The Dictatorship of Majorities

Nowadays Liberalism has a wide range of controversial definitions, but in order to understand where all this came from, it’s a good idea to remember some of the most influential authors of the liberal tradition, one of them being John Stuart Mills, an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century.

In his book “On Liberty” Mills develops on Bentham’s theory of Utilitarianism and focuses on the Dictatorship of majorities as one of his core concepts.

In order to analyze this concept, Mills first step was to analyze different stages of society:

During absolutism the ruler minority imposed and the protection of fundamental rights was only applied through revolt. During democracy society is ruled by the majority, but what happens when the majority wants to eliminate part of itself??

For Mills there is no moral that is not grounded by universal, natural or objective views, there are only conceptions of what is moral based on personal likes and dislikes, so there is not a really objective view on what reality a majority should eliminate, yet they do. So the question begs; If democracy is the rule of majority and there are no natural or universal grounds of morality in which to rely upon, then how can we protect individuals?

To this question’s answer, he starts by distinguishing two spheres where society interacts upon:

Private sphere: Government should not take part in this. Most fundamental rights emanate from this sphere.

Public sphere: The State should regulate this area. Actions that affect others, the boundaries between individual domains are not clear.

So in order to protect the minority against the majority the actions of the state must be limited to the public sphere, limiting the influence of government only to the public sphere.

And so, he then tries to delimitate what belongs to the public and private sphere to which he answers with what he calls “The harm principle”: Only the actions that affect society can be made answerable. Every individual is free to do what he pleases with his mind and body. As a consequence of this, fundamental rights are all those that assure the protection of the private sphere:

• Rights securing the inward domain of consciousness (religion, political thoughts)
• Rights securing securing a sphere of actions that let us choose how to lead our life (property, freedom of speech, basic civil rights)
• Rights securing our liberty of associations (political party affiliations)

Back to Bentham’s theory, Utilitarianism can be interpreted as The state must first try to protect the private sphere and then try to do the best for the majority, and one can clearly see how Mills develops on that premise to construct a more solid ideology. Of course this 19th century ideology does not come without criticism and had to be developed further in order to survive the modern political climate, but it is a good place to start remembering what the liberal tradition is actually about.

Cayetano Sotomayor Landazuri, Zürich Switzerland, 2023.