John Stuart Mill - Book Report/Review Example

John Stuart Mill According to Chapter 5 of the Proper Functions of Representative Bodies, John Stuart Mill elaborately explains the meaning of a representative government whereby the people have the absolute power to exercise through their elected deputies the ultimate controlling power. These deputies are elected by the people themselves. Additionally, these elected deputies exercise their duties as the masters of all government operations. The Constitution is the supreme law that ensures that there is a balance between all the functions of the government.

The Constitution neutralizes all the powers of the other arms of the government. This is effectively done in order to have harmonized functions since they would all crash the government operations if they were allowed to operate fully on their own (Mill, 59). In accordance to Chapter6 of the Infirmities and Dangers to which Representative Government is liable, John Stuart Mill effectively points out that the defects of the government may either be positive or negative. John Stuart Mill elaborates that the government’s defects can be negatively defective if it the government does not concentrate efficient in the hands of the sufficient authorities power in order to fulfill the essential government offices.

John Stuart Mill illustrates further examples of the defects cab either be positive or negative though he notes that it depends from what perspective that one is evaluating the government from. There is no standard yardstick that can be compared with since representative governments can take various stances in order to perform effectively (Mill, 63). In Chapter 7, John Stuart Mill mentions two great evils which affect the representation of all and the majority. These two evils are the dangers of having a representative body with members having a low grade of intellect and also the lurking danger of class legislation brought about by the numerical majority.

The author outlines and expounds on the popular belief that democracy can only be achieved if the people chose their leaders. This has a number of shortcomings since the people can elect leaders who have low levels of intellect who will not even be able to comprehend the complexity of the legislation that they are supposed to uphold. This system ensures that a leader who is chosen by the people is elected to office and this has detrimental effects of the choice of the minority. This also means that the choice of the minority is not elected to office.

There is also the danger of a certain class of people being elected in government just because of the simple reason that they belong to the class of majority. This will lead to false democracy since the majority will only choose one of their own which should not be the case (Mill, 89). I agree with the author in totality since the points he has raised are actually a reality. These are the main issues affecting the world over since the term democracy has been massively been abused. Many governments have taken full advantage of their numbers and thus ensuring that only a select few are elected into representative governments just because they have the majority numbers.

Politics and elected governments have been turned into issues of the numbers rather than been issue-based. Corrective measures should therefore be taken to prevent these vices effectively (Mill, 98). Work Citied Mill, John Stuart, Considerations on Representative Government, Chapters 5-7. Pgs. 59-98