Thread: voting
View Single Post
Old 12-31-2018, 02:01 PM   #92
Undertoad
Radical Centrist
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Cottage of Prussia
Posts: 31,423
This is in the intro to "On Liberty" in which he's working out the role of utilitarianism in governing, but he's admitting that there is a "tyranny of the majority" that applies outside of government. And fighting that is just as important as fighting government tyranny. (although he had not seen the horrors of the 20th century yet, this was 1869)

He goes on to say

"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. 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."
Undertoad is offline   Reply With Quote