In this way the whole people will be like a single tyrant.” ( De Regno, Book I, Chapter 2) “If wrongful government is exercised by the many, this is named democracy, that is, rule by the people and this comes about when the common people oppress the rich by force of numbers. “At all events this sort of democracy, which is now a monarchy, and no longer under the control of law, seeks to exercise monarchical sway, and grows into a despot the flatterer is held in honor this sort of democracy is to other democracies what tyranny is to other forms of monarchy.” ( Politics, 1292a) “The ones we called constitutions just now are not really that at all: they are just a number of ways of running a state, all of which involve some citizens living in subjection to others like slaves, and the state is named after the ruling class in each case.” ( Laws, 712e) With or without mentioning the actual phrase ‘the tyranny of the majority’, most authors writing on democracy expressed worries about the potentially unjust rule of democratic majorities. At the same time, there are more possible subdivisions: for instance, an international majority may mean either the majority of states or that of the global population, etc. OK, some of those may sound odd, like the infringement of basic rights by a virtual and relative majority of society in a diachronic way at the international level. (1) the majority of society / of the electorate / of those actually voting / of elected representatives ģ × 4 × 3 × 2 × 2 × 2 = 288 possible combinations (b) a systematic infringement of the citizens’ basic rights (a) governing for the ruler’s own good (i.e. It has in fact as many meanings as the combination of the words ‘tyranny’ and ‘majority’ allows for.
The tyranny of the majority has no single definition. It is obvious, however, that similar concepts (majority oppression, democracy turning into despotism, the majority acting as a single tyrant) had often been used in political literature from at least the time of Plato. It became more widely known after the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the first part of which contained a whole chapter on the tyranny of the majority in 1835.
The phrase ‘the tyranny of the majority’ was most probably first used by John Adams in his In Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America in 1788. As an obscure author once put it, lynching members of a minority is sometimes condemned as undemocratic, but this is a mistake: as soon as the majority wants to hang someone, “this action is un-Christian, illegal, but certainly very democratic.” (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: The Menace of the Herd. But cannot a democracy be unjust? As long as democracy (like all forms of government) has anything to do with power, its power may become just as tyrannical as any other. Today, if we see an unjust political regime, we tend to call it ‘undemocratic’ right away.
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