Representative Democracy and Colonial Inspirations: The Case of John Stuart Mill

Abstract

Focusing on John Stuart Mill, a particularly illuminating contributor to modern democratic theory, this article examines the connections between modern democracy and the European colonial experience. It argues that Mill drew on the exclusionary logic and discourse available through the colonial experience to present significant portions of the English working classes as domestic barbarians, whose potential rise to power posed a danger to civilization itself: a line of argument that helped him legitimate representative government as a democratic, rather than an antidemocratic form of government, as it had been traditionally perceived. The article contributes to our understanding of the development of modern democratic theory and practice by drawing attention to the ways the colonial experience shaped core Western institutions and ways of thinking, and it makes the case that this experience remains an essential, if often unacknowledged, part of our collective “self.”

Liberal Plebeianism: John Stuart Mill on Democracy, Oligarchy, and Working-Class Mobilization

“… On Mill's Malthusianism as a disciplinary project seeZerilli (1994, 95-109).Arneil (2012) sees a fundamental symmetry between Mill's arguments for imperial rule abroad and his endorsement of a disciplinary approach to the idle poor in Britain. This posture is seen as consistent with a broader phenomenon of "domestic colonization" manifested through labor colonies and other disciplinary institutions Lederman (2021). likewise insists that Mill viewed the working class as fundamentally "barbaric" and had deep anxieties about popular politics.…”

“…Critics argue that Mill's disciplinary tendencies (Arneil 2012;Zerilli 1994), overarching concern with stability and control (Hamburger 2001), and complicity in imperial politics (Lederman 2021;Mehta 1999;Pitts 2005) render him, at best, an antiquated "aristocratic liberal" (Kahan 1992). But recent scholarship has challenged conventional understandings of Mill's liberalism and expanded our understanding of his primary concerns, moving beyond On Liberty to a fuller appreciation of Mill's vast intellectual corpus.…”

“…This posture is seen as consistent with a broader phenomenon of "domestic colonization" manifested through labor colonies and other disciplinary institutions. Lederman (2021) likewise insists that Mill viewed the working class as fundamentally "barbaric" and had deep anxieties about popular politics. These readings are provocative in capturing some of Mill's expressed concerns about working-class character and unregulated mass democracy.…”

Darwin in India: Anticolonial Evolutionism at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

“…Much less commonly does it consider how non-western and anticolonial thinkers themselves conceptualized progress-what it looked like and how it was theorized from the other side of the colonial divide. This remains the case in more recent works on liberalism, race, empire, and developmentalism centering philosophers such as Mill (Beaumont and Li 2022;Lederman 2022), Hobhouse (Williams 2021;Tan 2022), Smith (Ince 2021), and Kant (Williams 2021;Church 2022).…”

“…Of course, the problem of developmentalism has received considerable critical scrutiny in political theory's turn to empire, as scholars have exposed the stage-based schemasparticularly in late-modern liberalism-depicting Europeans as at the apex of a universal historicaldevelopmental trajectory (for now-classic studies, see Pitts 2005;Mehta 1999;McCarthy 2009; for more recent entrants, see Williams 2021;Beaumont and Li 2022;Lederman 2022). Generative as it has been, however, much of this literature remains within a strictly western orbit in terms of the thinkers it addresses (Locke, Smith, Burke, Kant, the Mills, Tocqueville, Bentham, Hobhouse), its theoretical concerns (liberalism, utilitarianism, conjectural or philosophical histories), and its contemporary upshot (developmentalism's continuing entanglements with liberalism, Marxism, and critical theory).…”