Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant-society, collectively over the separate individuals who compose it-its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionary. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead or right, or mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by means other than civil penalties, its own ideas and rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development and, if possible prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to themselves upon the model of its own. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
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