Comment in 150 words: John Stuart Mill is a ‘reluctant democrat’. – C. L. Wayper (2018, 10 Marks)
In Political Thought (1954) C. L. Wayper called John Stuart Mill a “reluctant democrat”: he accepts popular government in principle and hedges it wherever it turns concrete. Mill’s liberalism, built on individual liberty and a utility enlarged to include self-development, explains both halves. He wanted democracy, and he feared what an unready majority might do with it.
Why Mill Is a Democrat
- Considerations on Representative Government (1861) calls representative government the ideally best polity. Its protective case is that interests are safe only where their holders can defend them. Its developmental case is that participation enlarges citizens’ intelligence and public spirit.
- He wanted workers and women enfranchised, held no sane adult should be permanently excluded, and in 1867 moved to replace “man” with “person” in the Reform Bill.
Why He Is Reluctant
- Tyranny of the majority. Borrowing from Alexis de Tocqueville, On Liberty (1859) warns that the people may oppress a part of their number, through opinion as well as law.
- Class legislation. An uninstructed majority might vote its immediate interest against the general good.
- Collective mediocrity. Mass rule rewards average opinion and discourages originality.
The Safeguards
- Plural votes for the better educated, graded by occupation and instruction, never by property.
- Exclusion of those unable to read, write and reckon, but only after free universal schooling: universal teaching must precede universal enfranchisement.
- Thomas Hare‘s single transferable vote, so that minorities and able men are heard.
- Open voting as a public trust, an expert Commission of Legislation and a trained bureaucracy.
- “Fitness” conditions that denied self-government to colonised peoples.
Assessment
C. B. Macpherson calls this developmental democracy, but plural voting contradicts it: those who most need civic education get the least weight. Mill’s defenders reply that in the 1860s he was a radical. His reluctance concerned democracy’s conditions, not its principle. The worry has not died: Jason Brennan‘s case for epistocracy (Against Democracy, 2016) revives weighting votes by knowledge. India’s Constituent Assembly took the bolder path. Article 326 gave universal adult suffrage from the first general election of 1951–52 to an electorate largely unable to read, trusting participation itself to educate.
Conclusion
Wayper’s label is accurate but incomplete. Mill was a liberal before he was a democrat, and he accepted majority rule only with devices to protect minorities and competence. His fears about majority tyranny remain valid, but his remedies ranked citizens in a way no democracy could now accept.