The purpose of this research is to examine the thought of Plato, Locke, and Mill on the subject of political authority, from the perspective of western liberal democracy. The plan of the research will be to set forth a working definition of western liberal democracy and political authority and then to discuss ways in which Plato's Republic, Locke's Second Treatise of Government, and Mill's Essay on Liberty explain the basis on which states and their rulers achieve or should achieve and maintain authority and legitimacy with their people.
To speak of Western liberal democracy is to speak of such concepts as individual freedom of thought, property, and action, equality of all persons before the law, representative government, open social and political discourse, and a history of relatively stable social structures amid transfer or sharing of and competition for political power within a political structure broadly accepted and publicly understood as having legitimacy and social value. These concepts are commonplaces of political discourse and rhetoric in the West in the modern period because their attributes are so readily identifiable with lived political and social experience and can be so readily contrasted with the political and social experience of so many non-Western peoples, as well as with the experience of Western peoples (say, in the former Yugoslavia) of unstable or repressive regimes. As Huntington (x) remarks of the democratic transition in Taiwan and of the contemporaneous demise of the Soviet system in recent years, "in a global sense, almost no one is against democracy; in that respect democracy has clearly won the war of ideas." Political authority under such conditions derives from a rule of law that is systematically applied and that is not destabilized owing to irrevocable challenges to that power. Democracy by its nature not only obliges tolerance of diverse opinions in this regard but is predicated of competition ...