Alexis de Tocqueville
Thinker · 1805-1859 · Politics, stage 3: Meet the thinkers
Studied democracy as a social condition rather than a form of government, and asked what equality does to independent judgement.
Overview
Tocqueville was a French aristocrat who travelled through the United States in 1831 on a commission to study its prisons, and produced instead a two-volume account of a society organised around equality of condition. He treats the levelling of ranks as an irreversible historical movement rather than an American peculiarity, and asks what it does to families, religion, law, literature and ambition. His best-known arguments concern the tyranny of the majority, the danger that a society of equals enforces conformity of opinion more effectively than any censor could, and the part played by voluntary associations, local self-government and independent courts in preventing that. He also wrote plainly about slavery and about the destruction of Native American nations as facts the American experiment could not be separated from. Volume One is the more descriptive and the better place to begin.
Where to start reading
Democracy in America, Volume 1 1835
The descriptive volume: American federal and local institutions, the press, juries, parties, and the danger of majority tyranny.
Democracy in America, Volume 2 1840
The more speculative volume, on what equality of condition does to opinion, taste, family life and ambition.
The Old Regime and the Revolution 1856
An archival study arguing that the French Revolution completed the centralisation the monarchy had already begun, rather than breaking with it.
Part of
Sources
- Alexis de Tocqueville Wikipedia
- Democracy in America Wikipedia
