John Stuart Mill and "Majority" Book Report

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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).

"Majority rule," therefore, does not seem as possible today as it did perhaps in Mill's time. In our own land of supposed democracy and majority rule, the majority fails to even vote. The majority, in other words, has preferred to see itself be led by a faction, a political despot, a totalitarian state.

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Yet, could that be because the majority has failed to feel itself the real director of its course ever since, for example, the assassination of Kennedy, and the fear that the military-industrial complex had performed a coup? It is possible. For this reason, while one might like to apply Mill's ideas to American society, he must realize that American society is in need of much stronger medicine. It needs a realistic solution to a real problem of tyranny -- not a Romantic vision that fails to realize that man himself needs more than a mere Constitution to guide him in the right: he needs grace, of the old world variety.

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