Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America in two parts, in 1835 and 1840, following a nine-month trip through the United States in 1831-32 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. Tocqueville was twenty-five when he traveled, thirty when the first volume appeared. The work is an analysis of American democratic society rather than a travel memoir. Tocqueville uses what he observed in the United States to develop a theory of democratic social conditions and their implications for political liberty, social equality, and cultural life. He regarded democracy as an irreversible historical development that European societies would have to accommodate, and wanted to understand its effects clearly before it arrived fully in France.
Tocqueville's most persistent concern is the specific threat to liberty that he believed democracies generate: not the tyranny of a single oppressor but what he called the "tyranny of the majority", the tendency of democratic culture to produce conformity of opinion, to marginalize dissent through social pressure rather than legal coercion, and to create what he called "soft despotism," in which citizens delegate their freedom to a benevolent government that manages their welfare in exchange for their political passivity. The prediction, that democratic societies would produce isolated individuals who no longer valued political engagement, governed by a mild tutelary power that kept them "fixed irrevocably in childhood", was not a description of 1835 America but a projection from tendencies he observed there.
Tocqueville's concept of soft despotism is frequently cited in contemporary discussions of technocratic governance, the welfare state, and political apathy. Whether his description of American exceptionalism, the habits of association, the decentralized institutions, the religious culture he credited with sustaining civic virtue, still describes the United States is a question that makes the text productive rather than merely historical. His warnings about what democracy was liable to become have been used by both conservatives and liberals, which suggests either that the analysis is politically neutral or that the contradictions he identified are structural enough to support genuinely different responses.
Tocqueville visited America for only 9 months yet produced one of the most enduring analyses of democracy ever written.
This book is in the public domain , its copyright has expired, meaning it now belongs to everyone. All books on EbookVaultFree are sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library. Downloading them is 100% legal, free, and requires no sign-up.