Alexis de Tocqueville
French politician, traveler, and historian Alexis Charles Henri Clérel de Tocqueville toured the United States from 1831 to 1832 and afterward wrote
Democracy in America
a widely influential study of institutions, from 1835 to 1840.
People today consider his major published early work of sociology and science. An eminent representative of the classical liberal tradition, Tocqueville actively participated first under the monarchy of July 1830. Tocqueville despised this monarchy but began his career in the same period.
After Alexis de Tocqueville obtained a law degree, people named him auditor-magistrate at the court of Versailles. He met Gustave de Beaumont, a prosecutor substitute, who collaborated on various literary works. People sent them to the penitentiary system. During this trip, they authored {book:Du système pénitentiaire aux Etats-Unis et de son application] (1832). Tocqueville went back and worked as lawyer.
Tocqueville met the English economist Nassau William Senior in 1833, and they, good friends, corresponded for many years.
Tocqueville published his master-work.
The success of this work, an early model for the science, known as sociology, led people to name him knight of the Legion of Honor in 1837.
People elected Tocqueville in the next year of 1838 to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques.
Thus, Tocqueville served Valognes from 1839 as deputy of the department of Manche.
In 1841, people elected Tocqueville to the academy. Apart from Canada, Tocqueville also made an observation of England and produced
Memoir on Pauperism
. In 1841, he visited Algeria. This first visit inspired him in Travail sur l'Algérie to criticize the model of colonization, based on an assimilationist view and to prefer instead the British model of indirect rule, which mixed not different populations together.
People also elected Tocqueville as general counselor of the Manche in 1842.
In 1846, Tocqueville went to Algeria. He went as far as openly advocating racial segregation between the European colonists and the "Arabs" through the implementation of two different legislative systems, effectively implemented with the indigenous code, thirty-five years later.
In parliament, Tocqueville defended abolitionist views and upheld free trade, while regime of Louis Philippe carried on the colonization of Algeria with his support. The monarchy fell and ended during the revolution of February 1848. Tocqueville sided with the parti de l'Ordre against the "socialists" and workers. A few days after the insurrection, he thought that a violent clash with the population of the workers agitated in favor of a "social republic." People elected Tocqueville as a member of the constituent assembly of 1848, and he served as a member of the commission, charged with the drafting of the new constitution of the second Republic from 1848.
Tocqueville participated then during the second Republic from 1849. From 1849, he served as the president of the conseil général of the department of Manche.
He defended bicameralism (two parliamentary chambers) and the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage. As the countryside was thought to be more conservative than the laboring population of Paris, universal suffrage was conceived as a means to block the revolutionary spirit of Paris.
Tocqueville maintained position as deputy until 1851. He served as the president of the conseil général of the department of Manche to 1851. The second Republic ended to 1851. After coup of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte of 2 December 1851, Tocqueville retired from life and thereafter began work on The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume I.
People best know this thinker for his The Old Regime and the Revolution in 1856
“From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a savage.”
“When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.”
“Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”
“I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence.”
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”
“Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.”
“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”
“It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.”
“It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.”
“Our contemporaries are constantly wracked by two warring passions: they feel the need to be led and the desire to remain free. Unable to destroy either of these contrary instincts, they seek to satisfy both at once. They imagine a single, omnipotent, tutelary power, but one that is elected by the citizens. They combine centralization with popular sovereignty. This gives them some respite. They console themselves for being treated as wards by imagining that they have chosen their own protectors. Each individual allows himself to be clapped in chains because that the other end of the chain is held not by a man or a class but by the people themselves.”
“Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains.”
“Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that. You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death.”
“What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?There are some nations in Europe whose inhabitants think of themselves in a sense as colonists, indifferent to the fate of the place they live in. The greatest changes occur in their country without their cooperation. They are not even aware of precisely what has taken place. They suspect it; they have heard of the event by chance. More than that, they are unconcerned with the fortunes of their village, the safety of their streets, the fate of their church and its vestry. They think that such things have nothing to do with them, that they belong to a powerful stranger called “the government.” They enjoy these goods as tenants, without a sense of ownership, and never give a thought to how they might be improved. They are so divorced from their own interests that even when their own security and that of their children is finally compromised, they do not seek to avert the danger themselves but cross their arms and wait for the nation as a whole to come to their aid. Yet as utterly as they sacrifice their own free will, they are no fonder of obedience than anyone else. They submit, it is true, to the whims of a clerk, but no sooner is force removed than they are glad to defy the law as a defeated enemy. Thus one finds them ever wavering between servitude and license.When a nation has reached this point, it must either change its laws and mores or perish, for the well of public virtue has run dry: in such a place one no longer finds citizens but only subjects.”