A democratic majority can oppress minorities as thoroughly as any despot, through law and through social pressure.
Tocqueville described it in Democracy in America (1835), observing that the majority's opinion in the United States exercised a power over thought that no European monarch possessed. Mill took up the phrase in On Liberty (1859) and extended the danger from law to the pressure of prevailing opinion and feeling.
In practice
- A town votes to close the only place of worship of a small religious minority under a planning rule applied to no one else.
- A workplace in which everyone shares one politics makes its single dissenter too uncomfortable to speak.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is incentive: majorities bear little of the cost of burdens they place on minorities. Another is conformity pressure, which Mill feared more than law.
- In its favour
- Underlies constitutional protections for minorities, judicial review and bills of rights in many democracies.
- Against it
- Critics argue that intense minorities often prevail over indifferent majorities in practice, and that the phrase can be used to resist legitimate majority decisions. Madison argued in Federalist 10 that a large republic makes stable oppressive majorities hard to form.
- Standing
- Compare the paradox of tolerance and Wollheim's paradox of democracy.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works