Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville

After returning to France in 1832, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his most famous work, Democracy in America. One of the earliest and most profound studies of American life, it concerns the legislative and administrative systems in the U.S. and the influence of social and political institutions on the behavior of the people. Tocqueville maintains in this work that the full development of democracy occurred in the U.S. because conditions there best permitted the diffusion of European social ideas. He was highly critical of certain aspects of American democracy. Tocqueville feared popular government because he believed that public opinion tended toward tyranny and that majority rule could be as oppressive as the rule of a tyrant.

The reason popular government worked in the U.S. is because there was a system of shared values. Factions were being moved as people began sharing the same values. Horace Greeley’s proposal of public education taught America’s children shared values. It was a republican solution to a republican problem.

Today, it is a common belief that everything is dissolving and individualism is endangering the republic. It is also a common belief that, today, political commitment is not as strong as it used to be. One of the reasons for this could be the fact that the U.S. does not have such a sense of unity that it once did in years of war. War brings unity against the enemy. Now that the U.S. is in the middle of a peaceful era, its citizens are out for the better of themselves in order to succeed. Yet, the U.S. has been able to prevent tyranny of the majority ever since the start of its existence. Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, argued throughout his essay that the “eminently democratic” nature of America would prevent the rise of an Aristocracy. Alexis went on to support his cause by describing how laws supporting “equal partition of property” would weaken the power of the rich. However, it was our...