Public Interest and Majority Rule in Bentham's Democratic Theory

Abstract

IS_JHE STANDARD CRITICISM of Bentham's democratic theory has been that the radical parliamentary reforms which he advocated between 1809 and his death in 1832 would lead to the formation of a class-based majoritarian tyranny. This fear was first voiced by Sir James Mackintosh, who, writing in The Edinburgh Review' in 1818, the year in which Bentham's Plan of Parliamentary Reform was published, argued that these reforms would result in the newly enfranchised poor combining to dispossess the owners of property, thereby destroying the institution of property and the benefits that flowed from it. In this way, the principle of utility would be systematically violated by the sole form of government which Bentham believed could be relied upon to enforce its dictates. While the simple majority decision rule that Bentham espoused does present difficulties, Mackintosh was mistaken in believing that it would inevitably give rise to a tyranny of the majority. In the first place, Bentham normally conceived of democracy as a set of institutions designed, not to discover the preponderant aggregate of individual but to promote only the common of all the members of the community. This conception of the public interest demanded clarification so as to remove the problems associated with his wellknown sum of interests definition. Moreover, Bentham was fully aware that sectional (or sinister interests, in his famous phrase) tended to subvert the public interest by exerting undue influence