ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses the controversial status of majority tyranny in political theory during the second half of the twentieth century. As Robert Dahl’s A Preface to Democratic Theory foreshadowed in 1956, most experts either questioned the very possibility of majority tyranny or treated it as a historical phenomenon happily superseded by the progress of liberal democracy. Exceptions were found on the political left in the 1960s (most notably in Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance), but also in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, which the chapter investigates from this – in Rawls’ case unusual – angle. The end of the chapter also notes how the issue of moral and opinion minorities became to some extent overshadowed by an emphasis on more stable minorities better protected by constitutional guarantees, thereby creating the illusion that the problem of majority tyranny belonged to the past.
