Tocqueville on the RPF

Bio

Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 to an aristocratic family in Paris.
He had a private tutor till high school, then went to high school and
college in Metz, where he studied rhetoric and philosophy. After studying
law in Paris, he worked as a substitute judge in Versaille. In 1831, he
came to the United States with Gustave de Beaumont to study the U.S.
penal system. “I confess that in America I saw more than America,” he
wrote, “I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its
character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have
to fear or to hope from its progress” (Democracy in America).

Beaumont and Tocqueville toured the U.S. for nine months, travelling from
New York to as far as Green Bay, Quebec, New Orleans, and Washington,
D.C. On returning home, the two began work on Du systeme penitentiaire
aux Etats-Unis et de son application en France, published in 1833. In
September of the same year, Tocqueville began writing his most famous
work, Democracy in America. Volume one was published in 1835, the
year he married Mary Motley, an English woman. In 1836, when his
mother passed away, he inherited the chateau and lands of Tocqueville
and the title of Comte, which he didn’t use.

Tocqueville had an active political life. He was elected a deputy in 1839,
and to the French Acadamy in 1841. His work was reviewed by John
Stuart Mill in England. Louis-Napoleon appointed Tocqueville minister of
foreign affairs in 1849, but then temporarily threw him in prison in 1851 for
opposing the coup where Louis-Napoleon seized power. Tocqueville died
in 1859 in Cannes, after battling tuberculosis off and on for nine years.

Tyranny of the Majority

In terms of rights philosophy, Tocqueville’s most important contribution is
perhaps his description of the tendency that public opinion has, in a
democratic society, to turn into its own kind of tyranny. This is much
different than Plato’s idea, in the Republic, that democracy tended to
degenerate into tyranny because too many lawless, competing desires
were in want of a tyrant to keep them in control. Tocqueville felt that the
very thing which we tend to believe makes a democracy ethically right in
government—appealing to majority sentiment to decide things—is in fact
one of its greatest dangers, because it marginalizes minority opinion:

“In my opinion, the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the
United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their
weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed
at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate
securities which one finds there against tyranny. An individual or a party is
wronged in the United States, to whom can he apply for redress? If to
public opinion, public opinion constitutes the majority; if to the legislature,
it represents the majority and implicitly obeys it; if to the executive power, it
is appointed by the majority and serves as a passive tool in its hands.
The public force consists of the majority under arms; the jury is the
majority invested with the right of hearing judicial cases; and in certain
states even the judges are elected by the majority. However iniquitous or
absurd the measure of which you complain, you must submit to it as well
as you can.” (Democracy in America, v.1, chapter XV, “Unlimited Power of
the Majority in the United States, and its Consequences.” Note:
depending on the version, this chapter is sometimes numbered as: v.1,
Part 2, chapter VII.)

(Much of the information in this article has been adapted from the website
tocqueville.org. Portrait taken from the Wikipedia article on Tocqueville. Click here
for article.)

Works

Democracy in America