Alexis de Tocqueville · Politics
Tocqueville’s darkest and most prophetic warning: that democratic equality breeds a new kind of solitude he named <em>individualism</em>, and that from it can grow a new kind of tyranny - mild, benevolent, and total - in which a vast tutelary state reduces free citizens to a flock of contented, passive children.
You learned Tocqueville’s concepts of “individualism” and “soft despotism.” Explain in your own words what he meant by each, and how he thought the first could lead, through a benevolent path, to the second.
Leads to Benjamin Constant.
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