Democracy in America

If we're not moving forward like Tocqueville warned in Democracy in America, we're going to be lapsing back into some other autocratic or monarchical aristocratic form of government.

Democracy in America by de Tocqueville is still the best description of what America is and in many ways ought to be. The Mansfield translation is the best version of it.

One of the parts of your book I found interesting was your analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. That's normally seen as a document laying out the early structure of America's inevitable ascent into liberal democracy. And you read it quite differently. I do. I read it both in terms of his interest and admiration for what he saw as a robust individualism and equality, but I also read it as a series of warnings about where this could be headed.

Democracy in America.

Alexis de Tocqueville, French aristocrat and probably best known in the Englishspeaking world as the author of a groundbreaking study of democracy in America, addressed the Chamber of Deputies in Paris

think about that speech by Tocqueville, which is the Tocqueville, which Tom cited at the beginning or Inspector Clouseau cited that, you know, Tocqueville can make this prophecy because he's been reading the papers.

He wrote, they, Americans, have a lively faith in the perfectibility of man. They all consider society as a body in a state of improvement. Humanity as a changing scene in which nothing is or ought to be permanent. And they admit that what appears to them to be good today may be superseded by something better tomorrow.

Alexis de Tocqueville talked very early on in American history about how what was unique about America is that there didn't seem to be these very rigid classes. People moved in and out of classes, there was this burgeoning middle class a huge middle class everybody seemed to have a certain amount of property in the United States. Tocqueville talks about this in Democracy in America which is being written in the 1830s.

But isn't there this observation of Tocqueville, who writes Democracy in America, probably the best observer of early American politics.

The term individualism itself was first coined by Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Tocqueville forever in his invest, forever the invested far-off onlooker understood American democracy, what he called the equality of conditions, not merely as a way to govern, but as a way to live. Individualism was a lifestyle not rooted in selfishness, but self-reliance, empowering the individual to be dependent on no man nor entity other than himself.

And that spirit, that spirit is what they're coming for right now. They're telling you, no, no, no, we must have one law to rule everybody. You need us. If you don't give us power, you will be afraid.

He ends up writing a great book called Democracy in America.