would be no less bent upon preying upon the flock than any of the minor harpies, it was indispensable to be in a perpetual attitude of defence against his beak and claws." (Mills, I.2) It was in this defense that cultures first began to put limits on absolute rule, implementing political liberties that the ruler was bound to respect, or even using some form of constitutional checks on his control. Eventually, in the name of liberty, most European nations embraced some form of representational government "by the people," labeling these democracies. The idea was to free the world from tyranny, for how could people tyrannize themselves? Yet even democracies, as it turned out, were prone to tyranny. "The 'people' who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the "self-government" spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest... 'the tyranny of the majority' is now generally included among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard." (Mills, 1.4) Hence, government by the people might not eliminate tyranny, but rather create a situation in which tyranny was enacted on the minority and enforced by the majority. In fact, such a tyranny could even be worse than despotism, because it gave the strong hand of the law to the private prejudiced of the cultural minority, and also gave a sort of legal sanction to the majority judgments (so that they were both subjectively and legally normative) so that state and majority opinion were constantly reinforcing. Tyranny here arose from the majority seeking to enthrone what they believed to be morally or normatively correct upon the actions and expressions of the remainder of society. The cultural desire to convince others of one's opinion and form heterogeneous cultures could thus be engrained by law.

As this short history should make apparent, the sources of tyranny are many -- it sometimes stems from the legitimate need for protection and from sometimes from the need for group conformity. The need for protection is the older source of tyranny, while the conformity issue is an newer source of tyranny, though just as dangerous. This tyranny is particularly threatening because it does not necessarily take the forms that one would expect. Tyranny is generally conceived of as something which is enacted by the public authorities on the public, but in the case of tyranny by the majority it is possible, even probable that the tyrant will be the society itself. This is a particularly horrendous form or tyranny which, while by no means a new phenomena (social shaming and strictures are as old as religion and may even predate it) it is something which is particularly noticeable and counter productive in an egalitarian, utilitarian or democratic society.

When society is itself the tyrant -- society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it -- its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. 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 practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself."

Mills, 1.4-5)