long as it hurts no one, will be seriously at risk in majoritarian democracy. For
Mill the uneducated working-class majority was seen as peculiarly prone to
intolerance of opinion and behaviour, and likely to persecute, at least infor-
mally if not legally, anyone who did not ‘fit in’ with common trends. He
certainly believed in at least restricted democracy, but held to such a strong
notion of the limitations on rightful government interference with private
liberty that he had reason to doubt that freedom would be protected as well in a
popular democracy as in some forms of enlightened despotism. A similar
though somewhat more pragmatic view was held by de Tocqueville, mainly in
his classic work on the emerging political system of the USA,Democracy in
America. Here his argument was that there were tremendous pressures towards
conformity, and therefore mediocrity, at work through the combination of
egalitarianism and popular democracy, and furthermore that the mass of ill-
educated citizens were prone to exploitation and being misled by talented but
corrupt demagogues. He was hardly alone in this view, as the authors of the
Federalist Papers, and the founding fathers of the US Constitution had argued
for intervening layers of electoral colleges to insulate the presidency and the
Senate from direct influence by the masses. Much later a version of this fear of
intolerance to minorities on the part of masses, whipped up to fury by
unscrupulous demagogues, formed part of thepluralistthesis common to
most American post-war political scientists. In particular Kornhauser’sThe
Politics of Mass Societyargued that vicious dictatorships of the Nazi type could
easily arise unless the social structure prevented direct access of leading political
figures to the emotions of the masses. In many ways the tyranny of the majority
is a version of the standing tension between the two halves of the prime
Western goal of creatingliberal democracy.
Tyranny of the Majority