존 스튜어트 밀과 대의 민주주의

A Reflection on John Stuart Mill’s Representative Democracy

Not a few people criticize that representative democracy has been created as a way of curtailing popular participation in politics. John Stuart Mill does not buy such a blame. He rather expects it to be the ideally best polity because of its potential to enable the sovereignty to he vested in the entire aggregate of the community. However, Mill had to recognize the danger of class legislation resulting from the low graded majority, Which, according to him, makes representative government turn into a false democracy. He was so seriously concerned about the fragility of the representative systems of h is time that he had to devise several proposals with a view to preventing them from deteriorating into uncontrolled democracy. The introduction of plural votes and the negation of the delegation theory of representation, among others, attract our utmost attention. Mill’s ideas on representative democracy have been hardly discussed in Korean society. Recent developments in Korean politics, in particular, the deepening of disappointment as a whole vis-a-vis the poor performance of its democratic system remind us the necessity of close examination of Mill’s theory of democracy.