The Case Against a Democratic State by Gordon Graham

Author:Gordon Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Government, state, democracy, sovereignty, cultural criticism, political philosophy, totalitarianism, law, statehood, reason, knowledge, representative democracy, direct democracy, majority rule, universal suffrage, dictatorship, tyranny, liberalism, liberal democracy, general will, modernity, marxism, republicanism, civil society
ISBN: 9781845407384
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2013
Published: 2013-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

4: The Illusion of Power

John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was an advocate of ‘representative government’ rather than popular democracy, about which he was somewhat nervous. Certainly he was no believer in majority rule, and yet the views he expounds in his lengthy essay on Representative Government (1861) include many that a thorough-going democrat would heartily endorse. One of these is a belief in the value of political participation.

Political Participation

Chapter III of Mill’s essay defends at length the contention that representative government is the best form of polity, and interestingly for my purposes it does so by contrasting it with an imaginary alternative – good despotism. Mill begins by considering the idea that ‘absolute power, in the hands of an eminent individual, would ensure a virtuous and intelligent performance of all the duties of government’ (Mill, p. 179). For the sake of the argument he makes two important concessions to this idea. The first is to grant to his opponent the very substantial additional conditions that would have to prevail for such a regime to be realized in practice. The good despot would have to be ‘not merely a good monarch, but an all seeing one . at all times informed correctly . of the conduct and working of every branch of administration’ ( ibid.) Mill regards this an impossible condition to fulfill, but is willing to overlook this difficulty in the interests of focusing on more intrinsic objections. The second concession he makes is that ‘however little probable it may be, we may imagine a despot observing many of the rules and restraints of constitutional government’ (Mill, p. 183). In other words, he is prepared to contemplate the implications of what he think most unlikely – a possessor of absolute power who nevertheless keeps to the rules.

Having made these concessions to what is in effect the same thought experiment as the one I conducted in the previous chapter, Mill goes on to formulate an argument similar to the one just considered – that the society of the good despot will be either socially stultifying, or politically unstable. Even if it is true that every political decision is taken in the real interests of the people, that the ruling class whether one (monarchy) or few (oligarchy) always acts wisely and benevolently, the fact that the beneficiaries of these decisions at no point participate in making them will itself have an effect. The result, according to Mill, will be a society marked by the mental passivity of its people, who will at the same time be wholly indifferent to the affairs of their country. ‘Let a person have nothing to do for his country, and he will not care for it’. In this way, widespread political participation is valuable not so much because it will result in better decisions, but because it will, so to speak, enliven the culture as a whole and create a proper sense of loyalty and public spiritedness.

Now there are at least two aspects of this one might question. The first is this.

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