On Mill's Political Thoughts: A Perspective Of Publicity

It is always a practical and useful theme to explore our own unique democratic institution, to develop a free and equal political atmosphere, to figure out a reasonable form of political life and to form a good political tradition in a developing country which is just at the beginning stage of modernization. This thesis focused on a study of Mill's political thoughts from a perspective of publicity. By virtue of a thorough discussion and analysis of the connotation of publicity in Mill's thoughts, we got to understand the formation and evolution of an institutionalized democracy and good political tradition.It will not be possible to explore the theoretical contents of publicity without reference to three other concepts of publicity, public sphere, and public opinion. In the first part of the thesis, I made use of a comparative study to illustrate the meaning of publicity and proposed that the foundation of publicity in Mill is a sense of responsibility based on individual rights. I then drew on the research methods of Western scholars to analyze the connotation of publicity in Mill's thoughts in two approaches, one of which is of hypothetical publicity while the other is of actual publicity. We then discussed in the second part the hypothetical publicity at the institutional and individual levels and the interaction of the two. At the institutional level, publicity contains values such as democracy, equality and the maximum of social utility while at the individual level, it contains values such as virtues, wisdom and active character. Mill emphasized the dynamic relationship between virtues of people and quality of political institution in a framework of mutual interaction. He then arrives at the conclusion that a good form of government will promote civic virtue and wisdom of the people and vice versa. By virtue of a summary of the electoral institution, ways of vote and political discussion, I proceeded in the final part of the thesis to unveil the actual publicity of Mill's political thoughts in the context of democratic participation and political argumentation.