Alfred North Whitehead on the possible tyranny of a majority

    As Lucien Price tells it,

Whitehead remarked that among the eighteenth-century thinkers there was a clear prevision that the tyranny of a majority might be more onerous than that of a despot. Continuing, Whitehead said, “Historians never sufficiently credit the man who averts a catastrophe. I am thinking of Augustus Caesar. It has always been a marvel to me that Rome could produce, just when they were most wanted, two such men of genius as Julius and Augustus.” (Quoted from page 122 of Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, as recorded by Lucien Price, Little, Brown and Company, 1953.)

    For a brief biography of Alfred North Whitehead, click here.