John Stuart Mill Undemocratic Analysis

When we think of the political theorists Hobbes, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Marx we often tend to catagorize them as one thing, undemocratic. In each one of their political theories they either criticize or lay out their concerns for being against democracy, some more severe on the opinion than others. Each laid out various explanations in their writings for why democracy isn 't the feasible way to run a government. While all of these theorists use democracy as a defense for why their political doctrines about how the government should be run should be applied to real life I think that there are a few of these arguments that would not hold substantial weight in the political world if they had not used democracy as a defense such as John …show more content…
J.S. Mill like other political thinkers before him had various issues with government that was ran through a democracy. Overall, I would not say that J.S. Mill is not undemocratic, he instead just fears what majorities would do if they had access to that much power because much of what Mill believes is centered on the personal development of the individual. One of other main concerns with democracy is that with rule by a majority you will in turn sometimes suppress a minority. By doing this J.S. Mill believes that there is a greater chance that the truth will stifled and by consequence of doing that people will only see one side and believe that the side that is seen is true. The issue with this for Mill is that it would be foolish to believe that any one opinion is the whole truth. By giving the majority control in a democracy and allowing their opinions to be made law by popular vote is not something that the government should be capable of doing according to Mill. Mill believes this because he thinks that “It is the duty of the governments, and individuals, to form the truest opinions they can; to form them carefully, and never impose them upon others unless they are quite sure they are right.” Mill also believed that with a genuine democracy that you would not have to worry about people tyrannizing themselves. This is why democracy for Mill is used as a defense for his political theory, because without it his doctrine would …show more content…
I think that the arguments of John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx ultimately fell short of this success because they used democracy to defend almost every point of their political doctrine and did not expand outside of this political school of thought like Hobbes and Rousseau. By failing to do this if you take away the defense of democracy to support their political doctrine then their works just become the opinions of men and their supposed utopias that they had wished to see enacted in the world instead of a concrete doctrine that if implemented could supposedly work in and even have the possibility of making society a better place. So ultimately it is in fact too easy to dismiss J.S. Mill and