In his essay Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau was ambivalent regarding the attributes of majority rule, recognizing in an unregulated political environment that it was no guarantor of justice. Hardly original in these concerns – the Framers of the U.S. Constitution fully understood the moral and practical necessities of ensuring minority (in a political if not ethnic sense) rights were respected – he was nevertheless an articulate advocate against over-reliance on the will of absolute majorities in determining public policy. As he wrote in this seminal essay:
“After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.”
Majority rule is an essential characteristic of democratic government, but is not in and of itself a guarantor of democratic tradition. Thoreau recognized this when he asked rhetorically,
“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”
With the expression of such sentiments, Thoreau place himself squarely within the democratic tradition envisioned by James Madison and others who feared tyranny of a majority.
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