The Threat Of Liberty Equality Based Societies By Alexis De Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville was born on July 29, 1805, in Paris, France. He was a historian, political scientist, and a politician, but he is best known as the author of Democracy in America. He began his political career as an apprentice magistrate, a role he was easily able to enter into due to his father’s role in French government. In the role of apprentice magistrate, Tocqueville witnessed the constitutional upheaval between the conservatives and liberals in France. With the inevitable decline of the aristocratic privilege on the horizon, he began to study the English political development. For Tocqueville, the July Revolution of 1830 and the resulting kingship of Louis Philippe of Orleans helped

The state of American politics is clearly unique, given its early focus on democracy in a world of monarchical and aristocratic governments. As it was a seemingly ideal government, it had its shortcomings, as Kammen describes. Tocqueville, on the other hand, argues for the positive side of American politics, that the lack of superiority eventually contributed to the democratic republic that the United States eventually became.

Due to the lack of a class which would be able to lead with society's

I chose these chapters to read and analyze because they dissect the mind of Tocqueville as he internally weighed the pros and cons of a democracy versus an aristocracy. He displays the positive aspects of a democracy, as well as the negative counterparts, along with what he approves of and what changes he could possibly make to better the American system of government. Coming from an aristocratic background, Tocqueville challenges himself to open his mind to the idea of a legislation ruled by the people. Initially he believes it to be inevitable, and eventually he embraces democracy in America. Tocqueville points out that a democracy is more for humanity than an aristocracy because a democratic government incorporates the interests of the poor

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is a 1835 masterpiece about the growth of democracy and the gradual disappearance of aristocracy. In attempts to help the French understand the concept about this new form of government, he wrote the document talking about the New World where the people rule instead of the nobles and kings. Two main differentiations are discussed: selfishness versus individualism and aristocracy versus democracy.

“I hold it to be impious and detestable maxim, that, politically speaking, the people have a right to do anything; and yet I have asserted that all authority originates in the will of the majority. Am I, then, in contradiction with myself? Alexis de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and writer. Alexis began his research for Democracy in America after being sent to the United States from France to learn about the new countries prison system. He arrived in the United States in 1831, it was the age of Andrew Jackson, Indian relocation, westward expansion, and high tension between the North and South over slavery, which would eventually lead to the Civil war. While Tocqueville was in the United States it was a crucial time in world history, because many governments in the western we're shifting from the aristocratic order of the world to a more democratic order in the new.

One reason he believed that democracy may be a poor fit for Europe is that European is more complicated in comparison to American Society therefore not providing adequate conditions for observation. One of the ways that Europe is seen by Tocqueville to be complicated in as mentioned in”

Our modern conceptions of liberty, especially in the context of political thought, pull heavily from the 19th century writings of France’s Alexis de Tocqueville and Britain’s John Stuart Mill. Germany’s Karl Marx, who was a contemporary of the two thinkers in the 19th century, has also had an effect on our thoughts concerning the admittedly abstract idea of liberty. However, his impact on our perceptions of liberty is maybe less pronounced than Tocqueville and Mill, especially in the context of American political thought, primarily because his revolutionary and divergent views on liberty. (His thoughts on liberty, along with those on other topics, were later dismissed and then opposed by the American government.) That said, of the three

The amount of government intervention in people’s everyday lives has always been a disputed topic. Prominent 19th century French thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, had very different values on the amount of government support to its population than early 20th century American philosopher John Dewey. Tocqueville was not against government trying to help its citizenry, but realized that the United States’ version of democracy has a unique set of flaws. He saw these flaws as exploitable, and focused mainly on the idea of “soft despotism”, a problem unique to democracies that leads the government to coddle its people. A little under a century later, renowned American philosopher John Dewey argued for his new theory of renascent liberalism.

From when Tocqueville first visited America in the 19th century, he fell infatuated with the idea of democracy and all it had to offer to its people. The colonial towns of New England possessed the ideals of a utopian society, a giant step ahead from the aristocracy that had just crumbled to pieces in his native French land. As his time grew in America and as he explored further and further into the vast new regime of democracy, he realized it wasn’t all it was praised to be. By the end of his book, Democracy in America, he stated that he was indeed weary of what democracy had to offer and that it was not the solution he was in search for to bring back to France. Even though, he persistently claims that equality is not the sole reason for which he fears a democratic society, his work supports that equality is at the source of all incidents in which democracy can go wrong.

The ideal of a democracy, like the one developed by the Americans since 1776, lies in the fact that Men were born equals. This principle of equality has been the foundation of Tocqueville’s thought. All along this book, we can notice that the causes that enable the democratic state of America to be, lies on the particular situation of this country. Indeed, America lives under a pure democracy, without any aristocratic inheritance or revolutionary passions. This country has laws, recognized and applied by “almost” everybody. However, the country also has habits and morals deeply integrated (brought about by the diverse immigration) and particularly powerful.

French writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, examines democratic revolutions where he describes his opinions about what occurred over the past seven hundred years. One of Tocqueville’s greatest pieces of literature is that of Democracy in America. Before we look deeper into Tocqueville’s two-volume study, we must learn some background information about this man and the things he has done in order to gain the knowledge to write such an impactful political book.

Regardless of his influences, Tocqueville’s most serious concern is that democracy may give rise to certain forms of despotism. “Without local institutions…the despotic tendencies which have been driven into the interior of the social body will sooner or later break out on the surface.” In the introductory chapter to “Democracy in America,” Tocqueville expresses his famous opinion that the movement of the history of Christendom over the course of the previous 700 years has invariably been in the direction of democratic equality. This is the foundation of Tocqueville’s “inevitability theory.” He implies that democracy in inevitable in the same way that the spread of civilization and enlightenment are inevitable.

     Tocqueville believes that history progresses with the inevitable growth of equality of conditions, and he sees America as the furthest progression of this growth. The extraordinary level of equality can be both a help and a hindrance to freedom. “On the one hand, one cannot have complete freedom. “As social conditions become more equal, the number increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants.“1 “Yet at the same time, Tocqueville recognizes than in almost every situation, freedom is endangered by an overly ardent passion for equality.”3 “This, independently of equality itself, tends powerfully to divide men, to lead them to mistrust the judgment of others, and to seek the light of truth nowhere but in their own understandings.”1

Similarly, French political scientist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, in his book Democracy in America, a commentary on American life in the early 19th Century, explains equality and its importance in American society. Tocqueville wrote, “as no one is different from his fellows… men will be perfectly free because they are all entirely equal” (Tocqueville 94). While there are a few flaws in Tocqueville’s statement, mainly that not all men were equal in the early 19th Century, as slavery was still legal and practiced, equality was, in some ways, achieved. Coming from a French aristocracy, the fact that all white, landowning men over the age of twenty one could vote, was equality. In an aristocracy, only the aristocrats—the elites— made the decisions that affected the entire nation, even though they represented the minority. When analyzing Tocqueville, looking at his view of