Alexis de Tocqueville · Politics
Tocqueville’s great discovery in America: that the secret of free, vigorous democracy is the endless web of <em>voluntary associations</em> and <em>local self-government</em> through which equal citizens join to act together - the schools of liberty and the antidote to the isolation that equality breeds.
Of all the things Tocqueville observed in America, none struck him with more admiration, or seemed to him more important, than the American genius for association. Wherever he looked, he found Americans of every age and condition forever joining together - forming companies, societies, clubs, congregations, charities, and committees to accomplish in common what no one could do alone. Where in France a great undertaking would be led by the government, and in England by some great nobleman, in America, Tocqueville marvelled, you would invariably find an association. To build a church, found a school, distribute books, send missionaries, fight a vice, advance a cause, or simply hold a celebration, Americans did not wait for the state or for some great man; they banded together, citizens with citizens, and did it themselves.
This was, Tocqueville came to believe, not a quaint national habit but the very secret of American freedom - the practical art on which the whole edifice of free democracy rested. He called the knowledge of how to combine, to associate, to act together for common ends the “mother science” of democratic peoples, on which the progress of everything else depends. For in the capacity of equal citizens to join freely into independent bodies and act in concert lay, he saw, the answer to democracy’s deepest dangers: the antidote to the isolation of equal individuals, the bulwark against the tyranny of the majority and the all-managing state, the school in which a free people learns and practises the art of governing itself.
Alongside voluntary associations, Tocqueville placed enormous weight on local self-government - and especially on the New England township, which he studied with the care of a man who believed he had found the very nursery of liberty. In the township, ordinary citizens governed their own local affairs directly: they assembled, debated, voted, levied taxes, built roads and schools, elected and oversaw their own local officials, and managed the common business of their community with their own hands. Power was not concentrated in a distant capital but dispersed down to the smallest unit, where citizens could see and touch and shape the government nearest to their lives.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Tocqueville saw voluntary associations and local self-government as the heart of free democracy. Explain in your own words why he thought the “art of association” was so vital, and how it counteracts the dangers equality brings.
Leads to Edmund Burke.
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