In fact, this “restlessness” becomes a perpetual state of motion and discontent, a grasping search for something better that cannot be satisfied. Democratic man is marked by an anxiety that this sense of individual potency might be lost at any time, which in turn creates universal democratic “restlessness,” a form of mobility and crass materialism intended to add to each person’s sense of individual significance.
In such a context, the best means of avoiding public indignity is to retreat to the private dignity afforded by one’s intimate family circle.įor Tocqueville, fear of “tyranny of the majority” leads to the rise of “individualism,” a sense of personal significance that results from interaction in one’s “little society.” This sense of personal potency, which paradoxically stems from a loss of actual influence in political life, forces democratic man to retreat constantly before the potential indignities of public life in order to support his belief in his personal private significance. The fear of such a tyranny results in a new form of internalized psychological control, an anticipation of disapproval by majorities and a concomitant attempt to avoid public commitment on any issue. While Tocqueville knew that in America the actual physical repression of a dissenting minority was rare (though not unheard of), the result of such equality in mass democratic society is the ever-present potential for a “tyranny of the majority,” which bases its claim to rule upon numbers, not upon rightness or excellence.
Regarded by Tocqueville as the “dogma of the sovereignty of the people,” this form of rule-founded on the apparently benign principle of equality-in fact leads to the belief that the opinion of the majority on any specific issue is unassailable and must be followed. Since every person’s judgment is to be regarded as equal to one’s own, the sole basis of determining the legitimacy of public issues is by means of majority rule. This assumption led to suspicion and the ultimate demise of aristocratic claims to excellence. In using the phrase “equality of conditions” Tocqueville did not refer to the literal material equality of all American citizens, but rather the universal assumption that no significance was to be accorded any apparent differences-material, social, or personal.
In the words of Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, Tocqueville’s two-volume work Democracy in America (1835) remains “at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.” Touching on themes and conditions that have in some cases only become apparent to Americans themselves more than a century and a half after his 1830–31 visit to the United States, Tocqueville argued that democracy was a “providential” new political arrangement of modernity, a regime legitimated not only by the official activities of voting and representation but more importantly, a radically new social arrangement based upon “equality of conditions” that transformed every aspect of human life and from which all of democracy’s unique virtues and vices flowed. By identifying and attempting to ameliorate democracy’s paradoxical excesses toward conformity and individualism, Alexis de Tocqueville sought to make democracy safe for liberty and to promote an ennobled, rather than a debased, form of equality.Īmong conservatives and liberals alike, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville is perhaps the most often quoted political theorist of democracy.