Abstract

Aim of the present work is a critical crossover of the collection of John Stuart Mill’s political writings, in order to inquire within them some of the most important key-concepts concerning political philosophy and the organization of Governments. Our first purpose is to verify the philosophical strength of these concepts and their formal system; but, at the same time, we would like to find out the possible aporiae, as well as the parallelisms and the conflicts with the fundamental theoretical references of John Stuart Mill’s political thought. Only inquiring all these elements, it could be possible for us to reconstruct Mill’s general theory about Government, or Governments, also considering that Mill never wrote an organic work on government in general, but only on its representative form; so it’s very important to find all the tracks in the whole body of his political writings. We will analyze in details Mill’s government, inquiring into its distinctive features; consequently we will focus on representation and political participation, as fundamental elements of the popular government form; finally, we will consider the opposite concepts of centralization and local government, as hypothesis to reach the ideally best form of government, also referred to the hic et nunc of every historical, political and geographical situation. The first chapter concerns the problem of government, in order to clarify the idea of good government on which Mill works autonomously, beginning from the parallelism with Bentham and James Mill, but also with Hobbes and Tocqueville theories. The second chapter goes more deeply into the study of the other two problematic concepts: representation and political participation, and it raises the fundamental issue on the relation between governors and governed people. The content analysis aims at pointing out some key points inherent to the idea of representative government, that Mill conceived: the essential requirements of the representation in the different political praxis, related to the need of governed people for securities and controlling power ; the necessity to submit the organization of the ideally best representative government to people contingencies; the question of suffrage and its limits, and finally the concept of political participation, conceived as a “comparison” tool with the political praxis, as well as a fundamental way of education and emancipation of people. In the third chapter we will try to define, by means of some Mill’s works, in particular by some parts of the Considerations on Representative Government, the dichotomy between centralization and local government and the relation to the federal theory in order to bring out in a correct way the up-to-dateness of Mill political thought, not in comparison with a traditional federal form of government, but with a particular form of representative government, in which it should be included a wide and specific political space for the local bodies, to which Mill would like to delegate parts of competences on some peculiar and contingent local issues. The working method followed is the philological and conceptual analysis, focused on the plain text, or better, on John Stuart Mill’s political works. For this reason, it was essential and prodromic during the analysis of Mill’s concepts and problems, the translation phase of some of his political works and essays, as a meta-understanding way of the considered arguments, in comparison with the different Italian editions, and in order to point out, through the semantic processing yielded, the possible different interpretation shades of the political thought implied in some given concepts. In this way it has been possible, in the course of our critical crossover, to give an account of all the useful tracks to verify or not, the connections between J.S. Mill’s political theory-building and the modern political thought; this without any intention of finding out presumed proofs of a specific originality or actuality in John Stuart Mill’s political work, but only with the specific aim of not ignoring one of the fundamental theoretical contributions in the political philosophy of the Eighteenth Century