Tocqueville and Democracy
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Description
At the beginning of Démocratie en Amérique, Alexis de Tocqueville asserts, with no clarifying explanation, that his book is unified by une pensée mère, translated ingeniously into English as “one pregnant thought.” There is plenty of room for disagreement about this key idea, this fil conducteur purportedly woven through a long, kaleidoscopic, detour-studded, and loosely organized work. Perhaps the master concept, tying Tocqueville's cascade of insights together, is a memorable descriptive claim: that mœurs are all-important, that a society's starting point determines its subsequent fate, or that the abolition of primogeniture and legal inequalities has revolutionized the old European world, leaving nothing unchanged. But given Tocqueville's turn of mind, especially his addiction to eye-catching paradoxes, the most likely candidate for the book's leading thought is this: “Extreme freedom corrects the abuse of freedom, and extreme democracy forestalls the dangers of democracy.” Unless you exaggerate, Tocqueville believed, no one will understand what you have to say. So, the question readers must ask is: What does this particular exaggeration mean?
Source Publication
The Idea of Democracy
Source Editors/Authors
David Copp, Jean Hampton, John E. Roemer
Publication Date
1993
Recommended Citation
Holmes, Stephen, "Tocqueville and Democracy" (1993). Faculty Chapters. 808.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/808
