The Idea of the Majority

Abstract: In the nineteenth century, the concept of the majority became a newly important way of organizing thought and perception in part because it tied together debates regarding logic, socialism, statistics, religion, and, above all, democracy. Amid controversies about the extension of the electoral franchise, the political principle of majority vote in collective decision-making became the basis of new epistemic and ontological assumptions, even as those assumptions reshaped political notions about the aims and limitations of democracy. The range of contradictory uses, grounds, and alleged tendencies of thinking in terms of the majority added to and drew on tensions within the idea of majority vote itself. In Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), the preoccupation with the majority is ultimately not just thematic; it also organizes the character-system, narrative structure, and reference, forming part of the nineteenth-century novel’s complex engagement with democracy.