India, Sept. 5 -- Many, like one of the founding fathers of liberalism, John Stuart Mill, thought that the tyranny of the majority to be feared was often the tyranny of the uneducated majority. This was part of the reason why Mill advocated more political say in public affairs for the educated. A dim view of the less educated was shared by many other early liberal thinkers, like Voltaire and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It was scarcely conceivable to these liberal thinkers that the educated elite would emerge as a very powerful block in liberal democracy, ruling from the commanding heights of business, government, bureaucracy, and civil society.

Liberalism's tensions paled in comparison to the agenda of constraining the power of unelected mon...