This case highlights the structural problem with democracy when it comes to legislating a minority population’s rights. In 2008, California democratically passed Proposition 8, banning gay marriage, which remained illegal until the U.S. Recent history shows that direct democracy doesn’t always result in pleasant outcomes. Yet, proponents assume that a population’s majority will know which policy changes result in positive outcomes. Mob rule eliminates Locke’s contract between citizens and government, where freedom is traded for safety.ĭirect democracy’s proponents claim it empowers citizens to vote on policy issues if elected officials fail their responsibilities.
PP.Direct democracy is impractical and unethical because it empowers mob rule at the expense of order and security. What these rules should be, is the principal question in human affairs but if we except a few of the most obvious cases, it is one of those which least progress has been made in resolving. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.īut though this proposition is not likely to be contested in general terms, the practical question, where to place the limit-how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control-is a subject on which nearly everything remains to be done. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant-society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it-its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. "tyranny of the majority" is now generally included among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard. What these rules should be, is the principal question in human affairs. This selection is a short snippet from his thoughts on the subject. Most references are to governments however, in part of John Stuart Mill's work entitled, On Liberty, he wrote about some issues surrounding tyranny when it is carried out by the majority. Tyranny is a word that has been much used in America since the 1760s.
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