Acting, speaking, being
Jul. 2nd, 2011 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbI've started reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, and less than ten pages into the Penguin edition, I've found a passage which I want to share.
Mill's branch of nineteenth-century liberalism can be read in support of a number of different modern political stances. He's a utilitarian, and his arguments can be taken as easily in support of libertarianism as anything else. But his emphasis on individual autonomy and the need to protect individuals not only from the tyranny of despotism, but from the potential tyranny of either the most active part of society, or the part which succeeds in making themselves accepted as the majority, seems to me to be not only vitally important, but also, all-too-easily ignored.
Where Mill writes, "the most numerous or the most active part," here, today, I read "the wealthiest or the most established part."
He writes also:
The tyranny of the prevailing opinion.
In these days, when the prevailing opinion all-too-often means the opinion of the Invisible Hand, market forces and GDP, I think it might be a good idea to revisit the idea of protection against the tyranny of the "most numerous or the most active part" of society.
I really do.
"...[S]uch phrases as 'self-government', and 'the power of the people over themselves', do not express the state of the case. 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 will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power." (Boldface mine.)
Mill's branch of nineteenth-century liberalism can be read in support of a number of different modern political stances. He's a utilitarian, and his arguments can be taken as easily in support of libertarianism as anything else. But his emphasis on individual autonomy and the need to protect individuals not only from the tyranny of despotism, but from the potential tyranny of either the most active part of society, or the part which succeeds in making themselves accepted as the majority, seems to me to be not only vitally important, but also, all-too-easily ignored.
Where Mill writes, "the most numerous or the most active part," here, today, I read "the wealthiest or the most established part."
He writes also:
Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tyranny of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to... compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. 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 condtion of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.
The tyranny of the prevailing opinion.
In these days, when the prevailing opinion all-too-often means the opinion of the Invisible Hand, market forces and GDP, I think it might be a good idea to revisit the idea of protection against the tyranny of the "most numerous or the most active part" of society.
I really do.
