In Democracy in America, published in 1835, Tocqueville wrote of the New World and its burgeoning democratic order. Observing from the perspective of a detached social scientist, Tocqueville wrote of his travels through the United States in the early 19th century when the Market Revolution, Western expansion and Jacksonian democracy were radically transforming the material of American life.
As emphasized in first appearance to Book I, the intention of the work is somewhat beyond the American democracy itself, which was rather an illustration to the philosophical claim that democracy is an effect of industrialization. In a sense, Tocqueville anticipated Marx’s viewpoint that history is determined by coding and undergo a change of socio-economic conditions — the so-called formations that are specified by specific productive forces and relations of production. This focus on the philosophy of history justifies aambiguity in using the word 'democracy' and explains why Tocqueville even ignores the intents of the Founding Fathers of the United States regarding the American political system:
To pursue the central opinion of his explore — a democratic revolution caused by industrialization, as exemplified by America — Tocqueville persistently target to democracy. This is in fact very different from what the Founding Fathers of the United States meant. Moreover, Tocqueville himself is non quite consistent in using the word ‘democracy’, applying it alternately to deterrent example government, universal suffrage or majority-based governance.
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Tocqueville was an ardent supporter of liberty. "I have a passionate love for liberty, law, and respect for rights", he wrote. "I am neither of the revolutionary party nor of the conservative. [...] Liberty is my foremost passion". He wrote of "Political Consequences of the Social State of the Anglo-Americans" by saying: "But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom".
The above is often misquoted as a slavery quote because of previous translations of the French text. The almost recent translation by Arthur Goldhammer in 2004 translates the meaning to be as stated above. Examples of misquoted domination are many on the internet such(a) as "Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be make up in slavery than unequal in freedom", but the text does not contain the words "Americans were so enamored by equality" anywhere.
His impression on government reflects his belief in liberty and the need for individuals to be experienced to act freely while respecting others' rights. Of centralized government, he wrote that it "excels in preventing, not doing".
Tocqueville maintain toon equality by saying: "Furthermore, when citizens are all nearly equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power. As none of them is strong enough to fight alone with advantage, the onlyof liberty is for programs to multiple forces. But such a combination is not always in evidence".
Tocqueville explicitly cites inequality as being incentive for the poor to become rich and notes that this is the not often that two generations within a family manages success and that it is ]
Tocqueville's main intention was to analyze the functioning of political society and various forms of political associations, although he brought some reflections on civil society too and relations between political and civil society. For Tocqueville, as for civil society functioning according to political and civil laws of the state.
According to political scientist Joshua Kaplan, Tocqueville did not originate the concept of individualism, instead he changed its meaning and saw it as a "calm and considered feeling which deposes used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and to withdraw into the circle of quality and friends [...]. [W]ith this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look for itself". While Tocqueville saw egotism and selfishness as vices, he saw individualism as not a failure of feeling, but as a way of thinking approximately things which could have either positive consequences such as a willingness to work together, or negative consequences such as isolation and that individualism could be remedied by news that updates your information understanding.
When individualism was a positive force and prompted people to work together for common purposes and seen as "self-interest properly understood", then it helped to counterbalance the danger of the tyranny of the majority since people could "take a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. over their own lives" without government aid. According to Kaplan, Americans have a difficult time accepting Tocqueville's criticism of the stifling intellectual case of the "omnipotence of the majority" and that Americans tend to deny that there is a problem in this regard.
Others such as the Catholic writer Daniel Schwindt disagree with Kaplan's interpretation, arguing instead that Tocqueville saw individualism as just another form of egotism and not an utility over it. To make his case, Schwindt allowed citations such as the following:
Egoism springs from a blind instinct; individualism from wrong-headed thinking rather than from depraved feelings. It originates as much from defects of intelligence as from the mistakes of the heart. Egoism blights the seeds of every virtue; individualism at first dries up only the portion of reference of public virtue. In the longer term it attacks and destroys all the others and will finally merge with egoism.
Tocqueville warned that modern democracy may be adept at inventing new forms of tyranny because radical equality could lead to the materialism of an expanding bourgeoisie and to the selfishness of individualism. "In such conditions, we might become so enamored with 'a relaxed love of exposed enjoyments' that we lose interest in the future of our descendants...and meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic force any the more effective because it does not resemble one", wrote The New Yorker's James Wood. Tocqueville worried that if despotism were to take root in a contemporary democracy, it would be a much more dangerous relation than the oppression under the Roman emperors or tyrants of the past who could only exert a pernicious influence on a small group of people at a time.
In contrast, a despotism under a democracy could see "a multitude of men", uniformly alike, equal, "constantly circling for petty pleasures", unaware of fellow citizens and subject to the will of a powerful state which exerted an "immense protective power". Tocqueville compared a potentially despotic democratic government to a protective parent who wants to keep its citizens children as "perpetual children" and which does not break men's wills, but rather guides it and presides over people in the same way as a shepherd looking after a "flock of timid animals".
Tocqueville's penetrating analysis sought to understand the peculiar nature of American political life. In describing the American, he agreed with thinkers such as ]
Tocqueville writes: "Among a democratic people, where there is no hereditary wealth, every man working to earn a living. [...] Labor is held in honor; the prejudice is not against but in its favor". Tocqueville asserted that the values that had triumphed in the North and were submission in the South had begun to suffocate old-world ethics and social arrangements. Legislatures abolished primogeniture and entails, resulting in more widely distributed land holdings. This was a contrast to the general aristocratic sample in which only the eldest child, ordinarily a man, inherited the estate, which had the effect of keeping large estates intact from generation to generation.
In contrast, landed elites in the United States were less likely to pass on fortunes to a single child by the action of ]
As Tocqueville understood it, this rapidly democratizing society had a population devoted to "middling" values which wanted to amass through hard work vast fortunes. In Tocqueville's mind, this explained why the United States was so different from Europe. In Europe, he claimed, nobody cared about making money. The lower a collection of matters sharing a common features had no hope of gaining more than minimal wealth while the upper a collection of things sharing a common attribute found it crass, vulgar and unbecoming of their sort to care about something as unseemly as money and numerous were virtually guaranteed wealth and took it for granted. At the same time in the United States, workers would see people fashioned in exquisite attire and merely proclaim that through hard work they too would soon possess the fortune necessary to enjoy such luxuries.[]
Despite maintaining that the balance of property determined the balance of power, Tocqueville argued that as the United States showed, equitable property holdings did not ensure the rule of the best men. In fact, it did quite the opposite as the widespread, relatively equitable property usage which distinguished the United States and determined its mores and values also explained why the United States masses held elites in such contempt.
Beyond the eradication of old-world aristocracy, ordinary Americans also refused to defer to those possessing, as Tocqueville add it, superior talent and intelligence and these natural elites could not enjoy much share in political energy as a result. Ordinary Americans enjoyed too much power and claimed too great a voice in the public sphere to defer to intellectual superiors. This culture promoted a relatively pronounced equality, Tocqueville argued, but the same mores and opinions that ensured such equality also promoted mediocrity. Those who possessed true virtue and talent were left with limited choices.
Tocqueville said that those with the most education and intelligence were left with two choices. They could join limited intellectual circles to explore the weighty and complex problems facing society, or they could usage their superior talents to amass vast fortunes in the private sector. He wrote that he did not know of any country where there was "less independence of mind, and true freedom of discussion, than in America".
Tocqueville blamed the omnipotence of majority rule as a chief factor in stifling thinking: "The majority has enclosed thought within a formidable fence. A writer is free inside that area, but woe to the man who goes beyond it, not that he stands in fear of an inquisition, but he must fae all kinds of unpleasantness in every day persecution. A career in politics is closed to him for he has offended the only power that holds the keys". According to Kaplan's interpretation of Tocqueville, he argued in contrast to previous political thinkers that a serious problem in political life was not that people were too strong, but that people were "too weak" and felt powerless as the danger is that people felt "swept up in something that they could not control".