Unfortunately, we have had no more success at finding that limit than Mill did, for what we see all around us today is that very same "political despotism" of which Mill speaks with trepidation. Mill writes that it is the "majority" who makes "the ways of mankind" (102-3), but his notion of "majority rule" appears to be based on the assumption that political despotism has not been enshrined. Majority rule would, in Mill's unadulterated view, affect the world democracies by forming the ways of the people within those democracies -- guiding them toward "harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole" (103). Again, the vision is extremely Romantic, for it does not take into account the disharmony found in the very heart of man, as someone like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would say (after experiencing the horrors of societal collapse in Soviet Russia).

"Majority rule," therefore, does not seem...
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