Democracy in America (II)
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~150,000 words · 711 passages
Cite this work
- APAAlexis de Tocqueville. (n.d.). Democracy in America (II). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/alexis-de-tocqueville/democracy-in-america-volume-2
- MLAAlexis de Tocqueville. "Democracy in America (II)." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/alexis-de-tocqueville/democracy-in-america-volume-2.
- ChicagoAlexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America (II). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/alexis-de-tocqueville/democracy-in-america-volume-2.
What it is about
The second volume, of 1840, in which Tocqueville leaves the American institutions behind and looks at what equality does to a people's way of thinking, feeling and living.
Context and history
The first volume, of 1835, describes how American democracy works; this one is more abstract and more disquieting, and it is the one that has aged better. Here are individualism — a word he helped put into circulation, and which does not mean selfishness but withdrawal into the small circle — the tyranny of the majority over opinions, the temptation of a mild despotism that treats citizens as well-cared-for minors, and the observation that in an equal society, the fewer differences remain, the more they are noticed. This is the volume people quote when they quote Tocqueville on modern democracy.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The Americans live in a democratic state of society, which has naturally suggested to them certain laws and a certain political character. This same state of society has, moreover, engendered amongst them a multitude of feelings and opinions which were unknown amongst the elder aristocratic communities of Europe: it has destroyed or modified all the relations which before existed, and established others of a novel kind. The--aspect of civil society has been no less affected by these changes than that of the political world. The former subject has been treated of in the work on the Democracy of America, which I published five years ago; to examine the latter is the object of the present book; but these two parts complete each other, and form one and the same work. I must at once warn the reader against an error which would be extremely prejudicial to me. When he finds that I attribute so many different consequences to the principle of equality, he may thence infer that I consider that principle to be the sole cause of all that takes place in the present age: but this would be to impute to me a very narrow view. A multitude of opinions, feelings, and propensities are now in existence, which owe their origin to circumstances unconnected with or even contrary to the principle of equality. Thus if I were to select the United States as an example, I could easily prove that the nature of the country, the origin of its inhabitants, the religion of its founders, their acquired knowledge, and their former habits, have exercised, and still exercise, independently of democracy, a vast influence upon the thoughts and feelings of that people. Different causes, but no less distinct from the circumstance of the equality of conditions, might be traced in Europe,