Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the
majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as
operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons
perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively over
the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannizing are not
restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political
functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues
wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it
ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many
kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme
penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into
the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore,
against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection
also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the
tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own
ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to
fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any
individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to
fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the
legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and
to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable
to a good condition of human affairs as protection against political despotism.
— On Liberty, The Library of Liberal Arts edition, p.7.
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