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.”
Highlights
There has been a growing recognition in recent decades that “Europe was made by its imperial projects, as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself” (Stoler and Cooper 1997, 1)
I discuss such symbiotic connections between the European colonial experience and the establishment of a political system that has been little examined in these terms: representative democracy
In his classic study on the principles of representative government, Bernard Manin observes that representative democracy “has its origins in a system of institutions ... that was in no way initially perceived as a form of democracy or of government by the people” (Manin 1997, 1)
Summary
There has been a growing recognition in recent decades that “Europe was made by its imperial projects, as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself” (Stoler and Cooper 1997, 1). The true understanding of democracy, in contrast, is that it is a form of government in which the elected function as representatives of the people in the sense that they act for their benefit, are accountable to them, and can be dismissed by them after their term ends, but they decide on policies according to their own judgment and the most advanced knowledge of the time, which naturally only a few would possess.
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