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Home » Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy

Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy

June 9, 2008 by ReligiousLiberty.TV

“Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: as they cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combined the principle of centralisation and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain. – By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people, and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.” – Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.

Filed Under: History Tagged With: democracy

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Alison Agins says

    August 5, 2008 at 5:38 am

    Wasn’t he seeing and reflecting on Jacksonian Democracy?

  2. Alison Agins says

    August 4, 2008 at 10:38 pm

    Wasn’t he seeing and reflecting on Jacksonian Democracy?

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Random Quote

“It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much … to forget it.”

— James Madison

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