Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes on Freedom

Tocqueville's Democracy in America (volume 1, 1835; volume 2, 1840) gave nineteenth-century political philosophy its most influential analysis of modern democratic society. The fundamental claim is that the equality of conditions characteristic of the United States — and tending to characterize all modern societies — is the new political fact to which all subsequent political philosophy must accommodate itself, and that the principal political danger of democratic equality is not classical tyranny but a soft despotism of administrative tutelage and conformist public opinion that may extinguish individual freedom by degrees. The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) extends the analysis to French history, locating the centralization Tocqueville feared not in the Revolution itself but in the Bourbon administrative state the Revolution inherited and extended.