Abstract

Particularly in his work Representative Government, J. S. Mill tries to shape the government of social order according to the rules that served as a pattern for the constitution of the literary salons and clubs of the 17 th and 18th centuries. On these rules the Enlightened legal-rational model of society was built, whose demands as well as its differences from reality are enormous. However, this model, which remained in existence, although often broken, during the 19 th and 20 th centuries, does not seem able to survive, even as a regulative ideal. The characteristics that now define the society of the masses in which we live make the fundamentals of Mill’s theory totally inadequate for an understanding of that society.