Considerations on Representative Government
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~100,000 words · 482 passages
Cite this work
- APAJohn Stuart Mill. (n.d.). Considerations on Representative Government. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-stuart-mill/considerations-on-representative-government
- MLAJohn Stuart Mill. Considerations on Representative Government. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-stuart-mill/considerations-on-representative-government.
- ChicagoJohn Stuart Mill. Considerations on Representative Government. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/john-stuart-mill/considerations-on-representative-government.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The 1861 book in which Mill sets out how a democracy would have to work if it were not to end as a tyranny of the majority.
Context and history
He holds that the best form of government is the representative, and then devotes the book to saying why electing is not enough. His problems are ours: how to keep the majority from imposing its interests on minorities, how to get parliament to control the executive without trying to administer itself, how to have informed people voting. Some proposals have aged and others have not: he defends Hare's proportional representation, the extension of the vote to women — in 1861 — and, at the same time, plural voting according to education, which makes uncomfortable reading today. His most quoted page is the one holding that a government is as good as what it makes of its citizens, and that a people not exercised in governing will never learn.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Besides these moral hindrances, mechanical difficulties are often an insuperable impediment to forms of government. In the ancient world, though there might be, and often was, great individual or local independence, there could be nothing like a regulated popular government beyond the bounds of a single city-community; because there did not exist the physical conditions for the formation and propagation of a public opinion, except among those who could be brought together to discuss public matters in the same agora. This obstacle is generally thought to have ceased by the adoption of the representative system. But to surmount it completely, required the press, and even the newspaper press, the real equivalent, though not in all respects an adequate one, of the Pnyx and the Forum. There have been states of society in which even a monarchy of any great territorial extent could not subsist, but unavoidably broke up into petty principalities, either mutually independent, or held together by a loose tie like the feudal: because the machinery of authority was not perfect enough to carry orders into effect at a great distance from the person of the ruler. He depended mainly upon voluntary fidelity for the obedience even of his army, nor did there exist the means of making the people pay an amount of taxes sufficient for keeping up the force necessary to compel obedience throughout a large territory. In these and all similar cases, it must be understood that the amount of the hindrance may be either greater or less. It may be so great as to make the form of government work very ill, without absolutely precluding its existence, or hindering it from being practically preferable to any other which can be had. This last question mainly depends upon a consideration which we have not yet arrived at--the tendencies of different forms of government to promote Progress.…