Alexis de Tocqueville Quotes on Politics

Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835/1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) gave nineteenth-century political philosophy its most influential analysis of the social conditions and political pathologies of modern democratic society. The fundamental claim is that the equality of conditions characteristic of America — and tending to characterize all modern societies — is the new political fact to which all subsequent political thought must accommodate itself. The principal pathologies Tocqueville diagnosed — the tyranny of majority opinion, the soft despotism of administrative tutelage, the flattening of civic life into the pursuit of small private comforts — are not contingent malfunctions of modern democracy but structural temptations to which it remains permanently exposed.