The French political theorist Montesquieu, through his masterpiece The Spirit of the Laws (1748), strongly influenced his younger contemporary Rousseau (see below Rousseau) and many of the American Founding Fathers, including John Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. Rejecting Aristotle’s classification, Montesquieu distinguishes three ideal types of government: monarchy, “in which a single person governs by fixed and established laws”; despotism, “in which a single person directs everything by his own will and caprice”; and republican (or popular) government, which may be of two types, depending on whether “the body, or only a part of the people, is possessed of the supreme power,” the former being a democracy, the latter an aristocracy.
According to Montesquieu, a necessary condition for the existence of a republican government, whether democratic or aristocratic, is that the people in whom supreme power is lodged possess the quality of “public virtue,” meaning that they are motivated by a desire to achieve the public good. Although public virtue may not be necessary in a monarchy and is certainly absent in despotic regimes, it must be present to some degree in aristocratic republics and to a large degree in democratic republics. Sounding a theme that would be loudly echoed in Madison’s “Federalist 10,” Montesquieu asserts that without strong public virtue, a democratic republic is likely to be destroyed by conflict between various “factions,” each pursuing its own narrow interests at the expense of the broader public good. Hume
The destructive power of factions was also strongly emphasized by the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, whose influence on Madison was perhaps even greater than Montesquieu’s. For it was from Hume that Madison seems to have acquired a view about factions that turned the issue of the desirability of larger political associations—i.e., those larger than the city-state—on its head. For the purpose of diminishing the destructive potential of factionalism, so Hume and Madison argued, bigger is in fact better, because in bigger associations each representative must look after a greater diversity of interests. It is also likely that Madison was influenced by Hume when in “Federalist 10” he rejected the term democracy for the type of government based on representation, preferring instead to call it a republic. Rousseau
When compared with Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau sometimes seems the more radical democrat, though a close reading of his work shows that, in important respects, Rousseau’s conception of democracy is narrower than Locke’s. Indeed, in his most influential work of political philosophy, The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau asserts that democracy is incompatible with representative institutions, a position that renders it all but irrelevant to nation-states (see state). The sovereignty of the people, he argues, can be neither alienated nor represented. “The idea of representatives is modern,” he wrote. “In the ancient republics…the people never had representatives.…[T]he moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer free: it no longer exists.” But if representation is incompatible with democracy, and if direct democracy is the only legitimate form of government, then no nation-state of Rousseau’s time or any other can have a legitimate government. Furthermore, according to Rousseau, if a political association that is small enough to practice direct democracy, such as a city-state, were to come into existence, it would inevitably be subjugated by larger nation-states and thereby cease to be democratic.
For these and other reasons, Rousseau was pessimistic about the prospects of democracy. “It is against the natural order for the many to govern and the few to be governed,” he wrote. “It is unimaginable that the people should remain continually assembled to devote their time to public affairs.” Adopting a view common among critics of democracy in his time, Rousseau also held that “there is no government so subject to civil wars and intestine agitations as democratic or popular government.” In a much-cited passage, he declares that, “were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men.”
Despite these negative conclusions, Rousseau hints, in a brief footnote (Book III, chapter 15), that democratic governments may be viable if joined together in confederations. Some years later, in a discussion of how the people of Poland might govern themselves, he allowed that there is simply no alternative to government by representation. However, he left the problem of the proper size or scale of democratic political associations largely unsolved. Mill
In his work On Liberty (1859) John Stuart Mill argued on utilitarian grounds that individual liberty cannot be legitimately infringed—whether by government, society, or individuals—except in cases where the individual’s action would cause harm to others. In a celebrated formulation of this principle, Mill wrote that
the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.…The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.
Mill’s principle provided a philosophical foundation for some of the basic freedoms essential to a functioning democracy, such as freedom of association (see below Ideal and representative democracy), and undermined the legitimacy of paternalistic laws, such as those requiring temperance, which in Mill’s view treated adult citizens like children. In the area of what he called the liberty of thought and discussion, another freedom crucial to democracy, Mill argued, also on utilitarian grounds, that legal restrictions on the expression of opinion are never justified. The “collision of adverse opinions,” he contended, is a necessary part of any society’s search for the truth. In another work, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Mill set forth in a lucid and penetrating manner many of the essential features of the new type of government, which had not yet emerged in continental Europe and was still incomplete in important respects in the United States. In this work he also advanced a powerful argument on behalf of woman suffrage—a position that virtually all previous political philosophers (all of them male, of course) had ignored or rejected. Dewey
According to the American philosopher John Dewey, democracy is the most desirable form of government because it alone provides the kinds of freedom necessary for individual self-development and growth—including the freedom to exchange ideas and opinions with others, the freedom to form associations with others to pursue common goals, and the freedom to determine and pursue one’s own conception of the good life. Democracy is more than merely a form of government, however; as Dewey remarks in Democracy and Education (1916), it is also a “mode of associated life” in which citizens cooperate with each other to solve their common problems through rational means (i.e., through critical inquiry and experiment) in a spirit of mutual respect and good will. Moreover, the political institutions of any democracy, according to Dewey, should not be viewed as the perfect and unchangeable creations of visionary statesmen of the past; rather, they should be constantly subject to criticism and improvement as historical circumstances and the public interest change.