Person
Alexis de Tocqueville
French judge and political thinker (1805–1859); in Democracy in America, written after his American journey, he described the tyranny of the majority and the way individualism isolates people.
Biography
Alexis de Tocqueville was born on 29 July 1805 and died in Cannes on 16 April 1859. He came from an aristocratic Norman family, studied law in Paris and became an assistant magistrate at Versailles. Together with his colleague Gustave de Beaumont he obtained permission to study the prison system in the United States; their families paid the costs. The two men stayed in America from May 1831 to February 1832. The first product of the journey was a report on the penitentiary system (1832); the main one was De la démocratie en Amérique, whose first volume appeared in 1835 and second in 1840.
The book’s basic observation is that equality is the heart of democracy and that democracy is inevitable. Tocqueville sees two dangers in an egalitarian society. The first is the tyranny of the majority: once the majority has decided a question, discussion ends and independent thought falls silent. The second is individualism and the soft despotism it may prepare: while people withdraw into their own small worlds, above them rises a tutelary power that keeps them in perpetual childhood. Among the remedies he names civil associations and newspapers.
He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, sat again after the revolution of 1848, served as foreign minister for a few months in 1849 and withdrew from public affairs at the end of 1851. In his last years he wrote The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856).
His place in the mass-society literature is this: the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology says the modern image of mass society, though not the label, begins with him.
In this course
In Mass Society and Mass Culture Theory he represents both sides of the mass-society fear: the “tyrannical majority” and the “isolated individual under soft tutelage”.
Key works
- Tocqueville, Alexis de (1835). De la démocratie en Amérique. Paris: Librairie de Charles Gosselin. — The tyranny of the majority (vol. 1), individualism and the tutelary power (vol. 2), newspapers and associations.