When the Majority Is Wrong

Every tyrant claims to speak for the people. How do we know when the majority is wrong?

In 1762, the republic of Geneva burned a slim book of political theory and ordered its author arrested. Three decades later, revolutionaries in Paris were quoting that same book as they sent their fellow citizens to the guillotine in the name of the people.

The book was The Social Contract. Its author, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, gave the modern world its most powerful argument for democracy, and also the idea most often used to destroy it: the claim that someone knows what the people really want better than the people themselves.

In this lively, deeply researched book, political scientist Tariq Farooq follows Rousseau's idea of the general will from the Terror of the French Revolution to the referendums, populist leaders and online mobs of our own time, and answers the question every democracy must face: how can we tell the will of a free people from the anger of a crowd?

Inside you will discover:

• Why Rousseau believed a majority vote can be wrong, and what modern research on juries, crowds and polarization reveals


• How "enemies of the people" traveled from the Revolutionary Tribunal to modern headlines


• The strongest case against Rousseau and the strongest case for him, from Constant, Berlin and Talmon to Kant and Rawls


• What referendums, populism, social media pile-ons and the tyranny of the majority tell us about democracy today


• Five practical signs that a majority has become a mob, and how free societies hold the line