Tyranny of the Majority: Hegel on the Paradox of Democracy

At the core of the principle of democracy is the claim that all individuals, or as many as possible, should decide for themselves and that they must be included in collective governance of the community in which the majority rules. However, drawing upon Hegel’s theory of the state, I will show in this paper that in a democracy, the emphasis on individual rights, at the expense of developing the notion of universal good, is not only problematic, but dangerous because in the absence of rational authority of the state, people rely mainly on public opinion for guidance, which results in what Hegel may call the tyranny of the majority. As a consequence, democracy, which purports itself to be the champion of freedom, tends to be exclusivist and totalitarian as dissenting ideas are silenced by the “ruling majority” in actual democratic processes. In fact, the notion of “legitimacy” (i.e., legitimated by the majority) conduces to the assault on the inner will to resist rendering individuals in a democracy as “conformists.” The paper concludes that, for Hegel, freedom can be realized not through democracy as espoused by the liberal theorists, but through his theory of the state―the state being not only a guarantor of basic rights and liberties, but as a dimension of freedom which commits itself to a substantive vision of the universal good as the paramount object of human aspiration.