Considerations on Representative Government

How representative democracy is supposed to work, and the ways it fails, set out by a man who thought hard about both. Mill defends self-government as the school of public spirit, the thing that makes citizens of subjects, while warning against its weaknesses: the tyranny of the majority, the temptation to mediocrity, the danger of a public that votes without understanding. A sober companion to the more famous On Liberty.

The English philosopher raised as an experiment in reason who became the great defender of individual liberty against the crowd. On Liberty sets out the harm principle, that the only purpose for which power can rightly be used against a person is to prevent harm to others, and argues that even false speech serves truth by forcing it to stay alive in argument. Considerations on Representative Government is his clear-eyed account of how self-rule is meant to work, and how it fails.