- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Preamble
- 1 Liberalism
- 2 Freedom
- 3 Culture and Anxiety
- 4 The Liberal Community
- 5 Liberal Imperialism
- 6 State and Private, Red and White
- 7 The Right to Kill in Cold Blood
- 8 Hobbes’s Political Philosophy
- 9 Hobbes and Individualism
- 10 Hobbes, Toleration, and the Inner Life
- 11 The Nature of Human Nature in Hobbes and Rousseau
- 12 Locke on Freedom
- 13 Mill’s Essay On Liberty
- 14 Sense and Sensibility in Mill’s Political Thought
- 15 Mill in a Liberal Landscape
- 16 Utilitarianism and Bureaucracy
- 17 Mill and Rousseau: Utility and Rights
- 18 Bureaucracy, Democracy, Liberty
- 19 Bertrand Russell’s Politics
- 20 Isaiah Berlin
- 21 Popper and Liberalism
- 22 Alexis de Tocqueville
- 23 Staunchly Modern, Nonbourgeois Liberalism
- 24 Pragmatism, Social Identity, Patriotism, and Self-Criticism
- 25 Deweyan Pragmatism and American Education
- 26 John Rawls
- 27 Locke and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie
- 28 Hegel on Work, Ownership, and Citizenship
- 29 Utility and Ownership
- 30 Maximizing, Moralizing, and Dramatizing
- 31 The Romantic Theory of Ownership
- 32 Justice, Exploitation, and the End of Morality
- 33 Liberty and Socialism
- Index
Mill and Rousseau: Utility and Rights
Mill and Rousseau: Utility and Rights
- Chapter:
- (p.346) 17 Mill and Rousseau: Utility and Rights
- Source:
- The Making of Modern Liberalism
- Author(s):
Alan Ryan
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
This chapter examines some differences between rights-based and utilitarian defenses of democracy by referencing to John Stuart Mill and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Since the early 1960s, Mill and Rousseau have been regarded as theorists of “participatory democracy,” defenders of a classical ideal of citizen virtue and public spirit who could still teach us something about the point of democratic government. The chapter first explains a rights-based theory of democracy and its emphasis on questions of legitimacy and authority before considering how the account of Rousseau and Mill seem to be at odds with the account of the connection between rights and democracy, on the one hand, and between utility and democracy on the other. It suggests that Rousseau's ethics are fundamentally the ethics of natural rights, whereas Mill's ethics are fundamentally utilitarian.
Keywords: democracy, John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, participatory democracy, legitimacy, authority, rights, utility, ethics, natural rights
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- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Preamble
- 1 Liberalism
- 2 Freedom
- 3 Culture and Anxiety
- 4 The Liberal Community
- 5 Liberal Imperialism
- 6 State and Private, Red and White
- 7 The Right to Kill in Cold Blood
- 8 Hobbes’s Political Philosophy
- 9 Hobbes and Individualism
- 10 Hobbes, Toleration, and the Inner Life
- 11 The Nature of Human Nature in Hobbes and Rousseau
- 12 Locke on Freedom
- 13 Mill’s Essay On Liberty
- 14 Sense and Sensibility in Mill’s Political Thought
- 15 Mill in a Liberal Landscape
- 16 Utilitarianism and Bureaucracy
- 17 Mill and Rousseau: Utility and Rights
- 18 Bureaucracy, Democracy, Liberty
- 19 Bertrand Russell’s Politics
- 20 Isaiah Berlin
- 21 Popper and Liberalism
- 22 Alexis de Tocqueville
- 23 Staunchly Modern, Nonbourgeois Liberalism
- 24 Pragmatism, Social Identity, Patriotism, and Self-Criticism
- 25 Deweyan Pragmatism and American Education
- 26 John Rawls
- 27 Locke and the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie
- 28 Hegel on Work, Ownership, and Citizenship
- 29 Utility and Ownership
- 30 Maximizing, Moralizing, and Dramatizing
- 31 The Romantic Theory of Ownership
- 32 Justice, Exploitation, and the End of Morality
- 33 Liberty and Socialism
- Index