Politics & Power Quote by John Stuart Mill

Mill is doing something slyly pragmatic here: defending friction. In an era when political argument was sliding toward moral absolutism, he insists that a functioning democracy needs two rival temperaments institutionalized - one that slows things down, one that speeds them up. It reads like moderation, but it is not a plea for mushy centrism. It is a theory of how societies avoid two equal disasters: paralysis dressed up as “stability,” and reckless overhaul sold as “progress.”

The intent is structural. Mill isn’t asking citizens to split the difference; he’s arguing that each side performs an essential civic service the other cannot. The party of order forces reforms to prove they can survive contact with reality: costs, unintended consequences, the stubbornness of custom. The party of progress keeps “order” from becoming a polite name for entrenched advantage. Under the surface is Mill’s broader liberal anxiety: power, left unchecked, calcifies; energy, left unchecked, burns. So you need organized resistance to both tendencies.

Context matters. Mid-19th century Britain was absorbing the shocks of industrialization, urban poverty, and expanding suffrage, with memories of the French Revolution still shaping elite fear of upheaval. Mill, a reformer who also distrusted majoritarian tyranny, is trying to design a political ecosystem where conflict is productive rather than existential. The rhetorical trick is calling both camps “necessary elements,” not enemies. He normalizes disagreement as a feature of health - a radical move in a culture that often treats the opposing side as proof the system is broken.