Williamson began writing the manuscript for The Smallest Minority in 2015 while still at National Review but shelved it when he couldn’t find a publisher. As he tells it, the day he got the ax from Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, his phone rang with offers of book deals before he even made it to the airport. The work Williamson subsequently produced is a jewel of political thought and an essential contribution to the lexicon of liberty.
The Smallest Minority is a dense little volume that punches above its 230-page weight. Williamson draws on political philosophy, social science, and classical literature to produce a deeply personal battle cry for individualism. From Aristotle to Oakeshott, Williamson is unflinching in his treatment of humanity’s tribalist and authoritarian impulses and unsparing in illuminating how they manifest in today’s culture.
Williamson draws from John Stuart Mill to ground his thesis in an indictment of blind faith in democracy. “Mill was rightly worried about the encroachment of government,” he writes, “about the need for formal limitations on governmental powers, the ‘tyranny of the majority,’ and the other inevitable abuses of democracy. But he was also apprehensive about informal illiberalism, the non-governmental suppression of ideas, discourse, and social experimentation by a ruthlessly if unofficially enforced conformism.” Williamson couldn’t have selected a more appropriate intellectual, and not because of Mill’s Harm Principle.
Mill wrestled with individual sovereignty in a time where the middle classes began to flex the newfound muscle of their opinions through newspapers, the 19th-century version of “new media.” A prolific writer, Mill repeatedly argued that mass public opinion would enervate intellectual discourse. In his personal life, Mill was in love with another man’s wife (whom he would eventually marry and dedicate On Liberty to) in Victorian England, hardly an “anything goes” society. He was most certainly subject to social blowback for contravening accepted norms. In short, Mill did his most important work from the radical edge of politics and polite society. (No, Williamson isn’t Mill—but does this sound familiar?)
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