ABSTRACT
Problems of government and governance were at the heart of John Stuart Mill's life and work. Mill's views on the great questions of government and governance did not remain static but developed and changed, along with his personal development. Mill recognized with growing clarity that the growth of communications, and especially of the press, prepared the way for increased domination by public opinion. Logically, Mill's work on government should have been part of his general sociology. It should have been empirical and inductive, or at least inductive-deductive. But Mill did not write a Democracy in America, empirically examining the way in which the actual political institutions of a particular democracy functioned in a given historical situation; that task was left to his friend Tocqueville. Nor did Mill produce an empirical study of despotism, an aristocracy, a nationality, or a colonial dependency, or even a history of India or the French Revolution.
