Concept
tyranny of the majority
In Tocqueville, the moral power of the majority in democracies, which ends discussion once it has decided and silences independent thought.
In the first volume of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the tyranny of the majority is the idea that a majority equipped with unlimited authority can harm the minority and independent thought. It is not only legal or physical pressure but moral power over opinion: once the majority has decided, discussion ends and “a submissive silence” prevails. Tocqueville writes that he knows no country with so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as America.
Encyclopedia summaries say that Tocqueville saw two undesirable developments in America: a pervasive tyranny of the majority and a centrifugal individualism. The Oxford Dictionary of Sociology also treats this idea as the first form of the modern image of mass society and recalls his picture of people who are all alike but each living apart.
Tocqueville’s reasoning is also striking: people do not change their characters by being gathered together, and consciousness of strength does not increase their patience; so he can never willingly give any number of people the unlimited authority he would refuse to any one of them. This sets up an interesting contrast with Le Bon, who says the crowd transforms the person.
The concept is a bridge to later discussions of the spiral of silence and public opinion: social pressure works even without law.
Example
(Hypothetical example.) In a neighbourhood where, once the majority has decided, those of the opposite view quietly stop arguing, that is the tyranny of the majority even without any legal sanction.