La funzione sociale dell’opinione pubblica e il processo di civilizzazione in John Stuart Mill

Abstract

In the first part of my paper, I reconstruct the complex judgment on the process of civilization formulated by Mill starting from the essay Civilization. In particular, I intend to highlight the relationship be- tween freedom and constraint in the primitive and the civilized stage. Furthermore, I focus on Mill’s considerations of the positive and negative effects of the process of civilization. In the second part, however, I intend to show that there are two different opinions on the social func- tion of public opinion that can be traced back to two different groups of works: on the one hand, in Civilization and On Liberty, Mill takes up Tocquevillian themes and arguments. Public opinion is therefore configured as a tyrannical force and as such as a danger to the autonomy and freedom of the individual; on the other hand, in works such as On Perfectibility, Utilitarianism and Considerations on Representative Government, Mill argues that public opinion has an educational function. In the third part, I show the close correlation that exists between the stage of civilization achieved by society and the social function that public opinion should have.

Keywords

• mill
• civilization
• public opinion
• freedom
• civil society