Work · Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism
Democracy in America
Two volumes (1835, 1840) on the United States as a laboratory of equality: townships, associations, the tyranny of the majority and a new, mild despotism.
Introduction
Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French magistrate, travelled through the United States with Gustave de Beaumont in 1831–32, officially to study its prisons. The first volume (1835) describes American institutions – townships, federalism, the courts, the press, associations and the power of majority opinion – and ends with a long chapter on the three races and the prospects of slavery. The second volume (1840) is more abstract and studies how equality of conditions shapes ideas, feelings and manners: individualism, the love of material comfort and the danger of a new, “soft” despotism by an all-providing state. Tocqueville wrote for France, asking how democracy could be combined with liberty. The work is regarded as a founding text of political sociology.
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Connections
Builds on
- The Spirit of the Laws1748 · Montesquieu
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