Jeremy Miller

J.S. Mill's plural voting proposal in Considerations on Representative Government presents political theorists with a puzzle: the elitist proposal that some individuals deserve a greater voice than others seems at odds with Mill's repeated arguments for the value of full participation in government. This essay looks at Mill's arguments for plural voting, arguing that, far from being motivated solely by elitism, Mill's account is actually driven by a commitment to both competence and participation. It goes on to argue that, for Mill, much of the value of political participation lies in its unique ability to educate the participants. That ability to educate is not, however, a product of participation alone; rather, for Mill, the true educative benefits of participation obtain only when competence and participation work together in the political sphere. Plural voting, then, is a mechanism for allowing Mill to take advantage of the educative benefits that arise from the intersection of competence and participation

This paper examines rhetorical strategies used by the democratic fourth century BCE orator Demosthenes to contain and counteract aristocratic and oligarchic criticisms of democracy. Demosthenes specifically addresses six categories of complaints: procrastination, the reactive character of the democracy, factionalism, the physical threat posed by the democracy to politicians, excessive concern with private interests and finally the inability to opt for difficult but necessary actions. For each of these complaints, Demosthenes deploys a strength that the democracy has that counter-acts--or at least minimizes--the problem. The argument further holds that the rhetorical techniques of Demosthenes opened up a unique theoretical space within which the democracy could consider not only the immediate policy issue, but also more general questions about the nature and efficacy of democratic government

Saint Thomas Aquinas harmonized four ostensibly competing views of law: positive (governmental enactment); natural (discovered by reason); Divine (revealed in scripture); and Eternal (God, Logos, or the ultimate nature of reality). He postulated that this was an ascending order - thus enacted law which was intrinsically unjust was not law at all. Both our own Martin Luther King and Thomas Jefferson used this understanding to indicate that unjust law could be disobeyed, and in fact, was not law. Plato, father of Western Philosophy, reinterpreted a pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses as instead, a system of eternal values known as Forms or Ideas. Thus God became the Good, and the other personalities were described as values, such as Truth and Beauty. For thousands of years, in Western Jurisprudence, a definition of Law has been attempted. These definitions have ranged from morality to anarchy. They have speculated law should be economic-based to the other pole that law should be liberty-based. As of this writing much of the world believes, as did Aquinas that law is God-based. It is queried, is it possible that all of these views have some correct quality in them? That is the thesis of this paper: that law is a timeless balancing of certain legitimate and immutable values and approaches; that these approaches go from the mundane command approach, to the transcendental spiritual approach. Law includes dignity and truth values, but also includes - and has room for - spiritual values. The approach is based on the methodology of Aquinas and Plato, but has greater specificity, which is synchrony with case law. The article traces the great jurisprudential debates and the possibility that there is a timeless approach to law.

The classical utilitarian legacy of Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, James Mill, and Henry Sidgwick has often been charged with both theoretical and practical complicity in the growth of British imperialism and the emerging racialist discourse of the nineteenth century. But there has been little scholarly work devoted to bringing together the conflicting interpretive perspectives on this legacy and its complex evolution with respect to orientalism and imperialism. This volume, with contributions by leading scholars in the field, represents the first attempt to survey the full range of current scholarly controversy on how the classical utilitarians conceived of 'race' and the part it played in their ethical and political programs, particularly with respect to such issues as slavery and the governance of India. The book both advances our understanding of the history of utilitarianism and imperialism and promotes the scholarly debate, clarifying the major points at issue between those sympathetic to the utilitarian legacy and those critical of it