“The most serious danger to the future prospects of mankind, ” Mill concluded, “is in the unbalanced influence of the commercial spirit ” ( 1962, p. ” The ills identified by Tocqueville emanated not from an omnipotent democratic majority per se but from an emergent commercial class.
Drawing on insights from his own 1836 essay “Civilization, ” composed after reviewing Tocqueville ’s first volume the year before, Mill argued that the “growing insignificance of individuals in comparison with the mass ” was less the result of a transition from aristocracy to democracy than of the progressive growth of wealth and industry he termed “Civilization. While very sympathetic on the whole, in his review of volume two Mill suggested that Tocqueville had over-generalized by associating all the causes of this new form of majority tyranny with the rise of democracy. Yet Mill had reviewed each volume of Democracy in America as they appeared in English translation two decades earlier, and he emendated Tocqueville ’s account in important ways. In On Liberty (1859), his famous defense of individual freedom, Mill deepened Tocqueville ’s diagnosis of this second type of tyranny by warning against the “despotism of custom ” and “collective mediocrity ” endemic to egalitarian societies, while defending expressions of individuality not in harmony with the “tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling ” ( 1982, pp. ” More insidious than the overt tyranny long practiced by monarchs and despots, which was physically brutal but powerless to inhibit the exercise of thought, under this new form of “democratic despotism, ” as Tocqueville would come to call it, “the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved ” ( 1990, pp. “As long as the majority is still silent, ” Tocqueville observed, “discussion is carried on but as soon as its decision is irrevocably pronounced, everyone is silent. The second type is the moral or social tyranny the majority exercises through custom and the power of public opinion. 10, in which he famously sought to quell anxieties that a majority “faction ” would impose its biddings on an enlightened minority by calling attention to the natural obstacle of the diversity of opinions in a large republic. This political tyranny was the primary concern of American founder James Madison (1751 –1836) in The Federalist Papers (1788), especially No. As Tocqueville put it in the first volume of Democracy in America (1835), “politically speaking, the people have a right to do anything ” ( 1990, p. Where all aspects of government, from public opinion and juries to the legislature, the executive, and even some judges, are a function of the majority, its power is absolute. The first is political or legal tyranny that operates through the formal procedures of majoritarian rule. The phrase “tyranny of the majority, ” first coined by French historian and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 –1859) in his seminal two-volume study Democracy in America (1835 –1840) and memorialized by John Stuart Mill (1806 –1873) in his classic 1859 treatise On Liberty, represented to this generation the fear and deep distrust of rule by an uneducated democratic mob.ĭemocracies were thought vulnerable to two distinct forms of majority tyranny.
A century later, the revolutionary experiences in America in 1776 and France in 1789 cast the prospect of rule by “the people ” in a new, more threatening, light. The emergence of large groups of individuals from the “lower ” classes of society as political actors in the English civil wars of the seventeenth century prompted philosopher John Locke (1632 –1704) to articulate the first conception of majority rule in his Two Treatises of Government (1690). 470 –399 BCE) in ancient Greece, the concept of majority tyranny dates to the modern age of democratic revolutions.
#Tyranny of the majority trial#
Although the specter of an unwise and unrestrained majority has haunted the democratic imagination since the trial of Socrates (c.