Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian known for his work "Democracy in America," which analyzed the American political system and society. He highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of democracy, emphasizing the potential for individualism and the tyranny of the majority. Tocqueville's insights continue to be influential in the study of democratic governance and societal dynamics.
8 Key excerpts on "Alexis de Tocqueville"
eBook - ePub- James T. Schleifer(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...Introduction: Tocqueville's Basic Message and His Intellectual Journey Alexis de Tocqueville's fame as a political and social theorist rests on two books, Democracy in America, published in two parts in 1835 and 1840, and The Old Regime and the Revolution, published in 1856 near the end of his life. In those works, his essential message is the providential advance of democracy (or equality) in the modern world and the concurrent demise of the old aristocratic order. Tocqueville attempts to define democracy, sketch its march forward, and reveal the potential consequences, both good and bad, of the ongoing democratic revolution. His constant twin goals are, first, to show his readers how to develop and sustain democratic societies that are stable, free, and prosperous, and, second, to persuade his readers to take responsibility for moving toward that first elusive goal. Various traits, habitual to Tocqueville, should be kept in mind. He insisted on the interrelatedness of all aspects of society and carefully traced the many ways in which increasing democracy influenced all areas of civil and political society, including how it transformed human attitudes and behavior. He also characteristically avoided final answers and definitive solutions. Instead, he raised enduring questions about the likely impact of democracy on the contemporary world and offered a perceptive catalogue of probable results and possible responses. Tocqueville does not fit the usual categories as a theorist. He called for “a new political science … for a world entirely new.” 1 And, in his two master works, he presented a number of original ideas and perspectives that we will examine later. He also assumed an arguably exaggerated stance of impartiality, claiming to speak for no particular political party or viewpoint...
eBook - ePub- Gregory Claeys(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- CQ Press(Publisher)
...Tocqueville’s ideas have become central to the way both America and France understand themselves as well as to many contemporary understandings of democratic society. Beyond his easy quotability, beyond the decline of Marxism, there is a reason why Tocqueville is popular today. Tocqueville’s attempt to understand democracy is what makes him so valuable to thinkers and politicians alike. His discussion of the threats to freedom in democratic societies, and the remedies to those threats, has proved to be of lasting interest in the postcommunist world. Even if he would not always agree with their interpretations of his thought, Tocqueville would certainly not have objected to contemporary efforts to adapt his work to the task of encouraging freedom today. Chief among these efforts is perhaps his discussion of the role of private associations in promoting freedom in democratic societies. Through the idea of association, Tocqueville is central to modern discussions of “civil society,” those aspects of society independent of the state and of religion. Indeed, he would have felt deeply flattered at the relevance of his ideas. But flattered as he might be, it is hard to imagine him being any less concerned today than when he died in 1859 for the future of freedom. Insofar as Tocqueville has remained relevant, it is because we too live in a democratic world where the future of freedom is not assured. Alan Kahan See also American Political Thought ; Civil Society ; Democratic Theory ; Equality and Egalitarianism ; French Political Thought ; French Revolution, Political Thought of the ; Individualism ; Liberty, Theories of ; Montesquieu, Baron de ; Nineteenth-Century Political Thought ; Progress ; Religion and Western Political Thought ; Republicanism ; Revolution ; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques ; State, Theories of the Further Readings Tocqueville’s own works are readily available in both French and English...
eBook - ePubMain Currents in Sociological Thought: Volume One
Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, De Tocqueville: The Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848
- Raymond Aron(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In both cases, the stability of the state is based on the discipline of its citizens and on the predominant influence which manners and beliefs exert on the conduct of individuals. Such, broadly summarized, is the theory of American liberal democracy outlined by Tocqueville. Let me repeat: he was by no means an entirely enthusiastic or uncritical admirer of American society or democracy. Tocqueville, who, at bottom, retained a hierarchy of values borrowed from the class to which he belonged or from which he was descended, i.e., the French aristocracy, was sensitive to the mediocrity which characterizes a civilization of this kind. He brought to modern democracy neither the enthusiasm of those who expected from it a transfiguration of the human lot nor the hostility of those who saw in it no less than the very decomposition of human society. Democracy, for him, was justified by the fact that it strove for the well-being of the greatest number; but this well-being would be without brilliance or grandeur, and it would always be attended by risks. Chief among these appear to be the following. Every democracy tends toward centralization and therefore toward a kind of despotism which is capable of degenerating into tyranny. Democracy is in perennial danger of a tyranny of the majority. Every democratic regime postulates that the majority is right, and it is sometimes difficult to prevent a majority from abusing its victory and oppressing the minority. Democracy, Tocqueville continued, tends to propagate the spirit of flattery, though it is understood that the sovereign whom the candidates for office will flatter is the people and not the monarch. But to flatter the popular sovereign is no better than to flatter the monarchical sovereign...
eBook - ePub- Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey, Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...Alexis de Tocqueville 1805–1859 The publication in 1835 of the first part of Democracy in America established Alexis de Tocqueville as one of the foremost analysts of the problem of democracy. Tocqueville was the first writer of modern times to undertake a comprehensive investigation of the way in which the democratic principle, equality, functions as a first cause, shaping or affecting every aspect of life within society. Tocqueville’s approach to the study of political things appears as a departure from the method of those political writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who began their inquiries with the study of man simply, irrespective of his citizenship in a particular regime. For Tocqueville, the study of politics begins with an inquiry into social condition. Social condition is commonly the result of circumstances, sometimes of laws, oftener still of these two causes united; but when once established, it may justly be considered as itself the source of almost all the laws, the usages, and the ideas which regulate the conduct of nations; whatever it does not produce, it modifies. 1 Tocqueville’s Democracy is explicitly devoted to an exposition of the way in which a particular social condition, a condition of equality, has made itself felt in the political institutions of the nation, and in the customs, manners, and intellectual habits of the citizens. Social condition is the cause of a regime having its own particular characteristics. This is not to say that social condition explains everything about a society, for antecedent customs and geographical factors, among others, also play a role in shaping the regime. But in no enduring case will these secondary factors conceal or frustrate the operation of the fundamental moving principle...
- Adam Possamai, Anthony J. Blasi, Adam Possamai, Anthony J. Blasi(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...Aaron Herold Aaron Herold Herold, Aaron Tocqueville, Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexis de 852 854 Tocqueville, Alexis de French author, statesman, and political scientist, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) is best known for his 1830 visit to the United States, resulting in the publication of his two-volume work Democracy in America. Widely cited for his analysis of democratic politics in that country as well as for his later account of the historical causes of the French Revolution (The Old Regime and the Revolution), Tocqueville is sometimes considered among the first sociologists, and one distinguished by his positive view of religion. He viewed democracy, which he defined as equality of conditions, as a social state that does not necessarily entail any particular political arrangements. He believed it could accompany freedom and human greatness as well as tyranny and mediocrity, and he presented religion as a vital ally for helping steer democracy toward the former and away from the latter. Tocqueville, however, discussed religion as a sociological, a political, and a psychological phenomenon, and he saw religion and democracy as mutually influencing each other. In the introduction to Democracy, Tocqueville describes the growth of social equality as a slowly developing bottom-up phenomenon—a claim he would repeat in The Old Regime, where he described the egalitarian changes in French society predating the Revolution. Tocqueville calls democracy the generative fact of equality of conditions. It is simply the absence of aristocratic hierarchy (it does not require respect for rights or other features of liberal politics), but it determines almost every aspect of the societies where it is present. To Tocqueville, the gradual development of social equality is linked to religion in complex ways...
eBook - ePubPolitical Thought in the Age of Revolution 1776-1848
Burke to Marx
- Michael Levin(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...John Stuart Mill wrote a glowing review of Democracy in America, and his own thought was much influenced by it. In his own country, Tocqueville, as we have noted, achieved high political office and was elected a member of French Academy and became President of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. Tocqueville is now rightly accepted as one of the founders of French sociology, though this was not the accepted view in the nineteenth century, when the influence of Auguste Comte and then Emile Durkheim was very much greater. After his death, then, Tocqueville’s writings went out of fashion, though it is clear that his depiction of mass society found strong echoes in the writings of John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gustave Le Bon in the nineteenth century, and Ortegay Gasset, C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse in the twentieth. With the rise of totalitarianism, Tocqueville’s writings appeared particularly illuminating. His analysis of the social basis of freedom came to provide the means of understanding modern tyranny, particularly through a focus on the significance of ‘intermediate powers’. As these disappear, a mass society emerges and, in the 1950s writings of Hannah Arendt and William Kornhauser, this was taken to be the social base from which both German nazism and Russian communism emerged. We have seen that Tocqueville’s concept of a revolution of rising expectations was made in respect of the fall of the Bourbons in 1789, but in the last two decades, this notion has also been applied to the fall of communism. Communism, on this account, partly fell because, with Gorbachev, it sought to mend its ways and so created expectations it could not satisfy. Then, to fortify their newly won freedom, post-communist societies were advised to cultivate a healthy ‘civil society’...
eBook - ePubThe Philosophy of Legal Change
Theoretical Perspectives and Practical Processes
- Maciej Chmieliński, Michał Rupniewski, Maciej Chmieliński, Michał Rupniewski(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Information on the Alexis de Tocqueville Center of Political and Legal Thought The Alexis de Tocqueville Center of Political and Legal Thought is a researched unit within the Faculty of Law and Administration at the University of Łód ź. The Center draws from the ideas and intellectual heritage of the author of Democracy in America. This heritage combines two traditions that dominate today, conservatism and liberalism, with the Christian vision of Western identity and the republican ethos of civic participation. It derives political, institutional and legal reflection from the analysis of actual social relations and avoids constructing any a priori, abstract and rationalist models of public life. It views the main values of today such as liberty, equality, democracy, the rule of law, efficiency of state authority, civil society and self government as being far from harmonious. It leaves room for axiological skepticism, inspires the dissemination of ideas and demands epistemological objectivism. In all its endeavors the Center treats this heritage as important for both civic attitudes and research projects....
eBook - ePub- Pierre Manent, Rebecca Balinski(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
...The social state defines the negative moment of democracy, the people’s sovereignty defines its positive one. Such an analysis has considerable consequences for the interpretation of modern societies. It implies that the distinction between civil society and the political institution is not fundamental; both are only what they are, and are distinguished only to accomplish a common project. This project, in itself, is neither social nor political: it includes “the greater part of human actions.” The sight of democracy in America thus leads Tocqueville to question the founding categories of the liberal doctrine. Tocqueville’s idea of democracy focuses essentially on something that belongs to neither the civil nor the political order, but is earlier and more fundamental. It is a particular type of relationship among men that is defined, paradoxically, by the absence of relationship. Here is what he writes about the “extreme outcome” of democracy: It is in the West that one can see democracy in its most extreme form. In these states, in some sense improvisations of fortune, the inhabitants have arrived only yesterday in the land where they dwell. They hardly know one another, and each man is ignorant of his nearest neighbor’s history. So in that part of the American continent the population escapes the influence not only of great names and great wealth but also of the natural aristocracy of education and probity…. There are inhabitants already in the new states of the West, but not as yet a society. 7 The important word here is influence. Ever since men have lived in society, these societies have been held together only through influence, by the effect that men have on each other. The keener and more diverse this influence, the more civilized the society and the more man develops his faculties...
