A Paper on Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocquivelle (original) (raw)
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An Analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America
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Democracy in America By Alexis de Tocqueville A Penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication
Tocqueville for the safety of personal rights, and for the safety of the government, and the prophetic outlook of M. De Tocqueville will be fully realized through the influence of Democracy in America. Each succeeding generation of Americans will find in the pure and impartial reflections of De Tocqueville a new source of pride in our institutions of government, and sound reasons for patriotic effort to preserve them and to inculcate their teachings. They have mastered the power of monarchical rule in the American Hemisphere, freeing religion from all shackles, and will spread, by a quiet but resistless influence, through the islands of the seas to other lands, where the appeals of De Tocqueville for human rights and liberties have already inspired the souls of the people.
2003
Tocqueville for the safety of personal rights, and for the safety of the government, and the prophetic outlook of M. De Tocqueville will be fully realized through the influence of Democracy in America. Each succeeding generation of Americans will find in the pure and impartial reflections of De Tocqueville a new source of pride in our institutions of government, and sound reasons for patriotic effort to preserve them and to inculcate their teachings. They have mastered the power of monarchical rule in the American Hemisphere, freeing religion from all shackles, and will spread, by a quiet but resistless influence, through the islands of the seas to other lands, where the appeals of De Tocqueville for human rights and liberties have already inspired the souls of the people.
Tocqueville's Democracy in America
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once observed “We must live life forward, but we only understand life backwards.” And yet to live life forward well it is essential that we pay close attention to the past, which I believe goes a long way in explaining why a young French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville set off on an his historic tour of America in the early 1830’s. He saw democracy as the wave of the future and so he wanted to analyze the merits of America’s republican representative democracy since democracy had proven a failure in his native France. His insightful study entitled Democracy in America has subsequently served as a prophetic guide for well over a century, and in this lecture we will reflect upon its continuing relevance in our day.
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America Study Guide
2004
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A Critical Approach to Tocqueville's Understanding of Democracy
Journal of Academic Researches and Studies, 2017
Over the years, Alexis de Tocqueville's masterwork, Democracy in America, has been praised by politicians, scientists, and researchers as a brilliant analysis of modern democratic society. Observing American politics, society, and culture, Tocqueville's deep analysis has provided us a message which offers a political program for sustaining prosperous, stable, and free democratic societies. Today, this message becomes especially important and necessary for the democratic societies since today's problems are much more complicated, ambiguous, and unexpected than ever, and therefore it is more difficult to preserve and maintain democracy. In this regard, understanding what democracy means to Tocqueville, how he explains the social and historical origins of democracy, and how, according to him, democracy maintains itself becomes an inevitable task for today's democratic societies. This manuscript is an effort to search for plausible answers to these questions with a critical perspective to Tocqueville's understanding of democracy.
The paper argues that there is a major inconsistency between Tocqueville’s arguments about individualism and equality of condition in the “Ancient Regime” and in “Democracy in America”. In the latter book, which is the basis for conventional analysis of Tocqueville in America, individualism is taken as a spontaneously emerging feature of the modern, enlightened society, heralding the future of the less democratic and less modern Europe. In the ‘Ancient regime’, however, leveling individualism is conceptualized as a by-product of the centralizing political dynamic of the modern European state, crushing all intermediate sources of social authority. If we accept this theory, then America is the last place one would look for individualism or equality, since there the institutions of a modern, centralized state were much weaker than in Europe. Yet, Tocqueville does exactly that. It is argued in this paper that those two different genealogies of individualism developed by the French thinker cannot be satisfactorily reconciled. An approach suggested instead is to combine Tocqueville’s analysis from AR with some modern historical research about early England and America which confirm them, making the analysis of individualism from “Democracy in America” superfluous.
Jefferson and Tocqueville on Democracy as Hemisperic Views
Rubikon : Journal of Transnational American Studies
This paper examines democracy to Jefferson’s and Tocqueville’s philosophy in shaping the American polity. A few scholars have discussed the connection between Jefferson and Tocqueville, but this writing provides a value of democracy as hemispheric mind or trans-national sources. Democracy is not only an American intellectual mind, but also a global mind. The philosophers, sociologists, and economists of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century formulated a political program that served as a guide to social policy first in the United States, then on the European continent, and finally in the other parts of the inhabited world as well. It was reflected in Tocqueville’s journey for learning democracy in America around the mid of the nineteenth century. Therefore, there are two significant points to describe both Tocqueville and Jefferson; they are democracy and tradition with all conditions.Keywords: Jefferson, Tocqueville, democracy, founding, and liberal