Alexis de Tocqueville

Dzieła

• 1835O demokracji w Ameryce

  Dwa tomy (1835, 1840) o Stanach Zjednoczonych jako laboratorium równości: gminy, stowarzyszenia, tyrania większości i nowy, łagodny despotyzm.

• 1856Dawny ustrój i rewolucja

  Rewolucja kontynuowała centralizację monarchii zamiast zrywać z nią.

Stanowisko

Tocqueville held that the great movement of modern history was the spread of “equality of conditions”: the end of inherited ranks and the belief that no one is by nature above anyone else. The process could not be stopped, but its outcome was open. In the United States he found a democracy that preserved liberty through township self-government, the jury, a free press, religion separated from the state, and above all the habit of forming associations for every purpose. He also described its dangers: a “tyranny of the majority” that shapes opinion more thoroughly than any king, an individualism that withdraws into private life, and a new kind of despotism, mild and tutelary, that would keep citizens in childhood by providing for all their needs. In The Old Regime and the Revolution he showed that centralised administration, often credited to the Revolution, had been built by the monarchy, which the Revolution completed rather than reversed. John Stuart Mill reviewed both volumes of Democracy in America and took the idea of the majority’s tyranny into On Liberty. Raymond Aron later placed Tocqueville beside Montesquieu among the founders of sociology. A darker part of his work has drawn more attention since the 1990s: as a deputy he supported the conquest and colonisation of Algeria and in his writings of 1841 and 1847 defended harsh methods of war against its population.

Życie i kontekst

Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris in 1805 into an old Norman noble family; his great-grandfather Malesherbes was guillotined in 1794, and his parents escaped the same fate only through the fall of Robespierre. He studied law and became a junior magistrate at Versailles. In 1831 he and his friend Gustave de Beaumont obtained an official mission to study American prisons. For nine months they travelled from New England to New Orleans and into the frontier regions of the Great Lakes, and their prison report appeared in 1833. The two volumes of Democracy in America (1835, 1840) made him famous; in 1841 he was elected to the Académie française. He sat in the Chamber of Deputies from 1839, helped draft the constitution of the Second Republic in 1848 and was foreign minister from June to October 1849. Briefly arrested after Louis-Napoléon’s coup of December 1851, he withdrew from politics and wrote The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). He died of tuberculosis in Cannes in 1859. His Recollections of 1848 appeared only in 1893.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• On the Penitentiary System in the United States (with Gustave de Beaumont, 1833)
• Democracy in America (De la démocratie en Amérique, 1835/1840)
• Essay on Algeria (Travail sur l’Algérie, 1841)
• The Old Regime and the Revolution (L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 1856)
• Recollections (Souvenirs, posthumous, 1893)

Pojawia się w

• Podróż „Jak socjologia wyłoniła się z filozofii” · Przystanek 10 z 12
• Debata „Wolność słowa i jej granice”