Democracy in America

If the levelling of ranks cannot be stopped, what is left to choose? Everything that matters, Tocqueville answers: whether equality arrives with liberty or with a new kind of servitude.

Equality of conditions, the wearing away of rank and inherited privilege, had been advancing in Europe for seven centuries, and Tocqueville treated it as a fact no one could reverse. He wrote as a nobleman whose parents had barely escaped the guillotine, and he told his own class that resistance was useless. The book was written for France about America: the United States showed a people already without ranks, and so showed in advance which of the two outcomes a democratic people might reach.

• democracy
• equality
• social equality
• aristocracy
• social change
• social class
• social hierarchy
• revolution

What keeps a people of equals from surrendering its freedom? The American answer, as Tocqueville read it, lay in institutions that made citizens run their own affairs.

Americans governed themselves in townships, sat on juries, read a free press, kept their churches apart from the state, and formed an association for every purpose. Tocqueville presented these as the means by which equality could remain free, each of them drawing citizens out of private life and into common action. Their value was practical rather than theoretical: they showed that a society without an aristocracy could still keep power in many hands instead of gathering it into one.

• local government
• federalism
• political institutions
• popular sovereignty
• political liberty
• liberty
• religion
• religion and politics
• law

Can a people be unfree when every law is made by its own majority? Tocqueville's warning is that a majority can silence dissent without passing any law at all.

Where the people is sovereign, the power to be feared is the people's own. Tocqueville saw that a majority governing opinion as well as legislation can make dissent costly without forbidding it, so that a minority falls silent of its own accord and no court finds anything to strike down. The danger is harder to resist than a king's because it carries the authority of everyone. John Stuart Mill reviewed both volumes and carried the tyranny of the majority into On Liberty in 1859.

• majority rule
• public opinion
• political power

What happens to citizens who ask only to be left to their private affairs? Tocqueville feared they would hand the rest to a mild, all-providing government that keeps them in permanent childhood.

The despotism Tocqueville feared for democratic peoples was not a tyrant's. It would be mild, and it would rest on two things the book found together: citizens withdrawn into private life, and a government glad to provide whatever they no longer did for themselves. Such a power need terrorise no one; it keeps its subjects in permanent childhood and relieves them of the trouble of governing. Because the threat grows out of equality itself, the book sets it beside the remedies America had found.

• despotism
• centralization
• executive power
• materialism
• commerce
• ambition