Anti-Climacus

THE FAMOUS HERR SCHLOSSER AND I: had this conversation earlier today, which was pretty interesting, and also, I think, a good slice-of-life for those who wonder what it's like to be a first-year theorist at a major political science graduate program:

We'd finished up (and not a moment too soon) on J.S. Mill today, and one of the things our professor noted was that Mill was the first theorist we'd covered who was not concerned primarily with what constitutes legitimate government, but rather with issues surrounding forced conformity. HS asked, apropos of this, when exactly the change had occurred. I cited the Federalist Papers (which, to my mind, answered once and for all that a legitimate government has to respect rights and the rule of law), he cited Montesquieu, for reasons I'm having trouble remembering at the moment (though I don't doubt he'll pop in an explanation in the comments (HINT HINT)). HS then mused that we knew when the change had occurred, but not why. I pointed out that the first two major theorists who dealt with the 'tyranny of the masses' idea (Tocqueville and Mill) were themselves, if not aristocrats, then certainly from groups that stood to lose power in the face of liberal democracy. HS, bless his heart, wanted to attribute this change to class, though as I pointed out, even though class and personal (aristocratic) interests ran in tandem for these two figures, there's no logical reason why they would always have to, and it's clearly the latter of the two that'd be doing the work. We also had something of an interesting digression as to whether rights theorists had to be inherently opposed to individualistic liberal theories, and we typed the major early modern theorists by which camp they fell into (and discovered that I actually do apparently agree with Rousseau about something, though, on further reflection, I think Locke belongs in the rights theorist camp, and not the individualist one). Then we got off the East-West bus and went our separate ways.