Tocqueville and American Slavery

A century and a half has not diminished the fame of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. It is still widely regarded as one of the most penetrating analyses of modern, democratic society; for Tocqueville stripped away the ephemeral, and superficial, and isolated the basic democratic features underlying American social and political institutions. He believed that man in the modern world was entering into an entirely new situation, a condition of social equality between man and man, in which all occupations, all privileges and all political rights would be opened to everyone. In his view the movement toward the equalization of conditions (democracy) was irresistible and, on the whole, desirable. But it was not without peril. Man was now confronted with a choice of the greatest magnitude: equality could be equal servitude or equal freedom. France, and seemingly much of Europe, was in jeopardy of drifting into the first; America, in her political and social structure, stood as a lesson of how liberty could be safeguarded in egalitarian (democratic) society

Democracy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Political Theory and Influence

• Reconstructing Religion-contra-Democracy in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

  Emily Salamanca•American Political Thought•2024

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• Political economy and cultural theory in Tocqueville's abolitionism

  Matthew Mancini•Slavery and Abolition•1989

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• Democracy in America

  Alexis De Tocqueville, Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clérel De Tocqueville et al.•The Two Narratives of Political…•2010

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• Alexis de Tocqueville and Slavery

  Sally Gershman•French Historical Studies•1976

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• Alexis De Tocqueville and the Negro

  Richard W Resh•The Journal of Negro History•1963

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