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John Stuart Mill and Representative Government
By Dennis Frank Thompson PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1976 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07582-2
CHAPTER 1
The Principle of Participation
Mill's enthusiasm for participation pervades the third chapter of Representative Government, where he seeks to show "that the only government which can fully satisfy all the exigencies of the social state, is one in which the whole people participate; [and] that any participation, even in the smallest public function, is useful." Mill so warms to the subject that the chapter approaches a vindication of direct democracy; not until the last sentence, which intrudes almost as an afterthought, does Mill dismiss that kind of democracy (because it is impracticable except in small towns). Mill of course resists direct democracy for another reason, too (elaborated in other chapters of Representative Government): only a representative government can give sufficient influence to persons of superior competence. Even so, Mill's representative government offers citizens more scope for political participation than do the systems advocated by many modern democratic theorists, and in some respects even more than do those of theorists, such as Rousseau, who are often counted as radical democrats. Mill's participatory ardor springs from his beliefs that extensive participation promotes, first, the "present well-being" of society by protecting the interests of citizens and, second, a "better and higher form of national character" by facilitating the political education of citizens. These beliefs, respectively, are the core of his protective and educative arguments for the principle of participation.
THE PROTECTIVE ARGUMENT
The first proposition on which the protective argument for participation rests is that
the rights and interests of every or any person are only secure from being disregarded, when the person interested is himself able, and habitually disposed, to stand up for them. ... [Alternatively,] each is the only safe guardian of his own rights and interests.
Two different assumptions support these propositions, one relating to motivation and the other to the knowledge on which individuals act. The motivational assumption holds that "mankind, as a rule, prefer themselves to others, and those nearest to them to those more remote." Earlier Mill had criticized Bentham and other utilitarians for founding a whole ethical theory on such an assumption, and he has not changed his mind about that. But he now seeks to support a theory of government under conditions where men cannot be expected to live up to the stringent demands of a general theory of ethics. His analysis of the "Benthamic theory" in the Logic indicates how he intends to limit the scope of the motivational assumption. When the Benthamites contended that "men's actions are determined by their interests," they sometimes wrote as if interest meant "anything a person likes." But from this concept of interest, Mill notes, they could not draw the implications they wished; presumably, he means that any proposition using such a broad concept of interest would be vacuous.
Mill thinks that the Benthamites intended to say that men's actions are determined by their "selfish" (or "private or worldly") interests. Although, according to Mill, this assertion is not universally true (and therefore cannot be the foundation of a general theory of motivation or ethics), it is generally true of large groups of men under present social conditions (and hence is a sensible assumption on which to base a practical political theory).
Mill follows Hume here: "It is, therefore, a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave; though ... it appears strange that a maxim should be true in politics which is false in fact." The social psychology behind Hume's dictum is very similar to Mill's. According to Hume, the social habits that make men care for others' interests as much as their own develop in close personal relations and spontaneously operate only in the family, among friends, and in small groups. As men learn the advantages of cooperation, as they adopt social rules and establish governments, artificial institutions curb somewhat this natural partiality toward themselves and their close associates. But it remains a potent force, especially in political life, which exhibits few of the features of close personal relations; to the extent politics does have these features, loyalty toward one's group or faction prevails against the general interest. Politics can thus bring out the worst in men. Similarly, Mill believes that we cannot safely expect political men to pursue more than their self-interests. A more extended sense of sympathy or concern for the general interest requires a greater appreciation of the more remote consequences of actions and a more highly developed imagination; at present these qualities are found only among the better educated members of society. The potential effect of education gives Mill some reason to hope that these dismal propensities in political life may be subdued in the future, but in the meantime
Governments must be made for human beings as they are, or as they are capable of speedily becoming. ... And it cannot be maintained that any form of government would be rational, which required as a condition that these exalted principles [such as "a disinterested regard for others"] ... should be the guiding and master motives in the conduct of average human beings.
The immediate object of these remarks is the democratic majority, but Mill plainly thinks that any ruling group must be assumed to suffer from the same infirmities.
Unless we can say that minorities are more likely to pursue selfish interests than the democratic majority, the motivational assumption alone cannot establish that maximum participation would be better than minority rule. If everyone must be assumed to pursue selfish interests, no group would have any more title than any other to rule in the general interest. We cannot decide a priori who is more inclined to pursue selfish interests — the rulers or the people. Mill is sensitive to this point because his father ignored it, thereby falling victim to a cogent rebuke from Macaulay. Mill thinks that both rulers and citizens are likely to pursue sinister interests when they have unrestrained power, and government must protect against both possibilities. He therefore needs an argument that does not depend on the false claim that rulers are always more inclined to pursue sinister or selfish interests than citizens are. Hence, he argues from the supposition that is least favorable to the case for democratic participation: even if rulers are benevolent, genuinely seeking to act in the interests of their subjects, they cannot reliably or fully know what these interests are unless citizens themselves have a chance to express them.
We need not suppose that when power resides in an exclusive class, that class will knowingly and deliberately sacrifice the other classes to themselves: it suffices that, in the absence of its natural defenders, the interest of the excluded is always in danger of being overlooked; and, when looked at, is seen with very different eyes from those of the persons whom it directly concerns.
Carried to an extreme, this view would deny the possibility of representation altogether, as Rousseau does in the Social Contract. Mill of course does not go so far; he applies the idea only to classes or groups of individuals, such as women and the working class. In this respect, however, he goes beyond his father, who thought that women's interests would be adequately represented by their husbands, and that men over forty would look after the interests of youth.
Mill is not saying that individuals or groups always know their own interests best. Although he subscribes to something like this view in On Liberty, he does not extend it to other-regarding activities, with which society and government are properly concerned. Even within the self-regarding sphere, Mill presses only the negative point that government and society usually do not know better than an individual what is in his interest, though he might not know very well either. Mill's defense of laissez-faire in Political Economy appeals to the principle that "most persons take a juster and more intelligent view of their own interest, and of the means of promoting it, than can either be prescribed to them by a general enactment of the legislature, or pointed out in the particular case by a public functionary." But by the time Mill finishes listing the "large and conspicuous exceptions" to this principle, its scope has contracted drastically. For his argument in Representative Government Mill needs only the cautious claim that a group or class sometimes perceives its interests better than others do, and that the interests of any group excluded from the political process are therefore not likely to be accurately or fully represented by others.
Some commentators suggest that Mill implicitly adopts the familiar "shoes-pinching" argument here to justify the principle of participation. Citizens at least know when the results of governmental decisions and laws affect them adversely, and since the aim of government generally cannot be to affect citizens adversely, the opinions of citizens about the effects of government must have some validity. The argument has a long and distinguished history — Aristotle used it and twentieth-century theorists still appeal to it — but fortunately Mill does not rely on it solely since, for two reasons, it cannot alone justify the principle of participation. First, benevolent rulers can discover the opinions of citizens through means other than participation — for example, by public opinion polls. If we add, as some theorists do, the further premise that rulers will not be likely to heed the opinions of citizens unless the opinions are backed by the sanction of elections, we undermine the supposition of benevolent rule, on which Mill wishes to ground his reasoning at this stage. Second, the most that the shoes-pinching argument could justify would be voting on policies after they had been implemented and on candidates after they had made political decisions that affected citizens. Although some political scientists interpret electoral decisions in much this way — as a broad verdict on past performance — Mill insists that opinions or apparent interests of citizens and their representatives should play a greater role than this in the political process. The opinions of the working class on the question of strikes, for example, ought to be expressed in Parliament by members of the working class.
Mill's conception of the role of ordinary citizens' opinions in elections has also been compared to Joseph Schumpeter's view that citizens should decide only which candidates are chosen among competing elites, not what policies are adopted. Mill does seem to take a very similar stance in an earlier essay: the judgment of "the many ... must in general be exercised rather upon the characters and talents of the persons whom they appoint to decide [political] questions for them than upon the questions themselves." But Representative Government expands the political role of ordinary citizens. Even though Mill still hopes that citizens will choose the wisest person to represent them, he now maintains that it is inevitable and even desirable that citizens' opinions about their own interests and about substantive political issues influence their choice of representatives. It is not that Mill trusts citizens' opinions more than Schumpeter, but rather that Mill expects to see some improvement in the quality of those opinions through the educative effects of participation, while Schumpeter and many of his followers among contemporary political scientists do not.
So far Mill has sought to show that the interests of nonparticipants are likely to be overlooked or misperceived. He still needs to establish that if nonparticipants become participants, their interests will be taken into account. Does participation in fact make a difference in the policies adopted by governments? This is an empirical question, and when Mill looks for evidence to answer it, he is handicapped by the scarcity of examples of democratic governments in his own time. He is forced to turn to historical comparisons of relatively free states (such as the Italian republics and the independent towns of Flanders, Germany, England, Switzerland and Holland) with relatively unfree states existing at the same time (such as the European feudal monarchies, Austria and prerevolutionary France). The former carried out more just policies and were more responsive to their citizens than were the latter. Even if this evidence pertains to democracies, it is suspect for reasons that Mill himself gives in the Logic. There Mill purports to prove that his "method of difference," which seems to underlie the empirical argument for participation, does not work in social science. If we wished to show, for example, the effects of a restrictive and prohibitory commercial legislation upon national wealth, we would have to compare at least two countries "whose habits, usages, opinions, laws and institutions are the same in all respects, except that one of them has a more protective tariff...." Although it may be said that Mill's standard of proof here almost makes social science impossible and that Mill himself does not observe it, nevertheless he does not in Representative Government adequately come to grips with the difficulties that his standard raises. He does not try to rule out other effects, such as political culture or class structure, that could account for the differences in governmental policies as much as could the relative freedom created by the political institutions.
Modern empirical studies that bear on Mill's argument give somewhat better support to it than he himself supplied. Two consequences of more extensive participation offer some indirect support. First, the social composition of political leadership has shifted somewhat toward social classes that were excluded in Mill's time (though even in the Labour party in Britain the middle classes have been more predominantly represented among M.P.s and leaders than have the working classes, and working-class representation in Labour cabinets reached its high point in 1924). Second, political competition has increased as participation has become more extensive. During Mill's time the proportion of contested parliamentary seats grew from 43 percent in 1835 to 77 percent in 1880. If increased competition permits more interests to be expressed, then participation tends to enlarge the range of interests that can be taken into consideration, as Mill hoped.
More direct evidence about the effects of participation on governmental policies is harder to secure. Some studies of state government in the United States indicate that greater participation has an effect on certain kinds of policies adopted by the government; for example, as the level of participation goes up, the ratio of benefits to tax burdens for lower-income groups also tends to go up. The best evidence now available is Verba and Nie's study of forty-two American communities, which concludes, inter alia, that participation makes some difference in the responsiveness of political leaders. The more citizens participate, the more likely leaders are to "adopt the same agenda for community action" as citizens would. This conclusion holds true at the individual level even when social and economic variables are held constant; citizens who participate more are more likely to have leaders agree with them. It also holds for a system as a whole; in systems that have relatively high levels of participation, leaders are more responsive to inactive as well as active citizens — and more responsive to the active citizens than to the inactive citizens.
If participation influences governmental decisions in this way, Mill has some basis for maintaining that individuals are the safest guardians of their own interests. The justification of the principle of participation is not yet complete, however, because the interests that individuals guard are not necessarily their real interests or the general interest. The well-being of all members of society (which should be understood to include the "permanent interests of man as a progressive being") is the sole object of government, and it cannot be achieved by merely adding up the particular interests of all citizens. Unlike Bentham and James Mill, the younger Mill repudiates the view that the general interest is simply the sum of all individual interests. How can the object of government be achieved then? Or to put the question another way: if the proposition that each is the safest guardian of his own interests is a maxim of prudence, as Mill maintains, how can he derive from it the principle of participation, which is a maxim of ethics?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from John Stuart Mill and Representative Government by Dennis Frank Thompson. Copyright © 1976 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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