Democracy in America is a masterful display of insight and foresight into all things American. Doubting whether the American experiment in equality could work, Tocqueville conjectured that democracy would erect a society that would succumb to a different type of tyranny than that of a monarchy or aristocracy – that of the majority. Through detailed interviews with “the most informed men” he could meet, he offers an examination of American institutions and the fabric of American life.

A two volume work, Democracy in America is divided into a series of chapters designed to tackle questions Tocqueville sees as key to understanding democracy, America, and its citizenry. The analysis covers the obvious elements of political and societal structure, as well as the social and cultural influences that shaped American democracy. It enables us to understand how others saw us – and in fact how we saw ourselves – in our nation’s youth, and will prompt readers to question whether the American experiment, with all that it promised at its beginning, has succeeded.

AMONGST the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. I readily discovered the prodigious influence which this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society; it gives a peculiar direction to public opinion, and a peculiar tenor to the laws; it imparts new maxims to the governing authorities, and peculiar habits to the governed.

I soon perceived that the influence of this fact extends far beyond the political character and the laws of the country, and that it has no less empire over civil society than over the government; it creates opinions, gives birth to new sentiments, founds novel customs, and modifies whatever it does not produce. The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that this equality of condition is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived, and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated.


I then turned my thoughts to our own hemisphere, and thought that I discerned there something analogous to the spectacle which the New World presented to me. I observed that equality of condition, though it has not there reached the extreme limit which it seems to have attained in the United States, is constantly approaching it; and that the democracy which governs the American communities appears to be rapidly rising into power in Europe.


Hence I conceived the idea of the book which is now before the reader.


It is evident to all alike that a great democratic revolution is going on amongst us; but all do not look at it in the same light. To some it appears to be novel but accidental, and, as such, they hope it may still be checked; to others it seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, the most ancient, and the most permanent tendency which is to be found in history.


I look back for a moment on the situation of France seven hundred years ago, when the territory was divided amongst a small number of families, who were the owners of the soil and the rulers of the inhabitants; the right of governing descended with the family inheritance from generation to generation; force was the only means by which man could act on man; and landed property was the sole source of power.


Soon, however, the political power of the clergy was founded, and began to increase: the clergy opened their ranks to all classes, to the poor and the rich, the vassal and the lord; through the Church, equality penetrated into the Government, and he who as a serf must have vegetated in perpetual bondage took his place as a priest in the midst of nobles, and not unfrequently above the heads of kings.


The different relations of men with each other became more complicated and numerous as society gradually became more stable and civilized. Hence the want of civil laws was felt; and the ministers of law soon rose from the obscurity of the tribunals and their dusty chambers, to appear at the court of the monarch, by the side of the feudal barons clothed in their ermine and their mail.


Whilst the kings were ruining themselves by their great enterprises, and the nobles exhausting their resources by private wars, the lower orders were enriching themselves by commerce. The influence of money began to be perceptible in state affairs. The transactions of business opened a new road to power, and the financier rose to a station of political influence in which he was at once flattered and despised.

 

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) worked first as a magistrate and then as a government administrator, and early in his career he saw how quickly the winds of political change could shift in post-Revolutionary War France. Like his father, who had narrowly escaped execution in 1793, he fell out of political favor, due to his perceived Bourbon sympathies during the July Revolution. As a result, he and his friend Gustave de Beaumont were required to fund their nine-month visit to America themselves, even though they were ostensibly coming to complete a survey of the American penal system, then regarded as one of the most humane in the world, on behalf of the French government. When Tocqueville arrived in America in May of 1831 he was far more interested in his own questions about America’s political future, and Democracy in America is the result of extensive personal research on the subject.

 

Democracy in America (World Digital Library Edition) by Alexis de Toqueville
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